Some months ago, Kiala and I drove through the dark, deer-flanked, eerily quiet and protected streets of Moraga to attend Chris Abani's reading at St. Mary's College. We arrived late and were surprised to find the auditorium filled with an audience of hundreds. As we stood to hear his--as it turned out, fiction--reading, I wondered: who are all these people who have gathered in this corner of the world to hear a poetry reading on a Wednesday night? Did the closed-minded Moragans I grew up around develop a thirst for literature in the ten years since I left that town? Does St. Mary's have incredible publicity for its events throughout the East Bay or entire Bay Area?
As it turned out, the majority of the students were St. Mary's kids, who had been assigned Abani's novel, Graceland, for a class. The novel has won many accolades and international recognition since its publication in 2004, so it would make sense that it be assigned, and that St. Mary's pull out all the stops to bring Abani out for several days of workshops, readings and meals with the college community. Still, there was something unsettling about the situation. We had each been handed bright red half-sheets of paper, instructing us on how to be polite and active participants in this reading. The language of the papers had an air of control and hierarchical authority. Besides attending, many of the undergraduates were required to ask Abani questions about it his book; and so they sprouted a long line behind the microphone. All though most of the questions were benign, some were problematic. One student asked why one of the characters was homosexual. One student asked why so few characters spoke "real English." Abani fielded the questions with grace, introducing the idea that there is no real form of any one language--that that is just a construct--and complicating their perceptions of relationships (romantic or otherwise) between people not of two different, heteronormative genders. However, he also cracked some jokes that made me feel uncomfortable (presumably to win the favor of this sea of sheltered eighteen-year-olds). For example, encouraging one student not to be shy when asking her question by offering to turn around and then offering, in jest, to take off his clothes (playing on the cliche of imagining your audience naked when speaking in public). I felt her could have exercised a little more sensitivity in the representation of his gender in this arena.
Overall, I was happy to hear him read and get a taste of his prose writing, and I was pleased to see St. Mary's seeking him out as their distinguished author for this series. I'm sure the reading of the book and participation in the reading were critical in these students' development and thinkers and global citizens. However, I couldn't shake from my mind the privilege and control of this situation--how much money St. Mary's has to put on an event like this, and the culture it has established amongst undergrads of dictating the decorum of the event. Granted, it is important to establish a positive, respectful atmosphere--but being present at this event made me feel like I was in high school again... maybe just because I got stuck going to high school in Moraga. I'm curious to see Abani perform in another setting, to get a sense of how performers present and transform themselves depending on the genre they are reading from and whom they are reading to.
Friday, December 4, 2009
MBJ at Berkeley Rep
I was so glad to get to see Marc Bamuthi Joseph perform in this setting (at Berkeley Rep), especially after seeing him perform excerpts of the same show for Works in Progress. Amazingly, both performances felt like an intimate experience--even though one was in the company of two or three dozen people (most of whom I knew) in a well-lit room in which Marc could easily move through the audience, and the other was in the company of hundreds (most of whom I didn't know) sitting in tiered darkness while Marc performed on a distant, lit stage. Comparing these two experiences made it clear that Marc is the kind of performer who can make his audience feel comfortable, and draw them in, despite the size of the venue.
Of course, the audience also plays a big part in making the performer feel comfortable. As Youth Speaks brings conscious performers to many different parts of the country, the performers don't always know what kind of reception they're going to get from their audience. Marc repeatedly announced, in intervals, how enlivening it was to perform before an engaged, familiar Berkeley audience--something that probably added to his comfort, and, added to my experience of feeling personally engaged in his performance.
It was also very powerful to see his pieces enhanced by lighting and amplified sound, and to experience the accompaniment by the MC. I was amazed by Marc's performance at Mills, fulling using his body and his own vocal capacity, but I hadn't experienced the poems/narratives fully until I was able to see and hear the full affect onstage.
Marc's work demonstrated how poetry and performance can work hand-in-hand with memoir and journalism. We had characters, we had stories from youth (interviewing Jay-Z was a personal favorite), we had travelogue. I loved the pieces because they were so intensely personal, but always with a political message or consideration behind the sizzling lyrical language and movement.
Of course, the audience also plays a big part in making the performer feel comfortable. As Youth Speaks brings conscious performers to many different parts of the country, the performers don't always know what kind of reception they're going to get from their audience. Marc repeatedly announced, in intervals, how enlivening it was to perform before an engaged, familiar Berkeley audience--something that probably added to his comfort, and, added to my experience of feeling personally engaged in his performance.
It was also very powerful to see his pieces enhanced by lighting and amplified sound, and to experience the accompaniment by the MC. I was amazed by Marc's performance at Mills, fulling using his body and his own vocal capacity, but I hadn't experienced the poems/narratives fully until I was able to see and hear the full affect onstage.
Marc's work demonstrated how poetry and performance can work hand-in-hand with memoir and journalism. We had characters, we had stories from youth (interviewing Jay-Z was a personal favorite), we had travelogue. I loved the pieces because they were so intensely personal, but always with a political message or consideration behind the sizzling lyrical language and movement.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
reading response #2
so, i wrote this a while ago when it actually happened & never posted it. yay, here it is:
This weekend’s events still feel like they’re happening, in all honesty. Staceyann Chin isn’t boarding my flight with me right now, but she was just at my gate out of Dulles after an insane weekend of a hundred thousand queers marching on the capitol for equal rights under the law.
I wouldn’t call Staceyann’s speech on Sunday so much of a poem as I would a performance. I’m sure you can find it on youtube by now, but seeing her face surrounded by microphones and news cameras just might ruin it. I heard her speech from 50,000 people deep and could not see her at all. Just her voice. Just her voice over the pa system and even then, sometimes the cheering drowned her out. There had been about fifteen speakers before her, including Judy Shepard, Lt. Dan Choi, Julian Bond and a number of young transfolk who spoke about the importance of education, visibility, endurance and conviction.
By the time she came to the podium, the crowd had become well-versed in the language and cadence of protest. All of us had marched for nearly three miles, screaming, singing & chanting. Staceyann and I, along with the other poets performing at smaller events throughout the day were hoarse before we even passed the White House. The speakers before Staceyann, even the young folks, all had that predictable rhythm and shift of volume in their voices when speaking. They knew when the crowd would erupt, they knew when to speak softly so that the entire mall strained to hear.
When Staceyann came to the mic, everybody woke up. Several people around me stood to up to listen. When she talked about her coming out story in Jamaica and the trauma that followed, there was a sense that everyone was holding their breath. In the face of all the criticism this march has received since its planning stages, I felt like that moment was exactly what made it worthwhile. Yes, absolutely, the whole thing was an important demonstration of community and the power of grassroots collaboration. But in light of Obama’s speech the night before, and all the promises he made, when Staceyann was on stage it seemed as if she enacted a turning point for the crowd. Change was not only possible, but inevitable. She talked frankly about the “places we [queers] are always fleeing” and that in order to create spaces that refused that, it was all about the breath and the repetition. BAM!
This weekend’s events still feel like they’re happening, in all honesty. Staceyann Chin isn’t boarding my flight with me right now, but she was just at my gate out of Dulles after an insane weekend of a hundred thousand queers marching on the capitol for equal rights under the law.
I wouldn’t call Staceyann’s speech on Sunday so much of a poem as I would a performance. I’m sure you can find it on youtube by now, but seeing her face surrounded by microphones and news cameras just might ruin it. I heard her speech from 50,000 people deep and could not see her at all. Just her voice. Just her voice over the pa system and even then, sometimes the cheering drowned her out. There had been about fifteen speakers before her, including Judy Shepard, Lt. Dan Choi, Julian Bond and a number of young transfolk who spoke about the importance of education, visibility, endurance and conviction.
By the time she came to the podium, the crowd had become well-versed in the language and cadence of protest. All of us had marched for nearly three miles, screaming, singing & chanting. Staceyann and I, along with the other poets performing at smaller events throughout the day were hoarse before we even passed the White House. The speakers before Staceyann, even the young folks, all had that predictable rhythm and shift of volume in their voices when speaking. They knew when the crowd would erupt, they knew when to speak softly so that the entire mall strained to hear.
When Staceyann came to the mic, everybody woke up. Several people around me stood to up to listen. When she talked about her coming out story in Jamaica and the trauma that followed, there was a sense that everyone was holding their breath. In the face of all the criticism this march has received since its planning stages, I felt like that moment was exactly what made it worthwhile. Yes, absolutely, the whole thing was an important demonstration of community and the power of grassroots collaboration. But in light of Obama’s speech the night before, and all the promises he made, when Staceyann was on stage it seemed as if she enacted a turning point for the crowd. Change was not only possible, but inevitable. She talked frankly about the “places we [queers] are always fleeing” and that in order to create spaces that refused that, it was all about the breath and the repetition. BAM!
post-script 11/09: this event & the things that staceyann said about marriage and the fight for equality have sparked some interesting debates. i went to the march as a supporter of the repeal of prop 8 & came away with really different views and a fuller understanding of the ways that we, as poets (and as queers), buy into and aid what may end up being the wrong side of the fight. i'm not saying that i don't support equality (i do! i do! i do!), but that i have really different ideas now, after hearing staceyann talk, about the ways in which we might all root for equality (and by all, i mean ALL, not just the queer folx).
xomegday
xomegday
reading response #1
So, over a month ago I went to this event in San Francisco at CounterPulse that included a performance by "Universes," a cross-genre performance group. It was BAD ASS.
Ritual is on my mind because Kiala & I are writing these poems about tradition and ritual in our own lives (and the ways those rituals intersect). Universes’ performance(s) redefined, for me, the idea of hip-hop/spoken word/music as ceremony. It was obvious to me as soon as I arrived that I had never considered my own readings and performances as ritual, even though I often do the same thing before each performance. I wear the same shoes (a uniform, of sorts), I jump up and down in the same ritualistic way that busts out some extra adrenaline, and I always sign the first few lines of all of my pieces to myself while mingling with folks beforehand as the crowd is settling or other performers are backstage prepping. I had to watch this happen at CounterPulse in order to recognize it in myself. This seems just as important for the performer as it does the audience. There is the ritual of waiting for the doors to open, the awkward but buzzing meet and greet outside, the rush for the right seat, then the patient flipping through of programs.
While Universes was a great indicator of how, exactly, to truly engage an audience and how to seamlessly piece a show together, the performances seemed most illustrative, at all times, of ceremony. The lights, the patterns in which each member spoke or performed, and the obvious ease with which the rehearsal of this ceremony had made possible, all conveyed, very seriously, that they had command of the room. As an audience member, I felt transported. I was not sitting in the corner of a blackbox theatre with an intimate crowd, I was somewhere else entirely. More impressive, however, was how the sole woman on stage seemed to grasp her position as implied Master of Ceremonies throughout the evening. The sound rarely stopped, the bodies rarely stopped and loop after loop, the breaks kept coming.
Politics, code-switching and a variety of literacies were definitely at play and I appreciated not having full, VIP-access to every single section of the "ceremony." Even without knowing her language or understanding all of the inside jokes, I still felt like I was invited to partake by the one woman on stage. She shut down the room with her voice, with their stories, and every time the stories shifted and looped back to the music, the break was definitely the point of heightened possibility, regardless of who you were or where you came from. That kind of accessibility is essential, I think. I also found it really interesting that even when the rhythm was strong, if that lead female voice maxed out and cracked (which it did, because they were tired or sick or on the road for a long time), then that break broke too. She was the conduit to that alternate space and only she, in that moment, could keep it looping.
Universes taught me a lot about the importance of seamless performance and the necessity of layering. A single layer is impressive, but it doesn’t move on its own. I felt like Chinaka Hodge’s “Mirrors In Every Corner” excerpt (she performed before Universes as a kind of "opener") illustrated this in indispensable ways. Despite being the only person on stage (during the excerpt), she used the space, the lights, her body and her words (not to mention the way she dressed and talked) to create those layers without needing other folks on the stage. She broke my brain. It was like seeing Karl Iglesias from Madison perform for the first time and not knowing what I was seeing, but feeling it. I cannot wait for the rest of Chinaka’s play in 2010. She gave me so much to think about. Years worth in five minutes.
xomegday
Ritual is on my mind because Kiala & I are writing these poems about tradition and ritual in our own lives (and the ways those rituals intersect). Universes’ performance(s) redefined, for me, the idea of hip-hop/spoken word/music as ceremony. It was obvious to me as soon as I arrived that I had never considered my own readings and performances as ritual, even though I often do the same thing before each performance. I wear the same shoes (a uniform, of sorts), I jump up and down in the same ritualistic way that busts out some extra adrenaline, and I always sign the first few lines of all of my pieces to myself while mingling with folks beforehand as the crowd is settling or other performers are backstage prepping. I had to watch this happen at CounterPulse in order to recognize it in myself. This seems just as important for the performer as it does the audience. There is the ritual of waiting for the doors to open, the awkward but buzzing meet and greet outside, the rush for the right seat, then the patient flipping through of programs.
While Universes was a great indicator of how, exactly, to truly engage an audience and how to seamlessly piece a show together, the performances seemed most illustrative, at all times, of ceremony. The lights, the patterns in which each member spoke or performed, and the obvious ease with which the rehearsal of this ceremony had made possible, all conveyed, very seriously, that they had command of the room. As an audience member, I felt transported. I was not sitting in the corner of a blackbox theatre with an intimate crowd, I was somewhere else entirely. More impressive, however, was how the sole woman on stage seemed to grasp her position as implied Master of Ceremonies throughout the evening. The sound rarely stopped, the bodies rarely stopped and loop after loop, the breaks kept coming.
Politics, code-switching and a variety of literacies were definitely at play and I appreciated not having full, VIP-access to every single section of the "ceremony." Even without knowing her language or understanding all of the inside jokes, I still felt like I was invited to partake by the one woman on stage. She shut down the room with her voice, with their stories, and every time the stories shifted and looped back to the music, the break was definitely the point of heightened possibility, regardless of who you were or where you came from. That kind of accessibility is essential, I think. I also found it really interesting that even when the rhythm was strong, if that lead female voice maxed out and cracked (which it did, because they were tired or sick or on the road for a long time), then that break broke too. She was the conduit to that alternate space and only she, in that moment, could keep it looping.
Universes taught me a lot about the importance of seamless performance and the necessity of layering. A single layer is impressive, but it doesn’t move on its own. I felt like Chinaka Hodge’s “Mirrors In Every Corner” excerpt (she performed before Universes as a kind of "opener") illustrated this in indispensable ways. Despite being the only person on stage (during the excerpt), she used the space, the lights, her body and her words (not to mention the way she dressed and talked) to create those layers without needing other folks on the stage. She broke my brain. It was like seeing Karl Iglesias from Madison perform for the first time and not knowing what I was seeing, but feeling it. I cannot wait for the rest of Chinaka’s play in 2010. She gave me so much to think about. Years worth in five minutes.
xomegday
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Poet of Color Reading -- Marc Bamuthi Joseph
Poetry on stage in a form other than spoken word or slam -- that's Marc Bamuthi Joseph.
Poetry written and performed with the body -- that's Marc Bamuthi Joseph.
Hip Hop as a form -- that's Marc Bamuthi Joseph.
Watching, in person, MBJ perform excerpts from his poetry-play, the/breaks, was one of those moments that a poet never forgets. From his first sound -- my ancestors HACKED -- I am engaged. Taken by the neck and forced to listen. Sounds violent right? Well, that's the point. The hacking of sugar cane was a violent act. The beating of slaves who didn't work fast enough or hard enough, that's was a violent act. So MBJ's words must pack enough punch to get you to that end.
As he looped small truths from his life together with the macro truths of capitalism, identity and artistic sustainability, I sat amazed at how conversational his poetry felt and how the confessional moments didn't feel overwhelming confessional, but more universal and momentous.
The brillance, I think, came from his fluid chronology -- the way he moved through time/history was powerful. It allowed me to sit with hard realities -- slavery, but then be moved to more warm moments -- the first time he sees the sonogram picture of his son or the conversations he has with his grandmother. Those were a few of the brilliant moments in this poetry-play.
The body as poetry combined with hip hop as a form to engage the audience -- powerful. The sampling of music from various points in his history -- powerful. The inclusion of all the places he has been as an artist and how his identity was constantly in question -- powerful.
I think the thing I appreciated most about MBJ's performance was that he presented a great deal of truth -- hard truths -- about his life and his mind-set at various times in his life. I appreciated that the most. I appreciated his ability to take a culture -- hip hop -- present it in a play using poetry and dance as the medium and have it crossover and touch so many lives. That is powerful. That is poetry.
Poetry written and performed with the body -- that's Marc Bamuthi Joseph.
Hip Hop as a form -- that's Marc Bamuthi Joseph.
Watching, in person, MBJ perform excerpts from his poetry-play, the/breaks, was one of those moments that a poet never forgets. From his first sound -- my ancestors HACKED -- I am engaged. Taken by the neck and forced to listen. Sounds violent right? Well, that's the point. The hacking of sugar cane was a violent act. The beating of slaves who didn't work fast enough or hard enough, that's was a violent act. So MBJ's words must pack enough punch to get you to that end.
As he looped small truths from his life together with the macro truths of capitalism, identity and artistic sustainability, I sat amazed at how conversational his poetry felt and how the confessional moments didn't feel overwhelming confessional, but more universal and momentous.
The brillance, I think, came from his fluid chronology -- the way he moved through time/history was powerful. It allowed me to sit with hard realities -- slavery, but then be moved to more warm moments -- the first time he sees the sonogram picture of his son or the conversations he has with his grandmother. Those were a few of the brilliant moments in this poetry-play.
The body as poetry combined with hip hop as a form to engage the audience -- powerful. The sampling of music from various points in his history -- powerful. The inclusion of all the places he has been as an artist and how his identity was constantly in question -- powerful.
I think the thing I appreciated most about MBJ's performance was that he presented a great deal of truth -- hard truths -- about his life and his mind-set at various times in his life. I appreciated that the most. I appreciated his ability to take a culture -- hip hop -- present it in a play using poetry and dance as the medium and have it crossover and touch so many lives. That is powerful. That is poetry.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Mangos With Chili - Beloved
Recently I was very excited to have the chance to see Mangos With Chilis' new show "Beloved: A Requiem for Our Dead" a show that was positioned to mourn the deaths of queer and trans- folx of color who had been taken from us. One of the poets that read was Rose Sims.
The stage was set up with an altar on one side of the stage and she stood next to it with a projection of a photo behind her. As the poem began she started talking about her family and the experiences of her Auntie being raised in the Phillipines with her mother. Then as the poetry unfolds we learn that the Auntie she speaks of was trans and the way that the family spoke of her was with female pronouns and used a female name for her. The recounting of these stories about this Auntie serve to place the poet in the position of mother telling these tales. She becomes the mother recounting the tales and we become her, sitting in the dark enraptured by these tales of this woman and her life.
As we sit there we begin to see the woman appear before us through the poem, the narrative shifts and we hear about the interest that we, as Rose, as children had in this woman and her life. The way that the language aroound her changed once the interest was shown, the way that the Auntie's name was shifted back to its birth configuration and the way that the pronoun used to refer to her becomes male. This is placed in the context of the poet's own identity as a transwoman, that Auntie becomes a focus for this child/us as a member of the family that shows acceptance of a path that is not the normative one set in front of children.
The image of Auntie behind Rose takes on more complexity when we learn that the arm around her waist, the man who is missing was an American soldier that took her away from the Phillipines. So now we have a relationship in the context of colonialism, in the context of conquering this man/soldier actually serves as salvation and love as oopposed to the violence of colonial occupation.
There's no obvious ending to Auntie's tale within the poem but we realize that whatever may have happened to her it actual matters little because the two narratives of the poet and her Auntie begin to merge into a historical connection, a legacy of love and accepting who you really are and living that life despite any obstacles. The emotion in her voice was obvious and the feeling was obvious to the audience. The love for this Auntie that she never physically met is about a connection through time, a connection of blood and experience that is visually represented by Rose standing in front of the projected image of her Auntie and turning to refer to her so often.
It was a powerful reading and a powerful poem that does a lot to create a connection between family that we create and family that we are born with and the connections and disconnections that can happen within those spaces.
The stage was set up with an altar on one side of the stage and she stood next to it with a projection of a photo behind her. As the poem began she started talking about her family and the experiences of her Auntie being raised in the Phillipines with her mother. Then as the poetry unfolds we learn that the Auntie she speaks of was trans and the way that the family spoke of her was with female pronouns and used a female name for her. The recounting of these stories about this Auntie serve to place the poet in the position of mother telling these tales. She becomes the mother recounting the tales and we become her, sitting in the dark enraptured by these tales of this woman and her life.
As we sit there we begin to see the woman appear before us through the poem, the narrative shifts and we hear about the interest that we, as Rose, as children had in this woman and her life. The way that the language aroound her changed once the interest was shown, the way that the Auntie's name was shifted back to its birth configuration and the way that the pronoun used to refer to her becomes male. This is placed in the context of the poet's own identity as a transwoman, that Auntie becomes a focus for this child/us as a member of the family that shows acceptance of a path that is not the normative one set in front of children.
The image of Auntie behind Rose takes on more complexity when we learn that the arm around her waist, the man who is missing was an American soldier that took her away from the Phillipines. So now we have a relationship in the context of colonialism, in the context of conquering this man/soldier actually serves as salvation and love as oopposed to the violence of colonial occupation.
There's no obvious ending to Auntie's tale within the poem but we realize that whatever may have happened to her it actual matters little because the two narratives of the poet and her Auntie begin to merge into a historical connection, a legacy of love and accepting who you really are and living that life despite any obstacles. The emotion in her voice was obvious and the feeling was obvious to the audience. The love for this Auntie that she never physically met is about a connection through time, a connection of blood and experience that is visually represented by Rose standing in front of the projected image of her Auntie and turning to refer to her so often.
It was a powerful reading and a powerful poem that does a lot to create a connection between family that we create and family that we are born with and the connections and disconnections that can happen within those spaces.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Poetry Reading - Ianna Hawkins Owen
I was able to hear poet Ianna Hawkins Owen read from her chapbook earlier this semester (and I probably should have blogged about it then but I spaced) and was really struck by the way she performed her piece. The piece was exploring her own mixed race identity as someone existing between the identities of black and white and within the identity of a mixed-race person. On top of this she is navigating moving to a new town who only the year before had repealed their anti-miscegenation laws. This of course plays into the dialogue around her identity, how does she exist in this place where only a little while back people such as her were legally barred from existing? What is the culture in that location like when this is it's recent history?
There's a lot going on there, a lot of violence both political and personal, a lot of questions of belonging and identity. After hearing so many poems that deal with identity and navigating the space of being marginalized in some way I've always been aware of what seems like a push of aggressive emotion behind the pieces that I've heard, not necessarily an anger but a realization of the way they were viewed and had to deal with themselves around their position. There is general a taking up of space, a exploration of the body in a way that is allowing it to expand into a position normally not allowed to it growing up. This is not to say that Ianna did not have a powerful or effective reading it was simply a different kind of power and emotional exchange.
When Ianna read she folded herself into a chair, leg up, arm wrapped around it. She shrank into a smaller ball, a smaller position, and read in a quiet voice. The fact that we as the audience had to stay silent, had to control our urges to whisper, cry, snap, emote in any way allowed for us to surrender to her reading more fully. There was no ability to disengage, to distract from what she was saying, from the past that she was conjuring for us to exist within. She used the quiet of her voice and the smallness of her position to take not only us but herself back to that time, her folding made us think of youth and her youth specifically in conjunction with the history and ideas she was speaking about/of/with.
It was an amazingly effective reading, as she talked about the small suburban town and referenced such things as "Serial Mom" we were carried along with her on this emotional and physical journey. We start to occupy the same space as her, to walk in her place just a little and to be drawn into her headspace.
I don't know for sure if these actions were purposeful or if that might just be the way the poet reads all her works but the interaction between this particular piece and her reading of it was especially powerful, it forced us to sit in silence, to engage fully or to be excluded from the energy and emotion that Ianna weaved about us.
There's a lot going on there, a lot of violence both political and personal, a lot of questions of belonging and identity. After hearing so many poems that deal with identity and navigating the space of being marginalized in some way I've always been aware of what seems like a push of aggressive emotion behind the pieces that I've heard, not necessarily an anger but a realization of the way they were viewed and had to deal with themselves around their position. There is general a taking up of space, a exploration of the body in a way that is allowing it to expand into a position normally not allowed to it growing up. This is not to say that Ianna did not have a powerful or effective reading it was simply a different kind of power and emotional exchange.
When Ianna read she folded herself into a chair, leg up, arm wrapped around it. She shrank into a smaller ball, a smaller position, and read in a quiet voice. The fact that we as the audience had to stay silent, had to control our urges to whisper, cry, snap, emote in any way allowed for us to surrender to her reading more fully. There was no ability to disengage, to distract from what she was saying, from the past that she was conjuring for us to exist within. She used the quiet of her voice and the smallness of her position to take not only us but herself back to that time, her folding made us think of youth and her youth specifically in conjunction with the history and ideas she was speaking about/of/with.
It was an amazingly effective reading, as she talked about the small suburban town and referenced such things as "Serial Mom" we were carried along with her on this emotional and physical journey. We start to occupy the same space as her, to walk in her place just a little and to be drawn into her headspace.
I don't know for sure if these actions were purposeful or if that might just be the way the poet reads all her works but the interaction between this particular piece and her reading of it was especially powerful, it forced us to sit in silence, to engage fully or to be excluded from the energy and emotion that Ianna weaved about us.
Today I read: Poesîa de Maquiladora by Sheryl Luna, and found several interpretations within myself about the poem's meaning. Generally, when I read a poem, the first time I see it only at face value: The story which I see unfolding is just from the words I choose to hear. The second time I read it, I put pieces together, and by the third time, I look at the language of the poem. The language for this poem, the words are so incredibly deliberate. This poem exemplifies that way of writing. There is a reason for each word used in this poem, from the word Border, to intelligent.
The title, as sheepish as I am to admit it, I had to get translated (via internet... I know, I know) and what I found was: Poesîa de Maquiladora, Poetry of Assembly Plant. That says something there, but the fact that they leave that in Spanish is a very interesting choice, because there are no other spanish words in this piece. This, for me makes the Title seem very important. Normally, I think that I would have just passed by the title, but because it stood out, it gave it a new kind of importance.
Now to the meat of this poem. The poet, Sheryl Luna, uses I for this poem, which again, is a deliberate choice in this poem. In the first stanza we read:
I am swept into a sadness, still
and unspeakable in sterile rooms where
men might as well wear white coats
and drink my breath from stethoscopes
two things immediately catch my attention: One is the form, when she uses the word "still," I notice how it is left aloe there hanging off that comma.... still.
still
and unspeakable.
just the way that it is left there, reading it to yourself or aloud, it makes you pause, creating stillness. The second thing I notice is content: men might as well wear white coats. Sterile rooms, stethoscopes, and yet she is not talking about doctors. These "clinical," words (I'm going to call them,) show up throughout the poem: drain blood, wound, swelled, sick, doctors, patients, sickness, body. And yet, as I mentioned, they are not doctors and this is not about a hospital, or sickness.
I look again to the title: Poesîa de Maquiladora.
She makes me think of working in dingy conditions, of overseers, yet she refers to them as doctors and patients with disdain.
They were so happy to show us
the habits of locusts, drain blood
into plastic bags of their manufacturing.
Tell us, Latina, was it what they
assumed it was, broken language,
poetry of a lesser nature, a wound?
The voice change within the stanza, "Tell us, Latina," As if that is how they are being addressed, and then to go on and talk about "broken language." Broken language and poetry of a lesser nature. There is something here that I am not quite getting. And the way she speaks about manufacturing their blood... it almost seems blatant, yet there is something so esoteric about her language that you would think that she is keeping so much of it a secret, and only hinting at her meaning, which in turn makes this poem extremely powerful. She then hits us with this:
The way my brown knees
slammed hard in the fall
from what was left of grace.
Excuse me? Someone please read that to me again. This poem right here blows my mind, I am lost, I think I understand parts, and then she loses me again. When I first read it, this was my initial impression: (purely face-value) This was a story about person, who was working in a factory, or in some place where there is a overseer type boss, clinical and calculating, demeaning, and this person is reflecting on their life there, but also perhaps hinting at their past, their place of origin:
My body is fading
back to an invisible border.
Because this poem is about a Latina person, I can not help but think of borders and the deliberate intention to end the poem on this note. We are left with the sense of two worlds, but also the different lives that they live in each. It makes me think about the endless trials, obstacles and lives... Lives they must lead here. So when she talks about the doctors, and patients, they way that she insinuates that they have a "sickness," she is referring to her race, or origins, and how that is something that is the "lesser nature," "wound," "sickness." This poem, though deliberate, is not direct, or easy to interpret, even now I wonder if what I am thinking is anywhere near the mark of what it truly means.
I am left with only this:
The way my brown knees
slammed hard in the fall
from what was left of grace.
Ahhhh.
-Bluey, aka Michaela C. Ellis
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Brenda Shaughnessy's poem "Rise" is a very interesting (and surprising) connection between baking and revenge. Initially the title did not cause me to imagine a fresh loaf baking in the oven, but instead conjured up ideas of surmounting and overcoming adversity. The first stanza solidifies those imagined scenes:
I can't believe you've come back,
like the train I missed so badly, barely,
which stopped & returned for me. It scared me,
humming backwards along the track
This stanza plays off of an emotion that we can all relate to- the hollow loss associated with the unfortunate mis-timing of an arrival. Whether it's the bus, a deadline, or a train, we are all capable of identifying with that gut-wrenching feeling that is resultant from our engagement leaving us behind. The reader's identification with the speaker's sentiment creates a stronger impact when she writes "like the train I missed so badly, barely, which stopped & returned for me". Ah, the relief that must come with that experience! I certainly have never witnessed the BART stopping and returning for me (much to my dismay), yet the speaker does not emphasize her exultation, instead she writes "It scared me, humming backwards along the track". In these lines she takes an emotion that the reader identifies with, and flips it. Rather than focusing on the fact that her destination will no longer be missed, she is mesmerized by the eery return of the train- moving in a direction it should not, towards a stop that it should not make. Why would it do this? What are its motives? Can the sudden change in direction be trusted? These deeper-seated questions relate back to the first line of the poem, "I can't believe you've come back". The interpersonal connection between the speaker and the audience "you" is explained in terms of an industrialized mechanical form of transportation. The disbelief described as a surreal, almost terrifying experience.
The initial feeling of distrust that is established in the first stanza begins to change in the second. Much like the subtle changes of a relationship, the speaker's emotions change steadily, slowly and are exhibited in her actions and thoughts throughout the remaining stanzas. In the second stanza the tables have shifted, the speaker is now in a position where she seems to be convincing her beloved to return the affection that she is giving. She writes "you remember you were mine./ You may resist, you will relent." I find the last line of this stanza to be particularly interesting. The difference between the words "will" and "may" lend themselves to interesting interpretations of the verbs resist and relent (both of which are rather harsh). To describe the engagement in a relationship with the verbs resist and relent makes it sounds like there's a little too much coercion happening. At the same time though, the speaker's phrasing of the sentence conveys a sense of familiarity with the beloved to the reader- the speaker knows that her beloved will resist succumbing to his/her feelings initially, but in time he/she will allow him/herself to experience them. It's a process that the couple must have gone through before, and our speaker knows this full well. Regardless, there's an unavoidable feeling of sexuality in the last line, coupled with the earlier possessive line "you were mine", and I can't help being skeptical of what's to come.
In the third stanza the speaker ties in the baking of bread with her relationship. She writes:
At home in fire, desire is bread
whose flour, water, salt, and yeast,
not yet confused, are still, at least
in the soil, the sea, the mine, the dead.
I love this stanza. The description of baking as "confusing" is really neat. The speaker explains how all of the ingredients required to bake bread are in their elemental states, awaiting their procurement. Just as her and her beloved's feelings of desire are. Everything is ready, simply in need of a little confusion. Their desire awaits in the soil, the sea, the mine, the dead. Such vague and descriptive origins, each of them elemental and raw. Unaltered. Much like the desire between our speaker and her beloved, perhaps? I'm not jumping to any conclusions just yet.
The final stanza completes the emotional transformation.
I have all I longed for, you
in pleasure. You missed me, you body swelling.
Once more, you lie with me, smelling
of almonds, as the poisoned do.
The first line is, at a quick glance, very enduring if read alone. "I have all I longed for, you/". But before the reader can revel in the sweetness of the line, your eyes are forced to strike the words "in pleasure". Ouch. I guess the motives weren't so innocent. It doesn't appear that love or commitment were what our speaker was out to find. The stanza continues, "Once more, you lie with me, smelling of almonds, as the poisoned do." So I had to look into this reference...almonds? Apparently several strains of undomesticated almonds are poisonous at very low doses, and these almonds have bitter tastes and scents.
After my first quick read this piece struck me as poem of love that was rediscovered, but the last line haunted me into reading it again. "As the poisoned do". There is so much in that line! Poisoned implicates motive and intent- someone had to actively poison the beloved for him/her to be deemed as such. So I read it again, and in between the lines that could easily come off as love-bound and innocent there lurks a darker, revengeful, and malicious speaker. The bread that is related to the relationship of the poem ends up being the vessel through which the speaker poisons her beloved (maybe we need a new term for him/her...). The original feelings of overcoming adversity come rushing back...it wasn't the rising up of an old love flame, it was the rising up of the speaker against an old lover who must have wronged her in some sense. She overcame tribulation. She rose, as the bread rose, as the ex-lover fell.
I can't believe you've come back,
like the train I missed so badly, barely,
which stopped & returned for me. It scared me,
humming backwards along the track
This stanza plays off of an emotion that we can all relate to- the hollow loss associated with the unfortunate mis-timing of an arrival. Whether it's the bus, a deadline, or a train, we are all capable of identifying with that gut-wrenching feeling that is resultant from our engagement leaving us behind. The reader's identification with the speaker's sentiment creates a stronger impact when she writes "like the train I missed so badly, barely, which stopped & returned for me". Ah, the relief that must come with that experience! I certainly have never witnessed the BART stopping and returning for me (much to my dismay), yet the speaker does not emphasize her exultation, instead she writes "It scared me, humming backwards along the track". In these lines she takes an emotion that the reader identifies with, and flips it. Rather than focusing on the fact that her destination will no longer be missed, she is mesmerized by the eery return of the train- moving in a direction it should not, towards a stop that it should not make. Why would it do this? What are its motives? Can the sudden change in direction be trusted? These deeper-seated questions relate back to the first line of the poem, "I can't believe you've come back". The interpersonal connection between the speaker and the audience "you" is explained in terms of an industrialized mechanical form of transportation. The disbelief described as a surreal, almost terrifying experience.
The initial feeling of distrust that is established in the first stanza begins to change in the second. Much like the subtle changes of a relationship, the speaker's emotions change steadily, slowly and are exhibited in her actions and thoughts throughout the remaining stanzas. In the second stanza the tables have shifted, the speaker is now in a position where she seems to be convincing her beloved to return the affection that she is giving. She writes "you remember you were mine./ You may resist, you will relent." I find the last line of this stanza to be particularly interesting. The difference between the words "will" and "may" lend themselves to interesting interpretations of the verbs resist and relent (both of which are rather harsh). To describe the engagement in a relationship with the verbs resist and relent makes it sounds like there's a little too much coercion happening. At the same time though, the speaker's phrasing of the sentence conveys a sense of familiarity with the beloved to the reader- the speaker knows that her beloved will resist succumbing to his/her feelings initially, but in time he/she will allow him/herself to experience them. It's a process that the couple must have gone through before, and our speaker knows this full well. Regardless, there's an unavoidable feeling of sexuality in the last line, coupled with the earlier possessive line "you were mine", and I can't help being skeptical of what's to come.
In the third stanza the speaker ties in the baking of bread with her relationship. She writes:
At home in fire, desire is bread
whose flour, water, salt, and yeast,
not yet confused, are still, at least
in the soil, the sea, the mine, the dead.
I love this stanza. The description of baking as "confusing" is really neat. The speaker explains how all of the ingredients required to bake bread are in their elemental states, awaiting their procurement. Just as her and her beloved's feelings of desire are. Everything is ready, simply in need of a little confusion. Their desire awaits in the soil, the sea, the mine, the dead. Such vague and descriptive origins, each of them elemental and raw. Unaltered. Much like the desire between our speaker and her beloved, perhaps? I'm not jumping to any conclusions just yet.
The final stanza completes the emotional transformation.
I have all I longed for, you
in pleasure. You missed me, you body swelling.
Once more, you lie with me, smelling
of almonds, as the poisoned do.
The first line is, at a quick glance, very enduring if read alone. "I have all I longed for, you/". But before the reader can revel in the sweetness of the line, your eyes are forced to strike the words "in pleasure". Ouch. I guess the motives weren't so innocent. It doesn't appear that love or commitment were what our speaker was out to find. The stanza continues, "Once more, you lie with me, smelling of almonds, as the poisoned do." So I had to look into this reference...almonds? Apparently several strains of undomesticated almonds are poisonous at very low doses, and these almonds have bitter tastes and scents.
After my first quick read this piece struck me as poem of love that was rediscovered, but the last line haunted me into reading it again. "As the poisoned do". There is so much in that line! Poisoned implicates motive and intent- someone had to actively poison the beloved for him/her to be deemed as such. So I read it again, and in between the lines that could easily come off as love-bound and innocent there lurks a darker, revengeful, and malicious speaker. The bread that is related to the relationship of the poem ends up being the vessel through which the speaker poisons her beloved (maybe we need a new term for him/her...). The original feelings of overcoming adversity come rushing back...it wasn't the rising up of an old love flame, it was the rising up of the speaker against an old lover who must have wronged her in some sense. She overcame tribulation. She rose, as the bread rose, as the ex-lover fell.
So, despite the fact that I have caught the flu again this year, I have still managed to try to do the most and best I can in my classes. Now that that is out the way I would like to post about my first outside poetry reading. Last Wednesday I went to the Air Lounge on 9th and Washington for open mic night which they have every Wednesday. I thought I was going to hear maybe something out of a comedy film, but the poetry read was very good and moved me. One poem read was by a black female poet called 'Queen D', she read a poem she wrote entitled Dear Little Black Boy. Every who spoke did a small introduction to what the poem was about and why they wrote it. Queen D is a middle school teacher for a special education class and she said that she deals with a lot of young black boys who are emotionally disturbed. For the longest she couldn't figure out why but after she held individual meetings with the parents of each child, her poem came about. That was one of the amazing things that attracted me to her poem, the context. After every line about the verbal and physical abuse most inner-city low-income black boys experience from their parents she repeatedly said, "I love you". She was saying even though you may not hear it if not at all, then you can hear it from me. The poem almost brought me to tears because I have an eight yr old nephew whose father (my brother) is incarcerated and whose mother has a 10th grade education and is currently homeless and has a brainwashed mind of imposed religious views. So I felt the anger and the rage from not being able to help in the way I want to help, or show the parents of every emotionally disturbed black boy what I see versus what they see. . . . Another poem that I was moved by was a poem called 'Poetic Stretch' I cannot remember the name of the poet but I remember the poem. lol. Very interesting. The poem was something I feel could be read as a morning ritual because it seriously was what the title said it was "a poetic stretch". The poem was instruction like in form and make me laugh and forget what might have been bothering me at that moment. It was one of those feel good poems that someone recites because they know you are having a bad day. The poem also had a melodic feel to it, I found myself tapping my feet and bobbing my head to the rhythm of the words. Amongst the many poets that read that night, those are the only two poems that stuck with me, but the Air Lounge itself is a very nice establishment with a mature and family-like crowd. Hopefully when my final project is done, I'll be able to approach the mic and make people feel the same way I felt that night.....free.
-Dorothy
-Dorothy
(sorry for the late posts, but I've been having trouble with the internet and connection)
One thing that I noticed especially during the in class presentation was that performance does make a difference in whether it is performed in person on stage or read right off the page, or even if it is accompanied by music. In the case of Sarah Jones's piece "Your Revolution". I can see the immense difference between what I felt from seeing her perform the poem versus just reading the poem as it was written. I did not get the same feeling or the message did not come across strong enough for me on paper as it did when I seen her perform. On paper you can lose the voice of the poet, the actual voice and the all the characteristics of that voice. You lose a connectedness you can only get from seeing a poet on stage and watching the way they move with every word spoken and the way they may look at you when speaking. You lose all of that on paper. Every word possible evokes a movement in the body, when reading a poem the movement or lack of movement your body makes comes from your perception and perspective of what the poet is trying to portray but when you are seeing the body movements made from the poet him/herself and what positions their body goes into when they speak the words, it's a totally difference perception and thought provoking experience that you cannot get on paper.
Performance in/of poetry also brings out orginal theatrical aspects of poetry and spoken word.
All poetry tells a story and what life is story without characters, laughter, smiles, and many emotions that you feel when hearing or watching a story unveil? So performance of a piece is taken into much consideration when talking about the overall criticism of someone's work.
One thing that I noticed especially during the in class presentation was that performance does make a difference in whether it is performed in person on stage or read right off the page, or even if it is accompanied by music. In the case of Sarah Jones's piece "Your Revolution". I can see the immense difference between what I felt from seeing her perform the poem versus just reading the poem as it was written. I did not get the same feeling or the message did not come across strong enough for me on paper as it did when I seen her perform. On paper you can lose the voice of the poet, the actual voice and the all the characteristics of that voice. You lose a connectedness you can only get from seeing a poet on stage and watching the way they move with every word spoken and the way they may look at you when speaking. You lose all of that on paper. Every word possible evokes a movement in the body, when reading a poem the movement or lack of movement your body makes comes from your perception and perspective of what the poet is trying to portray but when you are seeing the body movements made from the poet him/herself and what positions their body goes into when they speak the words, it's a totally difference perception and thought provoking experience that you cannot get on paper.
Performance in/of poetry also brings out orginal theatrical aspects of poetry and spoken word.
All poetry tells a story and what life is story without characters, laughter, smiles, and many emotions that you feel when hearing or watching a story unveil? So performance of a piece is taken into much consideration when talking about the overall criticism of someone's work.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Your Revolution Was Televised
Okay Sarah Jones, let's talk. Your poem, Your Revolution, lifted my spirits this weekend. I was able to reminisce through your use of sampling to move the narrative forward in this piece. Loving the musicality of this poem, I read it over and over and over. This is clearly one function of having a poem appear on the page -- the reader gets to experience it more than once. However, I wanted to see you perform this piece -- so I used technology to give me the next best thing.
Your Revolution
So I watched the video and you used the songs you sampled just as I expected you to and I still found myself wonderfully surprised. So having both the page and the stage versions gave me more access points, more clarity of how the songs work as text and more reasons to read and experience the work again.
Let's talk...
peacelovelight
Kiala
Your Revolution
So I watched the video and you used the songs you sampled just as I expected you to and I still found myself wonderfully surprised. So having both the page and the stage versions gave me more access points, more clarity of how the songs work as text and more reasons to read and experience the work again.
I could see/hear this piece on a stage before seeing you perform it. I cannot imagine this poem without movement. It feels like a song itself – the rhythm and the cadence of the lines are powerful AND for those of us from this generation of music, we know where to sing, hum, and bob. It’s wonderful in that way. A road map through my musical history.
Going from page to stage enhanced this piece. It is meant to be spoken/performed because there is too much music and energy from one line to the next for it to only live on the page. Ironically, it can live on the page, but without the performance to accompany it in the Universe, it would also die on the page. Both are necessary.
In this poem, you use lines from popular songs to make a point about the music industry:
Think I'm a put it in my mouth just cuz you made a few bucks?
Please brother please
Your revolution will not be me tossing my weave
And making me believe I'm some caviar-eating ghetto mafia clown
Or me giving up my behind, just so I can get signed
And maybe having somebody else write my rhymes
I'm Sarah Jones, not Foxy Brown
and I get what you are doing here, but wonder why you selected to omit this in the Def Poetry performance -- was it only about the 3 minute time limit or was there more? Was there some commentary you felt comfortable putting on the page, but not saying on the stage? That givees me great questions about audience and intent and how performance poetry interacts with both in a way that page poetry does not and vice versa.
You make some really political statements about male and female relationships too,
Your revolution will not happen between these thighs
The real revolution ain't about booty size
The Versaces you buys
Or the Lexus you drives
And though we've lost Biggie Smalls
Baby, your notorious revolution
Will never allow you to lace no lyrical douche in my bush
Your revolution will not be you killing me softly with Fugees
Your revolution ain't gonna knock me up without no ring
And produce little future emcees
Because that revolution will not happen between these thighs
and about sex:
Because that revolution will not happen between these thighs
Oh, my Jamaican brother, your revolution will not make you feel
Bombastic and really fantastic
And have you groping in the dark for that rubber wrapped in plastic
You will not be touching your lips to my triple dip of french
vanilla, butter pecan, chocolate deluxe
Or having Akinyele's dream, (mm hmm)
A 6-foot blowjob machine (mm hmm)
You want to subjugate your queen? (uh-huh)
Think I'm a put it in my mouth just cuz you made a few bucks?
Simply using the word "revolution" over and over again, you build up a call to action that unfortunately never plays out fully in the end of the poem,
Because the real revolution
That's right I said the real revolution
You know I'm talking about the revolution
When it comes, it's gonna be real
The funny thing is that this ending works in performance more than it works on the page. On the page I have more time with the ending and while it sounds great on stage, it has very little revolutionary quality. It does not play with language in a revolutionary way, nor does it revolutionize the poetic elements -- but I only get this because I sit with it on the page much longer than I do when you push it to me from the stage.Let's talk...
peacelovelight
Kiala
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Page and stage
For me whether or not a poem translates from page to stage or vice versa depends completely on the poet who is trying to make the transitions and I think that the work for this week exemplifies that. Each poet has an opportunity to make her work move able and it’s the effort that's important.
For instance Rock Me, Goong Hay! by Alvin Eng didn’t really translate into performance for me. I felt that hearing him sing/speak the poem/song that it lost a lot of the power of the words. He was just sort of yelling and we missed the words, which to me seemed so clever. I didn’t get to hear: “ Yellow fever was our lot in this country/ Now we’re the so-called ‘model minority’/ Which really don’t mean shit if you think about it/ ‘Cause plenty still despise our slanty eyes” (59) which I really wanted to come through in the performance. Maybe it was the quality of the video itself but I felt as though the performance was more about the music than the poem/lyrics and they just sort of threw something on top of the music. What stood out from the performance was that title line of “Rock Me, Goong Hay!” but it missed the verses, which were the more important and thought provoking parts.
On the other hand, Nigger-Reecan Blues by Willie Perdomo had all the elements of a good page to stage poem. The content is interesting and funny while still thought provoking. The voices used are each distinct and speak for themselves:
“—Tu no eres Puerto Riqueno, brother.
--Maybe Indian like Gandhi Indian.
--I thought you was a Black man
--Is one of your parents white?
--You sure you ain’t a mix of something like
--Portuguese and Chinese?
--Naaaaahhhh… You ain’t no Porta Reecan
--I keep telling you: The boy is a Black man with an accent.” (Aloud, 112)
With out hearing it performed I could hear the different tones and inflections of the voices. Then when I watched the YouTube video the poem was completely enhanced by Perdomo’s charming personality and theatrical presentation. The voices that he used enhanced his already captivating language.
There was also the work that seemed like it was purely created for the stage such as with the Aya de Leon piece. It was interesting and innovative but I imagine that if I could see it on the page it wouldn’t have the same bite. A lot of the importance of the piece was based in timing and in being able to see the movement that the performer was making around the stage. I think that there isn’t a way to communicate the movement
For instance Rock Me, Goong Hay! by Alvin Eng didn’t really translate into performance for me. I felt that hearing him sing/speak the poem/song that it lost a lot of the power of the words. He was just sort of yelling and we missed the words, which to me seemed so clever. I didn’t get to hear: “ Yellow fever was our lot in this country/ Now we’re the so-called ‘model minority’/ Which really don’t mean shit if you think about it/ ‘Cause plenty still despise our slanty eyes” (59) which I really wanted to come through in the performance. Maybe it was the quality of the video itself but I felt as though the performance was more about the music than the poem/lyrics and they just sort of threw something on top of the music. What stood out from the performance was that title line of “Rock Me, Goong Hay!” but it missed the verses, which were the more important and thought provoking parts.
On the other hand, Nigger-Reecan Blues by Willie Perdomo had all the elements of a good page to stage poem. The content is interesting and funny while still thought provoking. The voices used are each distinct and speak for themselves:
“—Tu no eres Puerto Riqueno, brother.
--Maybe Indian like Gandhi Indian.
--I thought you was a Black man
--Is one of your parents white?
--You sure you ain’t a mix of something like
--Portuguese and Chinese?
--Naaaaahhhh… You ain’t no Porta Reecan
--I keep telling you: The boy is a Black man with an accent.” (Aloud, 112)
With out hearing it performed I could hear the different tones and inflections of the voices. Then when I watched the YouTube video the poem was completely enhanced by Perdomo’s charming personality and theatrical presentation. The voices that he used enhanced his already captivating language.
There was also the work that seemed like it was purely created for the stage such as with the Aya de Leon piece. It was interesting and innovative but I imagine that if I could see it on the page it wouldn’t have the same bite. A lot of the importance of the piece was based in timing and in being able to see the movement that the performer was making around the stage. I think that there isn’t a way to communicate the movement
The performance of a poem allows it to transcend a reader's completely subjective interpretation of it. Once on stage, a poem is given context, rhythm, and inflection. Much less is left to the reader's analysis of the poem, and more is given to the performer's personification. While reading poetry I have often stumbled upon poems that I just knew would be amazing when performed. There's some element of the piece, whether it be due to the structure of the poem, the rhyme scheme, or simply the poignancy of the content, that makes it seem so performable. As I had expected, many of the poems that we read this week had such an effect.
The poem "Rock Me, Goong Hay!" was definitely one of them. As I read through the poem, I couldn't help myself from falling into its rhythm and by the end of the second or third stanza I even had a little head-bob action happening. The wonderfully placed and witty rhymes build up a momentum in the poem that builds up to the final lines "'CAUSE IT TAKES A NATION OF BILLIONS TO HOLD US PEOPLE BACK!/ Rock me, Goong Hay/ Goong hay fat choy!". Everything about this piece made it seem like a performance even before I had seen the actual page to stage transformation. The free-for-all rhythm and rhyme feeling is undeniable; just reading the piece makes me feel like I am witnessing some organic, unaltered poetic purging. With awesomely creative lines such as
"Yellow fever was our lot in this country/Now we're the so-called "model minority"/Which don't really mean shit if you think about it/'Cause plenty still despise our slanty eyes",
I couldn't wait to see the piece performed. The performance of this poem was fairly different than what I had expected. Rather than a simple, more rhythmic reading of the poem Alvin Eng had an entire song formulated from this piece. The instrumentation was a bit jazzier than I had expected, but Eng's vocal's brought in the "roots-rock-rapper" effect that the poem has.
The poem "Rock Me, Goong Hay!" was definitely one of them. As I read through the poem, I couldn't help myself from falling into its rhythm and by the end of the second or third stanza I even had a little head-bob action happening. The wonderfully placed and witty rhymes build up a momentum in the poem that builds up to the final lines "'CAUSE IT TAKES A NATION OF BILLIONS TO HOLD US PEOPLE BACK!/ Rock me, Goong Hay/ Goong hay fat choy!". Everything about this piece made it seem like a performance even before I had seen the actual page to stage transformation. The free-for-all rhythm and rhyme feeling is undeniable; just reading the piece makes me feel like I am witnessing some organic, unaltered poetic purging. With awesomely creative lines such as
"Yellow fever was our lot in this country/Now we're the so-called "model minority"/Which don't really mean shit if you think about it/'Cause plenty still despise our slanty eyes",
I couldn't wait to see the piece performed. The performance of this poem was fairly different than what I had expected. Rather than a simple, more rhythmic reading of the poem Alvin Eng had an entire song formulated from this piece. The instrumentation was a bit jazzier than I had expected, but Eng's vocal's brought in the "roots-rock-rapper" effect that the poem has.
From the page to the stage is a must evolution for poets of color. Performing their poem live affirms their power and strengthens communities - just by sharing their truth. I am a strong believer in performing one’s work. The tone, movement, and breath enhances a poem. Sometimes a poem is just meant to be performed because it can get lost on the page. Detecting a poet’s humor, irony or anger on one’s own is a little more tricky but if you hear a poet read their work live then there is a better understanding of what the poet’s intentions were. Willie Perdomo’s poem “Nigger Reecan Blues” is a great example of a poem elevating from academia to urban and street to insider and outsider perspectives.
There is a openness to Perdomo’s piece - his first person narrative invites the reader to share his humor and search for his identity. On the page the words are displaced and as a reader there is a connection to discover what his identity really is. Interestingly, the word coconut and Míralo are the only words that stands out and alone among the words. I feel he did this to emphasize look at his color. Coconut is usually referred in a community of people of color when someone is trying to be white. Brown on the outside and white on the inside. There is a raw reaction to this choice. Especially having the word coconut stand alone even though its referring to his hair. Yet, hair can be an identifier for one’s culture and since Perdomo’s identity is being questioned every which way - his hair is a marker that he is black.
The African slave trade brought Africans to Puerto Rico. I feel Perdomo’s poem calls out to the many ways his appearance lumps him into one category, even though he may look black, he is Puerto Rican before he is a poet, before he is spic. He uses two racially charged terms in his poem that are harsh and conjure many emotions for me. To be called a spic is the same as being called a nigger.During his performance the different voices from the men come to life. I find it interesting that he chooses to have this dialogue with men. I think its a great choice because he is addressing community and manhood. He consciously chooses this and not a dialogue with a woman who may question his masculinity and machismo.
This is a poem about his drowning in other people's perceptions and surfacing to the top to say: "Boricua I am."
Truly a fan of his work
(took his class at VONA and absolutely loved it!!)
in poetry & pen,
Melissa
There is a openness to Perdomo’s piece - his first person narrative invites the reader to share his humor and search for his identity. On the page the words are displaced and as a reader there is a connection to discover what his identity really is. Interestingly, the word coconut and Míralo are the only words that stands out and alone among the words. I feel he did this to emphasize look at his color. Coconut is usually referred in a community of people of color when someone is trying to be white. Brown on the outside and white on the inside. There is a raw reaction to this choice. Especially having the word coconut stand alone even though its referring to his hair. Yet, hair can be an identifier for one’s culture and since Perdomo’s identity is being questioned every which way - his hair is a marker that he is black.
The African slave trade brought Africans to Puerto Rico. I feel Perdomo’s poem calls out to the many ways his appearance lumps him into one category, even though he may look black, he is Puerto Rican before he is a poet, before he is spic. He uses two racially charged terms in his poem that are harsh and conjure many emotions for me. To be called a spic is the same as being called a nigger.During his performance the different voices from the men come to life. I find it interesting that he chooses to have this dialogue with men. I think its a great choice because he is addressing community and manhood. He consciously chooses this and not a dialogue with a woman who may question his masculinity and machismo.
This is a poem about his drowning in other people's perceptions and surfacing to the top to say: "Boricua I am."
Truly a fan of his work
(took his class at VONA and absolutely loved it!!)
in poetry & pen,
Melissa
Sarah Jones & Aya de Leon
There is a visual element to performance—the effect of which cannot truly be replicated on the page. Of course, timing, beat, intonation & other elements also change from page to stage, but I am thinking mainly of movement, expression and costuming—specifically in comparing Sarah Jones’ “Your Revolution” and Aya de Leon’s “Hoe Supastar.” I found both to be pretty incredible. They are going after a similar problematic element of the African American hip hop industry—the exploitation of women in the interest of self-representation. Both are edgy and cut-throat; one is straight-up declarations through rhyme, the other is satire & musical performance.
I read the Jones first—I picked up on the musical references & was singing the lines of the songs in my head that were inserted into the poem; I didn’t need a performance there. I also immediately fell into the rhythm of the lines, picked up the beat and the rhyme scheme, and was experiencing the piece as a musical critique of a music industry. The last three lines read as a bit of a letdown for me. I was grooving with the repetition and the rhyme, expecting the climax (what IS the real revolution?) but then it just.. ended. Although I could see it working in terms of content, it left me wanting a more satisfying wrap-up of the pulsing rhythm. I’d like to hear how Jones would read this, I’m think she had a plan with those last lines, as everything in the piece seems so carefully chosen. Maybe her pause, her intonation & her positioning would have made it all come together better for me.
Now, when I watched Aya de Leon’s piece (at least as much as I could because the sound cut out of the youtube video early in the second half…), I have to admit, my ears were burning. I felt shy and excited about the way she presented herself. For a moment, I wondered if I should be offended, particularly because of the intro to the piece, played with no visuals against a darkened screen:
I wondered if the correct link was sent out, and braced myself for what I was going to see. Then I thought of the Performance Group—Meg, Naamen, Micah & Jennifer—and told myself: Cool it, and trust these folks. Lady XXX-Rated struts onto the stage, displaying her body in her skimpy outfit to a cheering crowd. Once she started speaking, I understood that all this—the clothes, the wig, the announcer—was part of the image she was creating. She was in character—a character in the unique position of being a participant in a misogynistic element of the hip hop industry, but also an outspoken proponent of her placement within that industry (or at least the benefits that could be reaped from it).
This was taking Patricia Smith’s skinhead poem to another level—de Leon’s character is so fluid that we are forced to wonder whether there is some truth to her, and question how we fall in relation to her. de Leon further implicates the viewer in this manner when Lady XXX-Rated calls out the feminists of the Ivory Tower for critiquing her. So we are unable to write this character off as a subjugated woman who doesn’t even realize she is creating more problems for other women because then we are those finger-pointing, disconnected critics. And everybody seemed to freaking love Lady XXX-Rated (not sure if she is a parody of an actual person..). As soon as she started singing & dancing my cheeks burned even more. I loved the beat even though the lyrics made me angry. I loved the confidence of this woman, how assured she was in her body—even though I know this was supposed to represent a false confidence and problematic representations of the body.
So we are wooed by this character while at once aware of how she is knocking “herself” down. de Leon creates a fabulously complex image with this piece: she triggers our love for a good beat & an engaging character, and uses it to break down the entrapping misogyny of the mainstream (corporate) hip hop machine. She is using her body to display the misdirected way women have used they bodies to gain a lucrative position in a classist/racist nation. The costuming & movement she incorporates are absolutely critical to the success of this piece—making me wonder what effect it could have had on the page. But de Leon doesn’t give us the easy out, either, of being disgusted by or critical of this representative character. Because this character has a voice. The final message, if there can be one in so few words, is that we need to come down not on the women in this industry, but on those who put them in these positions; and, we need to reclaim this art from, as women, for our own self-representation & direct financial gain.
And, just a minute… could that be the “real revolution?”
I read the Jones first—I picked up on the musical references & was singing the lines of the songs in my head that were inserted into the poem; I didn’t need a performance there. I also immediately fell into the rhythm of the lines, picked up the beat and the rhyme scheme, and was experiencing the piece as a musical critique of a music industry. The last three lines read as a bit of a letdown for me. I was grooving with the repetition and the rhyme, expecting the climax (what IS the real revolution?) but then it just.. ended. Although I could see it working in terms of content, it left me wanting a more satisfying wrap-up of the pulsing rhythm. I’d like to hear how Jones would read this, I’m think she had a plan with those last lines, as everything in the piece seems so carefully chosen. Maybe her pause, her intonation & her positioning would have made it all come together better for me.
Now, when I watched Aya de Leon’s piece (at least as much as I could because the sound cut out of the youtube video early in the second half…), I have to admit, my ears were burning. I felt shy and excited about the way she presented herself. For a moment, I wondered if I should be offended, particularly because of the intro to the piece, played with no visuals against a darkened screen:
Next up is one of the most controversial artists of our day. Also on the Mighty Ignant label. She has been called one of the 10 most negative women in the U.S. by Ms. Magazine, and her world tour was picketed by angry women in Europe and Japan. Give it up y’all for Lady XXX-Rated.
I wondered if the correct link was sent out, and braced myself for what I was going to see. Then I thought of the Performance Group—Meg, Naamen, Micah & Jennifer—and told myself: Cool it, and trust these folks. Lady XXX-Rated struts onto the stage, displaying her body in her skimpy outfit to a cheering crowd. Once she started speaking, I understood that all this—the clothes, the wig, the announcer—was part of the image she was creating. She was in character—a character in the unique position of being a participant in a misogynistic element of the hip hop industry, but also an outspoken proponent of her placement within that industry (or at least the benefits that could be reaped from it).
This was taking Patricia Smith’s skinhead poem to another level—de Leon’s character is so fluid that we are forced to wonder whether there is some truth to her, and question how we fall in relation to her. de Leon further implicates the viewer in this manner when Lady XXX-Rated calls out the feminists of the Ivory Tower for critiquing her. So we are unable to write this character off as a subjugated woman who doesn’t even realize she is creating more problems for other women because then we are those finger-pointing, disconnected critics. And everybody seemed to freaking love Lady XXX-Rated (not sure if she is a parody of an actual person..). As soon as she started singing & dancing my cheeks burned even more. I loved the beat even though the lyrics made me angry. I loved the confidence of this woman, how assured she was in her body—even though I know this was supposed to represent a false confidence and problematic representations of the body.
So we are wooed by this character while at once aware of how she is knocking “herself” down. de Leon creates a fabulously complex image with this piece: she triggers our love for a good beat & an engaging character, and uses it to break down the entrapping misogyny of the mainstream (corporate) hip hop machine. She is using her body to display the misdirected way women have used they bodies to gain a lucrative position in a classist/racist nation. The costuming & movement she incorporates are absolutely critical to the success of this piece—making me wonder what effect it could have had on the page. But de Leon doesn’t give us the easy out, either, of being disgusted by or critical of this representative character. Because this character has a voice. The final message, if there can be one in so few words, is that we need to come down not on the women in this industry, but on those who put them in these positions; and, we need to reclaim this art from, as women, for our own self-representation & direct financial gain.
And, just a minute… could that be the “real revolution?”
After watching the video for “Nigger-Reecan Blues,” I found that the performing of the piece added more to the piece than was visible on the page. Without Perdomo’s intonation, hand movements and facial expressions, the page poem did not exhibit the humor so prevalent in the performed version. On the page, the poem seems more confrontational while in the performed version the writer/performer could make the listener feel a part of the action not an object of it. In addition, Perdomo added some additional words in the performed piece that I thought made his observations more vivid and enjoyable. For example, the page poem presents the following lines:
I can’t even catch a taxi late at night and the newspapers say that if I’m not in front of a gun, chances are that I’ll be behind one. I wonder why. . .
In the performed version, the image becomes more poignant when the line “I can’t even catch a taxi late at night,” is changed to:
Taxi drivers are quick to turn on those off-duty signs when they see my hand in the air
This language removes the culpability from the speaker by moving the action from the speaker to the taxi driver, from, “I can’t” to “Taxi drivers.” The syntax is more stimulating and conversational, less didactic. It also seems that the page version is dependent on the element of spoken sound. The dashes used to indicate dialogue give this away. In the performed version, certain movements of the speaker’s head and neck, certain vocal conceits, give us an indication that the speaker is speaking through the voices of those that are speaking to him. On the page, we require dashes to signal this move, and the dashes on the page seem clunky and somewhat out of place when judged against the flowing, conversational nature of the piece. The punctuation serves as an unwanted revelation of the bones of the work, like a ribcage exposed on a still-living person.
Whereas I liked the performed version of “Nigger-Reecan Blues” better than the page version, I did not feel the same way about “Rock Me, Goong Hay!” I thoroughly enjoyed the page version of this piece, admiring its clever rhymes, its intrinsic rhythms and its tongue in cheek humor. Unlike Perdomo’s piece, the humor in “Rock Me, Goong Hay!” was inescapable and effective. In the performed rap version, however, physical limitations of the speed of the reader’s human voice, the microphone, electronic equipment, and other issues regarding the venue served to put the poem at a disadvantage. For one thing, the speaker was required to talk so fast that many of the words were not audible and therefore, the message was not clear. Also, I felt that the internal music of the piece was overwritten by the rap beats produced by the musical instruments. It seemed that as a listener, my attention was more on the rhythmic drumbeat than on the message, which might have been okay had the words to the poem not been so involved or clever. I felt that when having to vy for attention with the drums and the lights of the venue, something was irrevocably lost.
Finally, after reading Tony Medina’s “New York City Rundown,” I was somewhat glad I didn’t have to hear this poem performed aloud. The content of the poem was so very confrontational that I felt that watching the reactions of myself and of the other listeners would be supremely uncomfortable. I am all about speaking the truth, but I felt assaulted by this poem even though I don’t feel guilty of most of the things “I” am being accused of as a result of the color I was born. I have come to understand that “whiteness” is now a common catchphrase for intolerance, for the mainstream that attempts to blend everything different into one shade, the fairer the better, to swallow into itself and pulverize anything outside the norm; however, I am not that individual, as far as I can tell. I feel that the poem intentionally excluded me on every level. Not only that, the poem belittled me and was enraged with me, pushing me aside. Of no small consequence is the fact that the poem was LONG. I’m afraid that hearing it performed, not being able to step away from the content, swallow my anger, and digest its message in smaller doses, the poem and I would never be able to reconcile our relationship.
I can’t even catch a taxi late at night and the newspapers say that if I’m not in front of a gun, chances are that I’ll be behind one. I wonder why. . .
In the performed version, the image becomes more poignant when the line “I can’t even catch a taxi late at night,” is changed to:
Taxi drivers are quick to turn on those off-duty signs when they see my hand in the air
This language removes the culpability from the speaker by moving the action from the speaker to the taxi driver, from, “I can’t” to “Taxi drivers.” The syntax is more stimulating and conversational, less didactic. It also seems that the page version is dependent on the element of spoken sound. The dashes used to indicate dialogue give this away. In the performed version, certain movements of the speaker’s head and neck, certain vocal conceits, give us an indication that the speaker is speaking through the voices of those that are speaking to him. On the page, we require dashes to signal this move, and the dashes on the page seem clunky and somewhat out of place when judged against the flowing, conversational nature of the piece. The punctuation serves as an unwanted revelation of the bones of the work, like a ribcage exposed on a still-living person.
Whereas I liked the performed version of “Nigger-Reecan Blues” better than the page version, I did not feel the same way about “Rock Me, Goong Hay!” I thoroughly enjoyed the page version of this piece, admiring its clever rhymes, its intrinsic rhythms and its tongue in cheek humor. Unlike Perdomo’s piece, the humor in “Rock Me, Goong Hay!” was inescapable and effective. In the performed rap version, however, physical limitations of the speed of the reader’s human voice, the microphone, electronic equipment, and other issues regarding the venue served to put the poem at a disadvantage. For one thing, the speaker was required to talk so fast that many of the words were not audible and therefore, the message was not clear. Also, I felt that the internal music of the piece was overwritten by the rap beats produced by the musical instruments. It seemed that as a listener, my attention was more on the rhythmic drumbeat than on the message, which might have been okay had the words to the poem not been so involved or clever. I felt that when having to vy for attention with the drums and the lights of the venue, something was irrevocably lost.
Finally, after reading Tony Medina’s “New York City Rundown,” I was somewhat glad I didn’t have to hear this poem performed aloud. The content of the poem was so very confrontational that I felt that watching the reactions of myself and of the other listeners would be supremely uncomfortable. I am all about speaking the truth, but I felt assaulted by this poem even though I don’t feel guilty of most of the things “I” am being accused of as a result of the color I was born. I have come to understand that “whiteness” is now a common catchphrase for intolerance, for the mainstream that attempts to blend everything different into one shade, the fairer the better, to swallow into itself and pulverize anything outside the norm; however, I am not that individual, as far as I can tell. I feel that the poem intentionally excluded me on every level. Not only that, the poem belittled me and was enraged with me, pushing me aside. Of no small consequence is the fact that the poem was LONG. I’m afraid that hearing it performed, not being able to step away from the content, swallow my anger, and digest its message in smaller doses, the poem and I would never be able to reconcile our relationship.
Performance
The page and the stage have a complex relationship. Reading poetry on the page is one activity, reading it aloud yourself is another, and having the poet recite/read/perform it is yet another.
I can read it on the page, and with the guidance of language, form, arrangement, and punctuation, I can get some of the intonations and meanings the poet designed in the poem. If I read it aloud, I both see it on the page and hear it outside of my head, and it increases the sensory experience. In forming the words in my own mouth and ears, I’m actively re-creating the poem. If the poet is performing the piece, I’ve got the image of the poet as well as the images the poet has created in the poem, along with the aural experience of listening to the words, the tones, and the focus of the poet – both in the moment and when the poem was written. Presumably, the poet communicates his or her intention in the reading and the performance of his or her own poem, and I get some information that I might not have by reading the poem myself. My impressions and my interpretations of the poem are different because of the emotion, the expression, the life the poem is given by the performance. One drawback of watching the performance is that I can’t have it repeated as many times as I want as I can with reading the poem myself. I get so much depth reading a poem again and again that I miss that experience with the performance. Sometimes the beauty of a word cluster or choice of language fades into the performance of the piece. If I’m watching the performance on video, I can watch it over and over again, but I may miss something anyway if the words go by too fast or if two performers talk over each other or if there’s music and it’s distracting in some way.
The poem on the page is the same words and form every time, but my reading might change depending on where I am, what mood I’m in, or for what purpose I’m reading it. The poet has done what he or she could to present his or her message, but now that I’m reading it, it’s all about me. With the poem on the stage, the poet is center-stage – in the moment – to present the poem. The poem can change with each performance. My listening may change depending on the same factors as with reading it, but there are fewer filters for the form because the poet is performing it, and the breaths, the stopping, the continuing are done for me. The poet controls how I hear it and has the freedom to add, delete, pause, use facial expressions, and use body language to contribute to the meaning of the poem. I am no longer responsible for approaching the poem with just what I bring to the poem; I have visual and auditory clues to assist me in my understanding.
Willie Perdomo, in “Nigger-Reecan Blues,” adds to the piece and changes it in his performance. He brings the conversation to life and creates the dialogue. There’s more humor – there’s different voices. It’s more of a one-man show – a play where he’s doing all the parts. He goes faster than I could read it and, although I couldn’t get every word in the performance, the expression and emotion is clearly better than I could do myself either in my head or aloud.
In Alvin Eng’s, “Rock me Goong Hay,” the performance is so much more about the music than the words. It was livelier and happier than reading it on the page. Where there was anger on the page, there was joy in the music. I had read the poem first and did not expect this performance for this poem. Everyone is smiling and bopping to the music, each musician is introduced and has a solo, there’s community and individuality. The concert atmosphere overshadowed the message in this poem for me. The caps on the page transferred to his shouting at the end, but the repetition of “Rock Me, Goong Hay” was the refrain that stayed in my head after the performance was over. There was confusion between the presentation on stage and the words in the anthology. When I read the poem, I felt the twist of the Chinese New Year’s greeting, but when I watched the performance, it was just a snappy entry into the rhythm and beat of the music. I found myself rocking along, but I lost the words and, therefore, the point of the piece as I understood it from the writing on the page.
“Tito Puente” was a performance for which we did not have the words on the page, and I think that helped. I took it for a performance, did my best at hearing and understanding the words, and appreciated this different entry point. The two performers, Meyda Del Valle and Lemon, talked over each other in parts, but the musical effects they produced were very cool, and I could actually see the homage – the reasons for the admiration and adoration – in their interaction. I don’t know how this would be done on the page.
Sarah Jones’ “Your Revolution,” for which we did not have the video, leapt off the page for me. I went looking for the video after I read it because I knew I needed the poet. I needed her voice, not my own, to say these words, to give it the full visual sound. The version I found varied a little from the words we had, but the tone, the attitude, the posture was there in the performance. I had read and re-read the piece on the page and looked up the referentials I did not know, but seeing Jones perform the piece did much more for my understanding.
I’m going to still read poems on the page, but if there are performances available, I’m going to look for them because the “vivid imagery” of poetry is made that much more vivid and visible by hearing it and seeing it performed by the person who created it.
Sheila Joseph
I can read it on the page, and with the guidance of language, form, arrangement, and punctuation, I can get some of the intonations and meanings the poet designed in the poem. If I read it aloud, I both see it on the page and hear it outside of my head, and it increases the sensory experience. In forming the words in my own mouth and ears, I’m actively re-creating the poem. If the poet is performing the piece, I’ve got the image of the poet as well as the images the poet has created in the poem, along with the aural experience of listening to the words, the tones, and the focus of the poet – both in the moment and when the poem was written. Presumably, the poet communicates his or her intention in the reading and the performance of his or her own poem, and I get some information that I might not have by reading the poem myself. My impressions and my interpretations of the poem are different because of the emotion, the expression, the life the poem is given by the performance. One drawback of watching the performance is that I can’t have it repeated as many times as I want as I can with reading the poem myself. I get so much depth reading a poem again and again that I miss that experience with the performance. Sometimes the beauty of a word cluster or choice of language fades into the performance of the piece. If I’m watching the performance on video, I can watch it over and over again, but I may miss something anyway if the words go by too fast or if two performers talk over each other or if there’s music and it’s distracting in some way.
The poem on the page is the same words and form every time, but my reading might change depending on where I am, what mood I’m in, or for what purpose I’m reading it. The poet has done what he or she could to present his or her message, but now that I’m reading it, it’s all about me. With the poem on the stage, the poet is center-stage – in the moment – to present the poem. The poem can change with each performance. My listening may change depending on the same factors as with reading it, but there are fewer filters for the form because the poet is performing it, and the breaths, the stopping, the continuing are done for me. The poet controls how I hear it and has the freedom to add, delete, pause, use facial expressions, and use body language to contribute to the meaning of the poem. I am no longer responsible for approaching the poem with just what I bring to the poem; I have visual and auditory clues to assist me in my understanding.
Willie Perdomo, in “Nigger-Reecan Blues,” adds to the piece and changes it in his performance. He brings the conversation to life and creates the dialogue. There’s more humor – there’s different voices. It’s more of a one-man show – a play where he’s doing all the parts. He goes faster than I could read it and, although I couldn’t get every word in the performance, the expression and emotion is clearly better than I could do myself either in my head or aloud.
In Alvin Eng’s, “Rock me Goong Hay,” the performance is so much more about the music than the words. It was livelier and happier than reading it on the page. Where there was anger on the page, there was joy in the music. I had read the poem first and did not expect this performance for this poem. Everyone is smiling and bopping to the music, each musician is introduced and has a solo, there’s community and individuality. The concert atmosphere overshadowed the message in this poem for me. The caps on the page transferred to his shouting at the end, but the repetition of “Rock Me, Goong Hay” was the refrain that stayed in my head after the performance was over. There was confusion between the presentation on stage and the words in the anthology. When I read the poem, I felt the twist of the Chinese New Year’s greeting, but when I watched the performance, it was just a snappy entry into the rhythm and beat of the music. I found myself rocking along, but I lost the words and, therefore, the point of the piece as I understood it from the writing on the page.
“Tito Puente” was a performance for which we did not have the words on the page, and I think that helped. I took it for a performance, did my best at hearing and understanding the words, and appreciated this different entry point. The two performers, Meyda Del Valle and Lemon, talked over each other in parts, but the musical effects they produced were very cool, and I could actually see the homage – the reasons for the admiration and adoration – in their interaction. I don’t know how this would be done on the page.
Sarah Jones’ “Your Revolution,” for which we did not have the video, leapt off the page for me. I went looking for the video after I read it because I knew I needed the poet. I needed her voice, not my own, to say these words, to give it the full visual sound. The version I found varied a little from the words we had, but the tone, the attitude, the posture was there in the performance. I had read and re-read the piece on the page and looked up the referentials I did not know, but seeing Jones perform the piece did much more for my understanding.
I’m going to still read poems on the page, but if there are performances available, I’m going to look for them because the “vivid imagery” of poetry is made that much more vivid and visible by hearing it and seeing it performed by the person who created it.
Sheila Joseph
Saturday, November 14, 2009
It's Alive!
Willie Perdomo's poem, "Nigger-Rican Blues," needs to be performed to get the complete effect. It is a conversation about the poet's identity in relation to how he is perceived. The subject matter lends itself to performance, and the form in which it is delivered, the different speaking parts, seems to require the poet's interpretation for the humor and the absurdity to lend their full weight to the poem. And because the poem is about perceptions, having an audience rounds out this meaning.
To understand the speaker's relationship to Puerto Rican culture, we have to hear him speak Spanish. Fluency is a demarcation of belonging. The authenticity only comes through on the stage.
Also, race is more informative to the meaning of the poem if we see the poet perform. This would be a very different poem if a White, non-Spanish speaking person delivered the piece. Race is interesting in "Nigger-Rican Blues" because in Puerto Rico, there are many more races than Black and White. Each mark on the skin tone scale between those two has a name. The poet keeps claiming that he isn't Black, and one of the characters in the poem keeps reminding him that he is. Because, in this country, you are either white or in various stages of being caught up in the criminalization of people of color, no matter how close you get to the top.
Performance brings the body to bear on meaning. Pieces that are written for the stage seem that way when reading them because the context clues are missing. A performance poet may neglect to write in context clues because they know that delivery is an essential element, and they expect to be able to "be" the poem as well as having written it. A dull rhyme scheme can come to life in a poet's mouth, the poet being able to deliver the words with authority of emotion that is stripped by the page.
Tony Medina must be an old school spoken word poet. The pages of little-line left-margin, and the phrasing, the word play, is classic. This is one in which the anger of the speaker does come through the words on the page, though the arrangement (form) does nothing extra for the piece.
We can certainly see the perspective and feel the anger of the speaker in "New York City Rundown," when he talks of "Aunt Jemima Oprahs" and "old white ladies / suckin on her / big bourgeois boob / tube," and the double duty the words are doing is delight. I was reading it out loud, for the first time, and two pages in I found myself saying "get the fuck out" with vehemence right on cue. The length of the poem allows a reader to get into character.
Still, when the refrain comes in, "european on me," this poem needs its creator. It needs the stage and the energy that has been built up through the preceding pages. It needs the audience to be riled up by the word play, to have been worked into a frenzy and be emboldened by it in order to participate when the call and response part comes around. The poem doesn't have stage direction; it doesn't say "audience repeat," but reading it I get the feeling that if this were live, it would be an interactive piece. And maybe even involuntarily so. The poet is on a roll, and the piece has enough snap phrases to have the audience on his side, and they would pick up on the repeated line and enter the poem as participants "in this great big toilet bowl / addressing the flusher."
It is possible that there is movement within a poem, and around it. If a poem was written to live on the page, it must be wholly self-sufficient. It has to be able to move a reader without the author present. All context clues must exist within the poem. Movement can also be indicated by using white space as a presence, rather than as absence of words. Enjambment for page and stage poetry indicates a direction through the break of the line, momentum. Piled-on rhyme indicates quickness, choice of syllables that zip or loll in the mouth can invoke or inhibit speed.
Many pieces written for performance don't bother with showing on the page what they know they will fill in on stage. There is so much more to communication than words. We read a thousand non-verbal clues for each word uttered. The construction of a poem requires anticipation of non-verbal clues, and figuring out how to direct that information without the author being visible. When this is done well, we say, "it works." It is working on all levels of information provided to the reader. I'm not sure that same care is taken in writing a performance. I believe that these non-verbal elements are thought of and planned for, but not as an element of the writing. The paper the piece is written on is a prop, not the whole show, and often is not allowed on stage at all.
I don't think it's worse or better, more or less capable. I might have called stage poetry lazy on the page; but in a more enlightened state, I see different beasts.
To understand the speaker's relationship to Puerto Rican culture, we have to hear him speak Spanish. Fluency is a demarcation of belonging. The authenticity only comes through on the stage.
Also, race is more informative to the meaning of the poem if we see the poet perform. This would be a very different poem if a White, non-Spanish speaking person delivered the piece. Race is interesting in "Nigger-Rican Blues" because in Puerto Rico, there are many more races than Black and White. Each mark on the skin tone scale between those two has a name. The poet keeps claiming that he isn't Black, and one of the characters in the poem keeps reminding him that he is. Because, in this country, you are either white or in various stages of being caught up in the criminalization of people of color, no matter how close you get to the top.
Performance brings the body to bear on meaning. Pieces that are written for the stage seem that way when reading them because the context clues are missing. A performance poet may neglect to write in context clues because they know that delivery is an essential element, and they expect to be able to "be" the poem as well as having written it. A dull rhyme scheme can come to life in a poet's mouth, the poet being able to deliver the words with authority of emotion that is stripped by the page.
Tony Medina must be an old school spoken word poet. The pages of little-line left-margin, and the phrasing, the word play, is classic. This is one in which the anger of the speaker does come through the words on the page, though the arrangement (form) does nothing extra for the piece.
We can certainly see the perspective and feel the anger of the speaker in "New York City Rundown," when he talks of "Aunt Jemima Oprahs" and "old white ladies / suckin on her / big bourgeois boob / tube," and the double duty the words are doing is delight. I was reading it out loud, for the first time, and two pages in I found myself saying "get the fuck out" with vehemence right on cue. The length of the poem allows a reader to get into character.
Still, when the refrain comes in, "european on me," this poem needs its creator. It needs the stage and the energy that has been built up through the preceding pages. It needs the audience to be riled up by the word play, to have been worked into a frenzy and be emboldened by it in order to participate when the call and response part comes around. The poem doesn't have stage direction; it doesn't say "audience repeat," but reading it I get the feeling that if this were live, it would be an interactive piece. And maybe even involuntarily so. The poet is on a roll, and the piece has enough snap phrases to have the audience on his side, and they would pick up on the repeated line and enter the poem as participants "in this great big toilet bowl / addressing the flusher."
It is possible that there is movement within a poem, and around it. If a poem was written to live on the page, it must be wholly self-sufficient. It has to be able to move a reader without the author present. All context clues must exist within the poem. Movement can also be indicated by using white space as a presence, rather than as absence of words. Enjambment for page and stage poetry indicates a direction through the break of the line, momentum. Piled-on rhyme indicates quickness, choice of syllables that zip or loll in the mouth can invoke or inhibit speed.
Many pieces written for performance don't bother with showing on the page what they know they will fill in on stage. There is so much more to communication than words. We read a thousand non-verbal clues for each word uttered. The construction of a poem requires anticipation of non-verbal clues, and figuring out how to direct that information without the author being visible. When this is done well, we say, "it works." It is working on all levels of information provided to the reader. I'm not sure that same care is taken in writing a performance. I believe that these non-verbal elements are thought of and planned for, but not as an element of the writing. The paper the piece is written on is a prop, not the whole show, and often is not allowed on stage at all.
I don't think it's worse or better, more or less capable. I might have called stage poetry lazy on the page; but in a more enlightened state, I see different beasts.
"Nigger-Reecan Blues"
Moving poetry from the page to the stage allows the poet to read his or her work the way he or she intended it to be read. In my opinion, I think performing poetry gives the poet the opportunity to enhance his or her work, because he or she can emphasize particular words or sentences. This emphasis allows the audience to interpret that word in many ways, or acknowledge the importance of that particular word or sentence.
When I first read William Perdomo’s poem, “Nigger-Reecan Blues," I kept wondering how this piece would be performed in front of live audience and I figured it would be performed by two people given that their is a dialogue between people. However, when I heard/saw the piece being performed I realized that there was more than one speaker. I realized there were more speakers because of the emphasis he places on each of the stances, he does so by making different voices for each new speaker. I think the multiple speakers in this particular piece are lost on the page, because the reader cannot tell who is speaking and if the voices are different people or just one speaker. When delivered on stage it is a different experience because of the poets power, power in terms of relaying his poem to the audience.
In addition, the comedic value of the piece is also lost on the page, in contrast to it being read and performed.I do not think that a piece being on the page detracts from the overall message, but I do think that performance helps enhance and illustrate the meaning of a poem.In my opinion I think performance is necessary when it comes to poetry because of all of the emotion that pours out of the poets mouth.
--Lizzie
Monday, November 9, 2009
group 4 post
Wow, off top Gabrielle N. Lane Clarke's Ode to a Black Child (AKA Mr. America) is great. Unlike many of the poems we have read so far this poem starts off as a tradtional writing form with a story being told about what was told to the author. The introduction almost seems as if it going to be information about the poet's background and accomplishes but instread it ends up being apart of the poem itself. In this poem I believe politics are defined by the mention of the civil rights movement and how that movement was a pillar attribute in Black culture. The title itself has a very political aspect to it, AKA Mr. America. As I said before I believe poets and comedians are the people's politicians. They bring the knowledge and information from the government and inform us the plain terms of information given. I take the poem more seriously when there is a political significance in the poem, because politics are things that everyone has a hand in whether they are aware of it or not. Just as I was saying of how poets give information about government or certain legislations, they have the power to relay that information however it pleases them. Though most poets relay information on its seriousness and relativeness to the community or audience it is intended to be heard by. This poem in particular I feel I can relate. It has been plenty of situations where I was one of two black people in the classroom, or at times the only black person in the classroom. And when you are not able to familiarize yourself with anyone else in the room, its hard to find a sense of self or community when everyone in the room looks different. You also start to notice differences in the way you are treated at an early age. Whether you are being treated differently based on color, ethnic background, religion, or SES. You do notice a difference. The last lines...
and why is it--
when I knock
Mr. America--
no one seems
to be HOME??!!
I love this line because it does not say that the knock on the door is being ignored when someone is in the house, but how the house is empty to begin with....hmph.....that makes me think, what does that mean??????????
-Dorothy
and why is it--
when I knock
Mr. America--
no one seems
to be HOME??!!
I love this line because it does not say that the knock on the door is being ignored when someone is in the house, but how the house is empty to begin with....hmph.....that makes me think, what does that mean??????????
-Dorothy
9/8 Post
History and poetry do indeed create one another. Poetry mostly comes from the history that has gone on in cultures, countries, communities, and individual lives'. I believe that is where most poets gain their strength and insight from; history. There is never a moment where the two topics do not intersect or can go unrelated. They are very much so related and dependent on what resources are given by history. A Prayer for My Friend, As Bombs Fall on Beirut by Phoebe Rusch is a great example of history and poetry because one would have to know the history of Beirut or have a gist of what goes on in other countries to understand why the poem was written. It is obvious that history inspired this poem and can offer additional referentials for the reader to enjoy. My favorite part of the poem is in the last stanza,
I pray for your family and all families
who have never known true peace,
whose every glass of milk is delicious.
for all people suspended
between night and morning. I pray
that as you breathe and I breathe,
our breaths coincide
and yours will slow so you may sleep.
I pray that you will take tiny risks:
step out on the balcony, feel the breeze
on your face. Go back inside quickly
knowing there are angels
at your heels.
The poem almost seems more like a biblical scripture than a poem, it made me think of religion and the significance one's religion may have on morals and values in life. That stand out of choice of words made this poem special and that much more important for readers to come across.
- Dorothy
I pray for your family and all families
who have never known true peace,
whose every glass of milk is delicious.
for all people suspended
between night and morning. I pray
that as you breathe and I breathe,
our breaths coincide
and yours will slow so you may sleep.
I pray that you will take tiny risks:
step out on the balcony, feel the breeze
on your face. Go back inside quickly
knowing there are angels
at your heels.
The poem almost seems more like a biblical scripture than a poem, it made me think of religion and the significance one's religion may have on morals and values in life. That stand out of choice of words made this poem special and that much more important for readers to come across.
- Dorothy
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Politics and John Olivares Espinoza
Espinoza's poems, Contemporary American Hunger, Learning Economics at Gemco, and Las Cucarachas are not only political statements, they are poignant and powerful commentary on how Americans view poverty.
I selected these three poems because reading them one after the other I saw the poet highlighting one side of poverty and in many ways saying that poverty is a matter of perspective. Since poverty is often considered a direct result of the politics of economy, I found it fitting to combine my discussion of these poems for this week.
One of the questions from this week's group was: How does the theme of politics influence your reading of these poems? For me, I kept thinking about how the definition of poverty seemed different when I was growing up. I mean we were probably poor by the politician'ss and statistician's definitions, but I didn't know it until I was an adult.
I think Espinoza does a great job of demonstrating this reality in the poem Contemporary American Hunger.
Satisfied, we ventured through a rainbow
Of tubes and balls with the other kids,
Their stomachs full of Big Macs or Happy Meals.
But we were happy too--better than staying
At home on a Saturday
Eating potato tacos after our yard chores.
and in Learning Economics at Gemco
I place the coins into his cupped hands
And he stacks two neat columns of cents
Next to his seat on the curb.
He nods his chin, half-solemnly.
...I ask Mom why?--
We only tried to help.
These poems, told from the perspective of a child living with poor parents, make it a point to state the complex using simple language. Giving us setting and circumstance helps to establish a tone that is non-accusatory, but in many ways speaks volumes.
In Las Cucarachas, Espinoza starts by establishing who (the roaches) and where (everywhere in your house), thus showing a universal picture of the place where roaches reside. He speaks of the roaches as beings graced and favored by God.
offering thanks
and grace
to a god who favors
them with the lost
harvest of the earth.
but he never accuses anyone for the roaches and never states directly that they are a result of poverty, it just seems understood. It could be that I'm detecting politics as humor or irony in the three poems.
Like the ironic moment in stanza 5 of Learning Economics at Gemco:
The cop says bums make thirty bucks a week
Begging for change
And are not so unhappy
When arrested
Since they get food, shelter,
And a hot shower for a least a week.
or the humorous moment in lines 9 - 11 of Las Cucarachas:
They munch on dry corn
flakes you thought
were raisin bran.
Espinoza is the one writer this week that really caught my eye because of his use of irony and humor in his writing. I found that I was able to connect to it in many ways. He provides lots of access points into his work because he does not point the finger at anyone, he simply uses poetry to point at what's always been there.
peacelovelight
Kiala
I selected these three poems because reading them one after the other I saw the poet highlighting one side of poverty and in many ways saying that poverty is a matter of perspective. Since poverty is often considered a direct result of the politics of economy, I found it fitting to combine my discussion of these poems for this week.
One of the questions from this week's group was: How does the theme of politics influence your reading of these poems? For me, I kept thinking about how the definition of poverty seemed different when I was growing up. I mean we were probably poor by the politician'ss and statistician's definitions, but I didn't know it until I was an adult.
I think Espinoza does a great job of demonstrating this reality in the poem Contemporary American Hunger.
Satisfied, we ventured through a rainbow
Of tubes and balls with the other kids,
Their stomachs full of Big Macs or Happy Meals.
But we were happy too--better than staying
At home on a Saturday
Eating potato tacos after our yard chores.
and in Learning Economics at Gemco
I place the coins into his cupped hands
And he stacks two neat columns of cents
Next to his seat on the curb.
He nods his chin, half-solemnly.
...I ask Mom why?--
We only tried to help.
These poems, told from the perspective of a child living with poor parents, make it a point to state the complex using simple language. Giving us setting and circumstance helps to establish a tone that is non-accusatory, but in many ways speaks volumes.
In Las Cucarachas, Espinoza starts by establishing who (the roaches) and where (everywhere in your house), thus showing a universal picture of the place where roaches reside. He speaks of the roaches as beings graced and favored by God.
offering thanks
and grace
to a god who favors
them with the lost
harvest of the earth.
but he never accuses anyone for the roaches and never states directly that they are a result of poverty, it just seems understood. It could be that I'm detecting politics as humor or irony in the three poems.
Like the ironic moment in stanza 5 of Learning Economics at Gemco:
The cop says bums make thirty bucks a week
Begging for change
And are not so unhappy
When arrested
Since they get food, shelter,
And a hot shower for a least a week.
or the humorous moment in lines 9 - 11 of Las Cucarachas:
They munch on dry corn
flakes you thought
were raisin bran.
Espinoza is the one writer this week that really caught my eye because of his use of irony and humor in his writing. I found that I was able to connect to it in many ways. He provides lots of access points into his work because he does not point the finger at anyone, he simply uses poetry to point at what's always been there.
peacelovelight
Kiala
On poetryfoundation.org, I found a ‘micro essay’ by Linh Dinh on teaching poetry, in which he states, “Poetry should astound and frighten.” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/01/what-i-usually-say-to-my-students/
I was drawn to and puzzled by his pieces, so I wanted to learn more about where he was coming from. Dinh immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1975 (as an 11 or 12-year-old), so it is presumable that the imagery in his poems, “The Fox Hole” and “The Most Beautiful Word” was informed by the child’s experience of direct war. Read without context, it would not be clear whether these episodes were from that war or another—they are not accompanied by the usual dogma of Vietnam War literature. And so they escape categorization. Each is a fresh, brutal, grizzly—and at once oddly comic, romantic—depiction human-imposed suffering, fear, and death. These poems startle their way into our systems, jolt and fragment our awareness.
“The Fox Hole” reads like a short story. The first sentence, “‘Oh great,’ she yells, ‘a fox hole!’” reads as light-hearted and jovial, as though an adventure is about to begun. Upon second and third readings, it is unclear what the woman’s emotions are behind this line—it could be frustration, relief. But Dinh immediately begins by turning us on our heads: the foxhole is a referential for a wartime setting, but the tone and punctuation of the statement doesn’t necessarily suggest the fear or anxiety that one associates with that setting. The proceeding images transform the foxhole into a grave, a living tomb: “throwing a clump of dirt on her head…bunched up like a mummy…almost completely buried.” The references to her beauty and her youth contrast the grave imagery: “flush of youth…pretty woman.”
One could almost read over the line, “There’s dirt in her nose, in her eyes, in her mouth,” because it blends right into the center of the paragraph-block. But I found this image, on second reading, to be the most horrifying. Imagining the sensation of having hard, gritty dirt in those orifices is unbearable—and the woman’s position suddenly jerks from living being (whom we were cheering on for successfully hiding and outwitting the soldiers) to cadaver. The dirt piles, she cannot get it out of her body, the feet are padding it down over her: she is being buried alive. The reference to a soldier being able to walk right over her also brings to mind the desecration of actual graves, and how colonization and war often disregards past graves. Here Dinh is flipping it around again—established graves are not just disturbed, but living graves are created and ignored.
Finally, the poem comes to a climactic end, when the woman questions what she has sat upon. We move from root (natural, benign), to hand (disturbing, but still safe) to hand grenade (death stamp). This last line demonstrates the same emotional progression as the rest of the poem: first relief, the growing horror, then devastation. In the last line and the last words it is confirmed that we are not on an adventure, that our heroine is not safe, that there is not safety in a war field.
In “The Most Beautiful Word,” the speaker is more defined than in “The Fox Hole”—which draws in the questions of complicity, and physical and emotional distance. We begin with a dreamy statement about language, specifically the English language. So our speaker knows English—did s/he know it then, at the time, or is s/he only using it now in reflection? (Clearly the poem is written in English but, in context, we can assume it is placed in Vietnam.) The next few images of the injured man conjure food and feasting: “steaming…harvest…” But the speaker’s tone remains casual, detached: “I myself was bleeding.” His injury’s are certainly not as extreme as the other man’s, but is he in a state of shock? The speaker has retreated from the present moment to an intellectual, ethereal meditation on language. He replaces the word “yaw” (movement from side to side), still in the context of injury/war/death, lyrical, playful words: “danced, tumbled.”
And suddenly we are in a scene between two would-be lovers—it is now “my man” who is lying, face-down, and the speaker is an “impatient lover”—still casual, distant. The dominoes of his bones or teeth “Clack! Clack!” and we are delivered from kitchen to bedroom to rec room. His blood is a “pink spray,” a “rainbow”, and the veins in his jaw are “blue threads to the soul”—all words that incite comfort, beauty. Is this to preserve the preciousness, the dignity of human life, or is this over-the-top language the mimics the ways in which we (English-speakers, Americans) are consistently protected from the gruesomeness of war? Several words also demonstrate medical knowledge: “C-spine” (cervical spine, or vertebrae just below the skull), “mandible” (lower jaw), “extracted.” So we wonder who the speaker is, a medic? Was he a doctor or will he be one? Or are these words all participants in active war learn because they are so consistently exposed to the body in a brutal way?
The word play this prose poem demonstrates the disjuncture between what death/war actually look like and what we are told. It also displays the human mind’s capacity for escapism in processing the horrifying—what cannot be processed. There are images from daily life/households, the spin off on sounds of words, and the movement into medical terms—all distracts from the suffering body blatantly displayed before us.
So how is this political? In every way that it’s not political: Dinh avoids a polemic with playful language, misleading storytelling, mixed metaphors, and ambivalent narration. He disarms us, but when we blink, look again, we realize he’s drug us into hell and left us there, marooned.
I was drawn to and puzzled by his pieces, so I wanted to learn more about where he was coming from. Dinh immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1975 (as an 11 or 12-year-old), so it is presumable that the imagery in his poems, “The Fox Hole” and “The Most Beautiful Word” was informed by the child’s experience of direct war. Read without context, it would not be clear whether these episodes were from that war or another—they are not accompanied by the usual dogma of Vietnam War literature. And so they escape categorization. Each is a fresh, brutal, grizzly—and at once oddly comic, romantic—depiction human-imposed suffering, fear, and death. These poems startle their way into our systems, jolt and fragment our awareness.
“The Fox Hole” reads like a short story. The first sentence, “‘Oh great,’ she yells, ‘a fox hole!’” reads as light-hearted and jovial, as though an adventure is about to begun. Upon second and third readings, it is unclear what the woman’s emotions are behind this line—it could be frustration, relief. But Dinh immediately begins by turning us on our heads: the foxhole is a referential for a wartime setting, but the tone and punctuation of the statement doesn’t necessarily suggest the fear or anxiety that one associates with that setting. The proceeding images transform the foxhole into a grave, a living tomb: “throwing a clump of dirt on her head…bunched up like a mummy…almost completely buried.” The references to her beauty and her youth contrast the grave imagery: “flush of youth…pretty woman.”
One could almost read over the line, “There’s dirt in her nose, in her eyes, in her mouth,” because it blends right into the center of the paragraph-block. But I found this image, on second reading, to be the most horrifying. Imagining the sensation of having hard, gritty dirt in those orifices is unbearable—and the woman’s position suddenly jerks from living being (whom we were cheering on for successfully hiding and outwitting the soldiers) to cadaver. The dirt piles, she cannot get it out of her body, the feet are padding it down over her: she is being buried alive. The reference to a soldier being able to walk right over her also brings to mind the desecration of actual graves, and how colonization and war often disregards past graves. Here Dinh is flipping it around again—established graves are not just disturbed, but living graves are created and ignored.
Finally, the poem comes to a climactic end, when the woman questions what she has sat upon. We move from root (natural, benign), to hand (disturbing, but still safe) to hand grenade (death stamp). This last line demonstrates the same emotional progression as the rest of the poem: first relief, the growing horror, then devastation. In the last line and the last words it is confirmed that we are not on an adventure, that our heroine is not safe, that there is not safety in a war field.
In “The Most Beautiful Word,” the speaker is more defined than in “The Fox Hole”—which draws in the questions of complicity, and physical and emotional distance. We begin with a dreamy statement about language, specifically the English language. So our speaker knows English—did s/he know it then, at the time, or is s/he only using it now in reflection? (Clearly the poem is written in English but, in context, we can assume it is placed in Vietnam.) The next few images of the injured man conjure food and feasting: “steaming…harvest…” But the speaker’s tone remains casual, detached: “I myself was bleeding.” His injury’s are certainly not as extreme as the other man’s, but is he in a state of shock? The speaker has retreated from the present moment to an intellectual, ethereal meditation on language. He replaces the word “yaw” (movement from side to side), still in the context of injury/war/death, lyrical, playful words: “danced, tumbled.”
And suddenly we are in a scene between two would-be lovers—it is now “my man” who is lying, face-down, and the speaker is an “impatient lover”—still casual, distant. The dominoes of his bones or teeth “Clack! Clack!” and we are delivered from kitchen to bedroom to rec room. His blood is a “pink spray,” a “rainbow”, and the veins in his jaw are “blue threads to the soul”—all words that incite comfort, beauty. Is this to preserve the preciousness, the dignity of human life, or is this over-the-top language the mimics the ways in which we (English-speakers, Americans) are consistently protected from the gruesomeness of war? Several words also demonstrate medical knowledge: “C-spine” (cervical spine, or vertebrae just below the skull), “mandible” (lower jaw), “extracted.” So we wonder who the speaker is, a medic? Was he a doctor or will he be one? Or are these words all participants in active war learn because they are so consistently exposed to the body in a brutal way?
The word play this prose poem demonstrates the disjuncture between what death/war actually look like and what we are told. It also displays the human mind’s capacity for escapism in processing the horrifying—what cannot be processed. There are images from daily life/households, the spin off on sounds of words, and the movement into medical terms—all distracts from the suffering body blatantly displayed before us.
So how is this political? In every way that it’s not political: Dinh avoids a polemic with playful language, misleading storytelling, mixed metaphors, and ambivalent narration. He disarms us, but when we blink, look again, we realize he’s drug us into hell and left us there, marooned.
Each poet approached and defined politics differently; however, each poet spoke about politics pertaining to a community rather than a world view. They did so by exposing the human condition, the struggles of everyday life and situations. Some themes the poets dealt with
were issues of racial discrimination, rape, self-image, spousal abuse, poverty, etc. etc. For me, the poems that stood out were the one's in BUM; particularly, Samiya A. Bashir's, "Her Scream Has Been Stolen."
From my understanding of the poem it is a piece about about a woman who doesn't realize her body is hers until it has been taken away from-- it is taken from her through the act of rape. The speaker of the poem states:
What does her scream sound
like can she hear it
when it echos off the leaves or the
cliffs or the streams or the mountains
peaks or canyons gardens marshes
beaches over water and land she
didn't know was her until she was told
it wasn't?
Here, the poet asks the questions if the subject could hear her screams when echos through nature. For me the act of screaming in this poem comes off as something violent because of the questions the speakers asks, particularly the last two lines, "she didn't know was her until she was told it wasn't. Reading this line made me think of rape because although one is aware his or her body belongs to themselves one isn't fully aware--i guess unless the situation arises (Like we don't walk around saying this is my body, I own it, it's something that we save in the back of our heads). Also because the areas she mentions seem to be places that are usually desolate--without people (at least that is the image in my head, because these are relaxing places).
Prior to the stanza I quoted above the speaker states: "What does her/ river taste like upstream and / downstream and how does it/ make love to her body as she bathes" I read this line as a symbol of her be private areas as well as her mouth. The speaker tends to also make lots of reference to mother nature which can be equivalent to describing women given that mother nature is always personified as a woman.
(For some reason I feel like I misread this poem just because it seems to be subtle in revealing the message of the poem).
Just the word "political" is polarizing. Regardless of context or specifics, the word alone conjures up passionate sentiments, a loyalty to beliefs, and the steadfast opinion of right versus wrong. There are an almost infinitesimal number of political issues, each with their own set of proponents and opponents. With such emotionally charged topics, it is no wonder that poetry serves as an ideal medium for the articulation of political stance. Through the manipulation of poetic form and content, a writer is given the unique opportunity to create a piece that can effectively stimulate and inspire its readers without ever entering active dialogue (and sometimes, without even explicitly addressing the issue). The piece "Beginning at the End: Capital/Capitol Punishment" is able to achieve a charged affect through a recount of the speaker's experience. The poet never outright states his opinion on the subject (capital punishment), but instead leads the reader to a specific conclusion. The title itself is strongly referential by simply contrasting the term Capital with Capitol Punishment. This juxtaposition contrasts the idea of capital (which are components of production that are used to make a final good, but are not of value themselves) with the death penalty, achieving a parallel between the use of a human as a means to an end with that of a material good. What could such an end be? The speaker writes "I want to scream something like gendercide". The poet is not only speaking out against the general use of capitol punishment, but rather the specific use of capitol punishment to target groups of individuals.
The speaker humanizes an experience that has been demonized by society. Through this piece he is able to flip the standard scenario, by creating an alternate murderer and victim. Rather than the victim being the innocent individual who was killed by the person receiving the death penalty, the "criminal" becomes the victim as he has committed no crime. The murderer in the poem is the executioner, who seems to be knowingly killing an innocent man. The poet recounts,
"Here I sit, my head is shaved, they strapped me in, my mother just waved
Is there anything I can do to be saved, Lord, here I sit.
There is a grin on his face as he throws the switch
Is he a man or the devil, I can't tell which"
This stanza is so powerful. For me the first lines conjures up images of concentration camps and the murders of throngs of innocent people (which I believe is precisely the poet's purpose).
The poem itself sounds like a prayer, or a simple hymn that follows (for the most part) an aabb rhyme scheme and makes use of repetition. Throughout the poem the speaker is addressing his "Lord", and his frustration with the injustice of his situation is undeniable. As the poem progresses we get a sense that the speaker's faith in his "Lord" is faltering as he gets nearer to his death. He eventually writes,
"Well here I sit, now I don't give a s-. Lord, here I sit.
(Here I sit, I think my heart just quit, Lord, here I sit)."
The title also includes an interesting allusion to the afterlife ("Beginning at the End"), which interestingly ties in with the end of the poem. After the death of the speaker, he writes
"Back to your right hand is where I hope to stay
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name...
Is it God, Lord, Jehovah, Lord? Yaweh, Lord? Krishna, Lord?
Obatalah, Lord? Wakantonka, Lord? Allah, Lord?"
Each of these names is used to refer to "God" in different religions. The speaker's questioning about which is correct is very interesting. I interpret this question as confusion or doubt on behalf of the speaker. It's as though the speaker's injustices have led him to doubt the sanctity and even the existence of his Lord.
-e. gutilla
The speaker humanizes an experience that has been demonized by society. Through this piece he is able to flip the standard scenario, by creating an alternate murderer and victim. Rather than the victim being the innocent individual who was killed by the person receiving the death penalty, the "criminal" becomes the victim as he has committed no crime. The murderer in the poem is the executioner, who seems to be knowingly killing an innocent man. The poet recounts,
"Here I sit, my head is shaved, they strapped me in, my mother just waved
Is there anything I can do to be saved, Lord, here I sit.
There is a grin on his face as he throws the switch
Is he a man or the devil, I can't tell which"
This stanza is so powerful. For me the first lines conjures up images of concentration camps and the murders of throngs of innocent people (which I believe is precisely the poet's purpose).
The poem itself sounds like a prayer, or a simple hymn that follows (for the most part) an aabb rhyme scheme and makes use of repetition. Throughout the poem the speaker is addressing his "Lord", and his frustration with the injustice of his situation is undeniable. As the poem progresses we get a sense that the speaker's faith in his "Lord" is faltering as he gets nearer to his death. He eventually writes,
"Well here I sit, now I don't give a s-. Lord, here I sit.
(Here I sit, I think my heart just quit, Lord, here I sit)."
The title also includes an interesting allusion to the afterlife ("Beginning at the End"), which interestingly ties in with the end of the poem. After the death of the speaker, he writes
"Back to your right hand is where I hope to stay
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name...
Is it God, Lord, Jehovah, Lord? Yaweh, Lord? Krishna, Lord?
Obatalah, Lord? Wakantonka, Lord? Allah, Lord?"
Each of these names is used to refer to "God" in different religions. The speaker's questioning about which is correct is very interesting. I interpret this question as confusion or doubt on behalf of the speaker. It's as though the speaker's injustices have led him to doubt the sanctity and even the existence of his Lord.
-e. gutilla
To be “political” assumes outspokenness. To be actively engaged. “Political” connotes a struggle, implies the walking of a line (as in politically correct, politically conscientious, one compliant with policies). Often it indicates a yielding. To pay attention to office politics, for example, means taking great care not to “step on someone else’s toes” not to “step out of line” to “follow the chain of command.” Yet, a politician is one whom no one can trust. The very designation of being a politician has come to mean liar, two-faced, socially irresponsible. Two poems stood out for me as examples of the two-sidedness of politics: one that aims to be outspoken and life-changing, and one that attempts to reveal the mechanisms behind a political language that seeks to obscure such outspokenness.
Alaan Bowe’s “Every Knotted Fist” is anything but silent. In this poem, the act of writing (and writing as a form of speech) is dangerous and divisive, even at times blinding the speaker of the poem with rage. Bowe identifies the knotted fist as the place where, “all my/ fuckin’ grudges” are held. The title points to the importance of this image as the center from which the poem radiates. These central lines are themselves “knotted” in the center of the page:
gonna hold all my
fuckin’ grudges
in every knotted fist
The pen, the words that flow from the pen are “little deaths” (the possible allusion to orgasm should not be ignored here), its strokes “bludgeon” the fingers and cause blood to “dapple the page.” In this poem, the tongue is burning with the need to speak, and the tongue refuses to be silenced by anything, even by physical interaction and the possibility of love:
Somebody gave me a hug yesterday
I don’t know who
I didn’t get that good a look at her
The rage contained in the poem, in isolated “knots” of words overpowers any positive emotion or outcome that could have occurred. The poem flows from Author, Audience and Community to Opposition, Murder, and Pain. The tone of the words Bowe uses are harsh and biting:
stroke
death
murder
rape
incest
torture
forced
bludgeon
spit
blood
knotted
clubbed
The use of the violent “o” sounds and the guttural “u” sounds speak of violence, their sounds cutting through the silence like blades. The structure of the words on the page forces the reader to pay attention to it. One must note the word clusters in order to behold the poem, is forced to feel the knotted anger inherent in the clumped lines.
By contrast, Linh Dinh’s “The Most Beautiful Word” has no truly distinctive form, but displays its message in prose poem style. The poem has no obvious line breaks to take the reader’s attention away from the message; therefore, the transparency of the message stands in direct contrast to the intent of the poem’s language to obscure certain “political” acts. In the lines “Don’t say, ‘The bullet yawed inside the body.’ Say, ‘The bullet danced inside the body,’” Dinh is revealing political language’s desire to obscure the cold, hard facts in a diffusive light. There is still a bullet, and there is still a body, but the act of the bullet dancing or tumbling hides the violent action of the bullet splitting the body open. Instead of an act of violence being enacted upon the body, the bullet becomes a sort of protagonist, beautifully dancing through its victim, “forward and upward.” Dinh calls attention to this desire of certain political language to put a lovely spin on acts of abhorrent violence by calling this strategy out and demanding that it answer for itself. The poem cannot answer and neither can the victim, for the victim has a collapsed face, a broken mandible, swallowed teeth and a punctured tongue.
It is important to these poets that the tongue have a place in these poems. As the organ of speech, the image representing voice, the tongue has two different lives in both of the poems. In Dinh’s poem, the tongue is useless and silent. In Bowe’s poem, the tongue is a dangerous weapon that spits blood on the page. When the tongue in “The Most Beautiful Word” is forced to use only beautiful-sounding words instead of ugly ones, we see the modern political machine’s attempts to remove dangerous, inciteful words from its vocabulary and thus sweeten the force of its blows. Dinh’s words are much more sonorous than Bowe’s:
beautiful
vesicle
harvest
danced
tumbled
upward
forward
llight
lover
rainbow
blue threads
soul
And yet, Dinh is not entirely successful at excoriating all the weighted words from his poem. The political machine has merely pulled a thin veneer over the rottenness hidden within:
burnt
steaming
bleeding
yaw
fracture
clanked.
These words are heavy, sounding weighted in the ear when spoken and weighted in the mind when read.
Alaan Bowe’s “Every Knotted Fist” is anything but silent. In this poem, the act of writing (and writing as a form of speech) is dangerous and divisive, even at times blinding the speaker of the poem with rage. Bowe identifies the knotted fist as the place where, “all my/ fuckin’ grudges” are held. The title points to the importance of this image as the center from which the poem radiates. These central lines are themselves “knotted” in the center of the page:
gonna hold all my
fuckin’ grudges
in every knotted fist
The pen, the words that flow from the pen are “little deaths” (the possible allusion to orgasm should not be ignored here), its strokes “bludgeon” the fingers and cause blood to “dapple the page.” In this poem, the tongue is burning with the need to speak, and the tongue refuses to be silenced by anything, even by physical interaction and the possibility of love:
Somebody gave me a hug yesterday
I don’t know who
I didn’t get that good a look at her
The rage contained in the poem, in isolated “knots” of words overpowers any positive emotion or outcome that could have occurred. The poem flows from Author, Audience and Community to Opposition, Murder, and Pain. The tone of the words Bowe uses are harsh and biting:
stroke
death
murder
rape
incest
torture
forced
bludgeon
spit
blood
knotted
clubbed
The use of the violent “o” sounds and the guttural “u” sounds speak of violence, their sounds cutting through the silence like blades. The structure of the words on the page forces the reader to pay attention to it. One must note the word clusters in order to behold the poem, is forced to feel the knotted anger inherent in the clumped lines.
By contrast, Linh Dinh’s “The Most Beautiful Word” has no truly distinctive form, but displays its message in prose poem style. The poem has no obvious line breaks to take the reader’s attention away from the message; therefore, the transparency of the message stands in direct contrast to the intent of the poem’s language to obscure certain “political” acts. In the lines “Don’t say, ‘The bullet yawed inside the body.’ Say, ‘The bullet danced inside the body,’” Dinh is revealing political language’s desire to obscure the cold, hard facts in a diffusive light. There is still a bullet, and there is still a body, but the act of the bullet dancing or tumbling hides the violent action of the bullet splitting the body open. Instead of an act of violence being enacted upon the body, the bullet becomes a sort of protagonist, beautifully dancing through its victim, “forward and upward.” Dinh calls attention to this desire of certain political language to put a lovely spin on acts of abhorrent violence by calling this strategy out and demanding that it answer for itself. The poem cannot answer and neither can the victim, for the victim has a collapsed face, a broken mandible, swallowed teeth and a punctured tongue.
It is important to these poets that the tongue have a place in these poems. As the organ of speech, the image representing voice, the tongue has two different lives in both of the poems. In Dinh’s poem, the tongue is useless and silent. In Bowe’s poem, the tongue is a dangerous weapon that spits blood on the page. When the tongue in “The Most Beautiful Word” is forced to use only beautiful-sounding words instead of ugly ones, we see the modern political machine’s attempts to remove dangerous, inciteful words from its vocabulary and thus sweeten the force of its blows. Dinh’s words are much more sonorous than Bowe’s:
beautiful
vesicle
harvest
danced
tumbled
upward
forward
llight
lover
rainbow
blue threads
soul
And yet, Dinh is not entirely successful at excoriating all the weighted words from his poem. The political machine has merely pulled a thin veneer over the rottenness hidden within:
burnt
steaming
bleeding
yaw
fracture
clanked.
These words are heavy, sounding weighted in the ear when spoken and weighted in the mind when read.
What's in a name?
Politics. Discussing politics whether they be identity, cultural or governmental can be a bit of a minefield. People that you care about can turn out to have political ideals that offend or frighten you and change the way you look at them forever. Fights can break out, friendships can be destroyed, relationships can be broken, reputations damaged beyond repair. For all these reasons a lot of people do not discuss politics just as they don’t discuss religion. Politics, especially identity politics, become the elephant in the room, the presence of it cannot be denied but the discussion of it is stifled and repressed, made invisible. Of course this is mostly for the benefit of those that belong to the dominant group, so that they won’t be uncomfortable when discussing politics in which they are the privileged part of the equation. This effectively silences marginalized people positioning them as a “troublemaker” if they break the enforced silence.
Diane Burns’ poem Sure You Can Ask Me A Personal Question takes this forced invisibility of identity to task. She plops us into the middle of a conversation and only allows us to hear one side of it, her side, the side that matters to her. In this case she has reversed the silence and made the dominant position the one that is rendered unable to speak for itself. In this case her words take prominence and are the only ones that give us any context for the conversation taking place in this way she shapes the whole of the conversation. We are taken out of the world in which every conversation is in some way shaped by the white heteronormative patriarchal society in which we live and instead she becomes the shaper, she is in control of if not the direction of the conversation itself then in our perception and understanding of it for sure.
In the beginning of the poem she uses repetition to build up the momentum and emotion to a fever pitch.
No, I’m not Chinese.
No, not Spanish.
No, I’m American Indi—uh, Native American.
No, not from India.
No, we’re not extinct.
No, not Navajo.
No, not Sioux.
Yes, Indian.
The calmness of these replies, the stillness and steadiness point to the fact that this is not the first or second or even third time she’s had to answer these types of questions. These are questions that she has had to deal with numerous times before and the answers turn into a rote response to an interrogation of identity. The hesitation when identifying herself as American Indian is unexplained at first and then with the next line becomes clear. This is a part of the conversation she was hoping to avoid this time but she does not get to. Then with the break of the repetitious “No” beginning is a affirmation of her Indian identity and yet at the same time it’s not the identity she actually presents. She calls herself “Native American” and only by going back to an identifier that many Native folks have chosen to throw off as a name placed upon them by colonialists can she make her identity understood by the dominant culture.
The whole thing made me think of the politics of silence and the politics of naming. Who chooses who speaks? Who chooses who is silenced? Who chooses what we are called? What if no one acknowledges the name that you claim?
Diane Burns’ poem Sure You Can Ask Me A Personal Question takes this forced invisibility of identity to task. She plops us into the middle of a conversation and only allows us to hear one side of it, her side, the side that matters to her. In this case she has reversed the silence and made the dominant position the one that is rendered unable to speak for itself. In this case her words take prominence and are the only ones that give us any context for the conversation taking place in this way she shapes the whole of the conversation. We are taken out of the world in which every conversation is in some way shaped by the white heteronormative patriarchal society in which we live and instead she becomes the shaper, she is in control of if not the direction of the conversation itself then in our perception and understanding of it for sure.
In the beginning of the poem she uses repetition to build up the momentum and emotion to a fever pitch.
No, I’m not Chinese.
No, not Spanish.
No, I’m American Indi—uh, Native American.
No, not from India.
No, we’re not extinct.
No, not Navajo.
No, not Sioux.
Yes, Indian.
The calmness of these replies, the stillness and steadiness point to the fact that this is not the first or second or even third time she’s had to answer these types of questions. These are questions that she has had to deal with numerous times before and the answers turn into a rote response to an interrogation of identity. The hesitation when identifying herself as American Indian is unexplained at first and then with the next line becomes clear. This is a part of the conversation she was hoping to avoid this time but she does not get to. Then with the break of the repetitious “No” beginning is a affirmation of her Indian identity and yet at the same time it’s not the identity she actually presents. She calls herself “Native American” and only by going back to an identifier that many Native folks have chosen to throw off as a name placed upon them by colonialists can she make her identity understood by the dominant culture.
The whole thing made me think of the politics of silence and the politics of naming. Who chooses who speaks? Who chooses who is silenced? Who chooses what we are called? What if no one acknowledges the name that you claim?
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