spoken word contrapuntals?

The question of content v. form is one that never gets old for me. Is form reacting to content, is content built around form? Does it switch halfway through the writing of the poem? I’m interested, sign me up.

I just about peed my pants when I saw “A Blue Black Pearl” in BumRush today. Seriously. How many contrapuntal poems do you find in a book of spoken word poems? Um, NONE. Bam, so stoked, especially after reading what a jaw-dropping four-footer this one by Clairesa Clay is.

I decided to look up what contrapuntal actually means (when not applied to poems), and the definition is unsurprising: of, relating to, or marked by counterpoint. This makes great sense, considering the latin root of the word, contra punctum, expands to very literally mean “point against point.” I think the term is originally a musical word, but I’ll leave the expansion of that to HK Rainey, since I’m almost positive she knows much more about it than me (and can probably explain it better, too).

My understanding of the contrapuntal (a poem that is multidirectional in its reading) is that, like in music, the two directions represent two distinct sounds or voices. Often, I think, contrapuntal poems tell two versions of a story within one. They are not necessarily opposing views, but definitely different vantage points. Often, one is much more poetic than the other, by fault of tricky punctuation (or none, as the case may be) or missing articles or pronouns.

In “A Blue Black Pearl,” the voices take hold right away. There is a history being told, a reparation for the past being carved out. We read down the columns for a cold, hard story. She is frank with us, tells it straight, and lets us breathe during the looping of “forty years.” There is a moment of transformation that happens at the end, but one that definitely isn’t complete without the additional reading.

The second reading, across all four “feet” of the poem, let’s the narration drop into a trance-like reflection. Instead of seeing the narrator straight on as she speaks to us, we are pushed to zoom in past her and focus on what’s happening behind the words. Whereas “forty years” was a place holder in the previous reading, it has become the drumbeat that keeps us steady with our eyes closed. Because the “forty years” lines appear in somewhat of a predictable pattern (two or three grouped closely and then a long break, in which the language becomes intense both topically and phonetically), we can pace ourselves through what might otherwise be an unusual reading. Instead, the poem seems like an incantation from this direction, a stretched mantra of healing for this blue black pearl.

By the time we reach the ending of the poem (in the second, horizontal reading), the speaker doesn’t sound any more relieved and yet we must know that she is. Like the relief after a good cry or the breaking of the sky over your eyelids after heavy meditation, we are pulled from the poem abruptly, but with a sense of self. We have a body, we know where we stand. There is some kind of intuitive hope that slips in during this hypnotizing read that couldn’t have happened within the plain narrative.

So when I return to the question of content v. form, I’m not necessarily concerned with which happened first, but with the fact that they both happened, finally. This poem would have been really long and hard to follow had it been written sporadically across the page or, pete forbid, in one tiny column against the left hand margin. Then again, not just any poem works in the contrapuntal form. Technically they do, but not intuitively or emotionally.

I guess my question, then, is how do we know which form to choose? Is it like trying on clothes, you pop the words into different forms until you find one that’s occasion-appropriate (and cross your fingers that it fits)?

And then also -- how would you read this aloud? 

music on the page?

I’ve been sitting all week with this question of poetry being the baseline (or bassline, even) of music. Folks are always saying crap like “poetry is the music of the soul,” and I’m always left wondering, What the hell does that mean? I guess I’ve written it off for years, this connection between music and poetry. I’m a big radio addict & I often find myself reaffirming the thick distinction I’ve made between the two while listening to simple rhymes being fed over really tight beats or beautiful acoustics. The music is what makes it good, I think, the voices. Also the cheap lyrics, like any good guilty pleasure, mostly because our country is so perpetually stifled emotionally that hearing Miley Cyrus sing “it’s the climb” on the radio could actually make someone feel good & motivated. It’s fascinating; wonderful & totally bizarre.

As I’m reading Bum Rush & Aloud, I’m wondering how or why music matters to the page. I love music & I love poetry. I understand that they share many important characteristics (rhythm, expression, emotion), but I’m not entirely sure the value in trying to enforce one on the other. There are some really good lyrics that make terrible songs & really great musical analogies in poems that in turn just suck the life out of it.

So what about spoken word? Or rap? I think both take the best parts of musical elements and the best parts of accessible poetic language, turn each on their head, and explode. Jessica & Eboni are asking questions about access versus message & I think it’s really important that these two are tied. In music, I think the message often gets watered down in order to be overly-accessible. In poetry, I think the message gets downplayed (if there even is one) in favor of devices that may or may not prove inaccessible to a reader. In spoken word & rap (and no, I’m not necessarily saying either is “not music”), I think they prioritize the two to an extent where they become a single unit. Accessible message.

How does this happen? I think a lot of it has to do with the spoken voice & not the singing voice. There is authority in spoken language, a different level of seriousness. It’s easy to go to a show & talk over the musician. We all know what background music is like, especially in a coffee shop or at a small venue where the opener isn’t well-known. But when folks get on a mic and start talking, people listen. Isn’t that strange? Maybe it’s our upbringing in America, where we are taught to be quiet when the person with authority in the room is speaking. Loudspeakers, news television, radio, classrooms, speeches, dialogue on teevee programs. It’s easy to talk or think or work while someone is playing music, but the second a spoken word or rap album shuffles onto my ipod while I’m doing homework, I have to skip it because I can’t focus with someone else talking. I think this is really interesting & would love to hear what other folks’ experiences of this are.

Back to the poems themselves. I really love “Owed to Eminem” & love even more that I got to the end and found out it was written by June Jordan. Bam! I hope somebody writes about it because there’s so much to unpack there.

I want to talk about “Conversation with Duke Ellington & Louis (Pops) Armstrong” in BumRush. Lucca does a fantastic job here of invoking music on the page. It’s possible not because there are specific rhythmic elements at play, but because there is a reference in that first stanza that knocks the pendulum on the entire poem, making it sway back and forth through to the end. Lucca writes “the clarinet and who/ does mean a thing / ‘case she’s got that swing.” Plenty of folks know that song & what the poem is riffing off in that moment. The question of access is a small one here, simply because the song (Ella Fitzgerald’s “It Don’t Mean A Thing”) has been so mainstreamed in jazz and hiphop circles that it’s a little unavoidable to have that strike a chord. The placement of the “doo wops” and the fact that they are imbedded in the stanzas, also moves the poem in ways that others in the section can’t seem to manage (like “Bebop Trumpet”). The spacing of the rhyme also mimics that of a jazz song, pushing back and forth between artists with a feminist in the middle.

“Bebop Trumpet,” on the other hand, is a really tight list of musical allusions, but with no real musical affect. There isn’t a moment in this poem where I feel a hook, anything to latch onto. I don’t think this makes it a bad poem, but I wonder – as I did with many in this section – why it is included. Simply for the topic? Or is there more I’m missing than co-opted lyrics?

I had the same question when I got to “The Creed of a Graffiti Writer,” a totally badass poem that I hope Rojas has taken to many, many stages. This poem belongs on the mic. It needs to be heard aloud. And while it shares rhythmic qualities with particular kinds of music, I don’t consider this to be a musical poem. The rhythm & the rhyme, the accents and the metered motion definitely make this poem come alive (another point of access). Would I call it music? Nope.

Also, I’m really thankful to whomever sent out this link. Thanks!

bum rush the virus

So I’ve been traveling with these poems again, reading about sex and pussy and HIV in airports and through jetlag. I’m in D.C. now and the poems from Bum Rush take on a mind of their own. The air is thick here, and I don’t just mean humidity. I’m thinking and writing a lot about how location plays such a huge role in our reading, how location and time and contemporary influences change the way we understand a poet, take them to heart or push them away, branded.

I can’t stop reading “13” on page 126 in Bum Rush. Can’t Stop Reading It. This is a simple poem on the surface, its lower-cased letters and short form allowing all kinds of access, no matter where you start reading. I tried looking up when this poem was written to get a better sense of the political (and medical) climate in which it was produced, but no dice. The permissions in the back of the book say it hasn’t been printed before anywhere (perhaps self-published?), which is also interesting. The ease of access into this poem makes me wonder why this is the only place the poem is accessed. Why this story hasn’t been told other places. How many stories like this haven’t been told, ever.

The repetition is what keeps this poem from feeling like it’s fallen short. The repetition of “you cannot” and “he is” offsets the telling in this poem. We are told what we can and cannot do, what could or could not happen, over and over again. You cannot fall in love, it could come back, you could be hit by a taxi, he could be alive for another thirteen years.

The climax of the poem happens right on schedule, about halfway through. We zero in on the man with whom one “cannot fall in love,” see his tattoos, the way he moves. He is glorified here, in a healthy way, I think. He is made human, and this humanness is exceptional to his virus. I find it interesting that there are comparisons made between the Sistine Chapel and skin, between cloth and skin. The Sistine Chapel invokes the religious elite (the pope), and we all know what the religious elite have to say about HIV and the people who get it. The next analogy of this man burning through the speaker’s skin is equally interesting. HIV is often called “viral shrapnel,” simply because the virus imbeds in various locations within the body to set up DNA camps and start producing imposters. The line breaks at “burns like shrapnel,” allowing us to see that, in comparison to the Sistine Chapel, perhaps this man is burning or will burn in sin. When connected with the following line, “burns like shrapnel / through threads of my skin,” invokes dual meanings for me. I read these two lines as not only a visceral, physical reaction/attraction to this man, but also a moment of contact. I read this line as a safe sex line, as contact between lovers that is intense, but safe because it is felt through the skin.

That reading feels like a bit of stretch until the poem continues and there’s a shift. We find out the speaker had cancer and is in remission, that her life is equally as volatile in terms of longevity. The speaker pushes that realization to the max, saying even life can be fatal (and therefore, even life can be in remission, a state I think she’s trying to avoid by rationalizing being with this man despite his diagnosis). The poem ends uncertainly for sure, but with a realization that you only live once and that this man may or may not be worth taking a chance on. We’ve moved forward from the beginning of the poem, we’ve made progress. She sees him as more human than disease, I think.

On a more macro level, the poem is called “13.” As a poet who always writes out numbers in word form in poems (unless I want them to be taken as numbers/statistics), I wonder immediately where the intention of this choice lies. Interestingly (is that a word?) the number 13 is really significant when it comes to HIV. Statistics of folks infected with HIV are often tallied from ages 13 and up, as that has become the new national average of when young folks begin sexual contact (and they are officially “teenagers”). This makes me really curious as to when the poem was written because it holds much more power as a poem written in the last five years than one written ten years ago. Obviously this can’t be true because the book was published in 2001, but still. Cocktails are often given on 13-week schedules, life expectancy delivered in 13-year increments. Maybe all of this is coincidence. The number thirteen holds a lot of power in luck or fate, historically. Anybody else got a read on that?

Also, not totally unrelated to this poem, I’m questioning why there aren’t more queer writers represented in this book. Especially on an issue like HIV. Or sex. Or politics. Or love. Or Nature. Or whatever. Am I overlooking something?

ps: i hope somebody else writes about "extremes aint my thing as salaam alaikum" and "a poem for you" or else i might have to come back and do it. xo

hammad solves page v. stage

I’m feeling really lucky that I have to post this ahead of time (I’ll be in Alaska next week, have fun being videotaped in class!) because it means I get to be the first to write about Suheir Hammad.

I started watching Suheir perform on scratchy VHS tapes borrowed from a classmate who recorded the HBO Def Poetry Jam episodes for me. She has always been a really strong example, I think, of how page and stage can intersect and still be equally beautiful on both sides of the street. In her poem “Silence,” you can hear the narrator’s voice effortlessly and immediately. That first stanza is such an incredibly accurate transcription of the way it should be read aloud that it’s hard to remember I’m still holding a book. I tried to figure out how she was doing it (because I am constantly trying to figure out how I can do it) and I think it’s less about the breath and more about the change in pitch in your voice as you move your head from one side of the audience to the other. She breaks a line before the emphasis comes, so you are always moving forward, always rocking. “I wonder what he / heard as he ran / wonder what he / thought as the,” breath, “American bullets / flew from,” breath, “Israeli hands / through,” breath, “god’s air.” She follows the typical cadence of her generation of slam poets (one that our generation has made a fool of themselves in trying to mimic), but does so on the page. I can hear it and I’m so impressed.

Later on in this same poem, she uses the space on the page to not only pace the reader the same way she would pace her voice on stage, but also directs the reader’s eyes the way she, as a performer, would direct her eyes. Toward the bottom of page 108, we have “Palestine occupied / freedom denied / my people’s genocide,” stretched across the page. I read these as stage directions, as shifting focus throughout the room as the list is spoken. I had never thought of doing this in such a physical and obvious way on the page.

She does something similar in the poem “exotic,” as well, pacing the words across the page in the way in which one might deliver it to an audience. We shift left to right like a typewriter head, and I can hear where she speeds up, where she lets the tongue go loose & trusts it.

I’m also glad we have the videos (thank god for youtube, right?) because I’m always curious about how this page-voice translates to a stage-voice without losing its integrity. I have been watching Suheir for years and yet I’m always surprised at the flatlining in her voice when she reads off a page (as opposed to when she performs), a bone I’m always picking with page poets who are confused when no one comes to poetry readings, but there’s barely standing-room-only at poetry slams.

What would happen if we embodied the page more often? What would happen if page poets memorized their shit?