Dearest Readers:
This month's post is an excerpt from a longer piece that I wrote, in which I examined the absence of community/spoken word artists in academic settings. I wanted to get a handle on, for example, why educators in the 21st century still felt the need to isolate non-Canonical authors and to create "specialty classes" to teach non-Canonical authors. Why, I wondered, aren't, say, SpokenWord authors simply part of the syllabus for a poetry workshop or a Contemporary American Poetry class? The below excerpt provides a reading of two SpokenWord authors, Devynity and Michele Mitchell, a New York and New Jersey poet, respectively.
I hope you enjoy this read, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Autumn's deep hues and verbal blues,
Metta Sáma
“I’m certain that anything that brings poetry to a wider audience is a good thing. At the end of the day, poetry needs to be seen as an ordinary part of our lives rather than something extraordinary. ” – Paul Muldoon
For poets whose work has found no place in academia, canonized halls, or the ears of Dana Gioia, poetry is not given to such ponderings as “can poetry matter.” Spoken Word poets, heavily invested in community work, seem to respond to Audre Lorde’s incredibly succinct and apt statement: “Poetry is not a luxury.” Often involved in local schools, hospitals, jails, and libraries, Spoken Word poets are performers, yet their work must live off and on the page. Zoë Anglesey, editor of Listen Up!, sees Spoken Word as an association with
…youthful wordslingers who involve themselves in aural
graffiti, verbal combat, slam squads, and roving posses of
like-minded masters at wordplay. Spoken word poetry
can also mean the recitation or reading of poetry that
rides on didactic rails of the irreverent rants and coming-of-
age rituals…this poetry often keeps a beat; it accentuates
rhythms to move a narrative, and strikes syllabic accents
to accentuate the music of a piece or an outrageous punch
line (xvii).
She goes on to describe the importance of oral storytelling in African-American culture. African-Americans have shown a commitment to an oral tradition while also being receptive of the relevance of a written text, a literacy tool that aids visual and auditory learners. Similarly, Native American, Mexican, Latin, and African storytelling is steeped in oral practices, particularly the fluidity of language, the power of words’ meanings to shift according to the times. In Nigerian, Senegalese, Jamaican, and Somalian traditions, call and response and improvisation are poetic techniques, signs of quick-wit and great storytelling.
. . .
Poet, hip-hop artist, and educator Devynity began performing at 14, and by the time she was 21 she released her first spoken word CD: “Tha Spoken Word Joint.” She has performed at the National Black Theater, the Afrikan Poetry Theatre, and the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe and has appeared on the hip-hop radio show “Off the Top” on 1240 WGBB. She has been featured on the PBS show, “Souls of New York” and has recorded with Steele of the Cocoa Brovaz, Dead Prez, and Lyricist Lounge. She has opened for N’ea Davenport and performed with Malik Yoba. She is also a 2002 Grand Slam Finalist and Nuyorican Slam team member. An avid believer in teaching others to gain power through the spoken and written word, she encouraged her grandmother to write poems, and at the age of 71, her grandmother saw her first collection, “Soul Sauce,” published by RoseDog. Devynity’s poems are steeped in an African Diasporic tradition that privileges the aural arts over the written, proving that language is fertile, malleable, and motile. Crediting her grandmother and her mother’s love of storytelling for her own sense of lyric narrative, Devynity uses “an array of metaphors and conceptual lyrics condensed into melodic form” to share her messages.
When I saw Devynity perform at the Liquid Lounge I was awed by her historical knowledge and the ease with which she educated her audience about the abuses imposed on black Americans. Her subject matters, ranging from questions of color to femaleness and hip-hop to reparations to single motherhood, could easily be construed as didactic, but Devynity’s poems exemplify a sentient wisdom that belies her youth. Her freshness and energy captivated me, as did her confidence and playfulness. She writes in “Intro Piece”: “I started flowing when I was an embryo/matter of fact, no,/when I was a single cell/and while engaged in the first stages of mitosis,/I was composing an opus.” Her spoken word CD warns us: “The words you are about to hear are so hot your speakers may just burst into flames.” And, indeed, her words are on fire; she uses language fiercely, relentlessly positioning herself as subject.
“Red Bones Blues,” a more serious poem, enters an often-ignored discussion about intraracial contentions. These are dangerous waters for Devynity to tread, as African Americans often still warn one another to “not air dirty laundry.” But Devynity won’t be silenced: “Do not be fooled by the color of my epidermis: I am black,” “Beneath this first surface beats African drums and impoverished slums,” “I am revolution, I am 3/5 human according to this country’s Constitution, I am the asp that bit Cleopatra,” ending: “I am one of god’s creatures and my blackness answers to no one.” This passage invokes I John 4: “For whoever is born of God overcomes the world,” and reminds me of stories of slaves interpreting themselves as ancient Hebrews who were exiled in Babylon.
Her free associational connections show that history itself is free associational, reliant on making connections between events and people, time and spaces, grounded in the reality that language makes. Dreamscapes are not the material for Devynity, but vision. Like Alice Walker, Devynity urges black Americans to listen to their history and to go in fear of worshipping Africa and Africans as innovators, philosophers, kings and queens if this worshipping leads us to ignore less glorious times in African history. When I inquired about Devynity’s grasp of history, she talked mostly about what she still has to learn but described her long train rides from Manhattan to Queens as reading hours. She learns history chronologically in order to see the full picture and how history impacts the present moment and predicts the future. Further, Devynity wonders how one can speak when one is ignorant of history, so history provides a lifeline to her lyrics. She is a poet of practical optimism who recalls the glory of African pasts in order to remind her audience of what we’re capable of; simultaneously, she critiques the ways in which, for example, hip-hop and pop artists use African dance techniques to advance their own careers without investigating the history of dance or rhythm or music. In “Interruption of Redundance,” she writes: “Stop the tape/Nefertiti must be rolling over in her grave,” “Suddenly bumping and grinding/displaying ancient African rituals/and I wonder what is wrong/with you,” and “Wouldn’t you rather be out/in the hot sun picking /cotton, honey, cause even with what the industry pays/you sisters are enslaved by diamond chains.”
Her poems are well-crafted, picking and choosing words with deliberate care (in revision) to grab readers’ attention and to be heard. As she tells the “you” in “To the Wack MCs,” she uses big words because she knows how to “arouse you with this spectacular vernacular as I have ménage à trois with vowels and consonants giving birth to constant cosmic concepts that can dismiss the diseased emcees stepping to me. See you just met your adversary coming to me with that mediocre vocabulary.” Internal rhyming gives her room to ask serious questions in a playful tone and also privileges the word as a spoken art form. Like the most ecstatic Biblical verses, Devynity uses periodic sentences and lush images to emphasize her point and to show the multiple angles of viewing one object. According to Stanford scholar Paula Moya, writing from multiple perspectives is common for those who have experienced the silencing of subjugation and oppression. Devynity works in this tradition, capturing the voices of the young and old who live in impoverished urban areas and are negatively influenced by popular cultures that keep their mind in a state of oppression.
Devynity is not invested in imitating the sounds of words, syntax, or grammar. She is obsessive about her revisions, working diligently to make sure her poems stand out on the page. She uses hip-hop and colloquial speech as well as purely-lyrical language in order to emphasize the ways in which black speech is metaphorical and/or signifying. Her poems attempt to reach out to oppressed peoples and offer them tools to dig their way out of the dung heap. She works to not only advance her own knowledge, craft, and poetry, but she takes a deep interest in poets of the community. She advocates for poetry as that which establishes one’s place in the world, while also speaking from her particular positions in order to interpret the world. She works in an African Diasporic tradition which raises the consciousness, I believe, of Americans, proving that one doesn’t need to pilfer from a white tradition in order to be thought-provoking, insightful, original, and worthwhile.
. . .
New Jersey poet Michele Mitchell, author of the chapbooks mood and thinkin’ aloud, is attending school at Rutgers University. She’s working on her BA and hopes to be finished in May. Although she wanted to graduate, get to work, and keep writing, she’s contemplating a master’s in education. I ran into Michele’s poem, “Oranges,” on a Web site dedicated to New York and New Jersey poets and immediately began a fast friendship via e-mail. “Oranges” questions the word orange and its original and extended connotations, intellectually, spiritually, psychologically and emotionally.
the color of the day is orange
high alerts and higher pulse rates
higher prices for duct tape and plastic
the masses paying higher prices for gas masks
and hustlers are now sellin them on the low
……………………………………………………..
aint nothing gonna change but our air quality.
the color of the day is orange
like the home depot sign isnt that ironic
………………………………………………
a fact is a fact but the public gets told fiction
slurred is my diction as i get tongue tied tryin to explain
my mind wanders back to four wrecked planes
……………………………………………………………
the color of the day is orange
osama has more videos than blockbuster
where a new release is guaranteed
but our safety is not
………………………………………………
and not to worry
no wonder our vision is blurry
we have our heads up our a$$es
thinkin bout michael jackson interviews
frenchies full frontal view
that r kelly can molest young girls and still reach number two
how can america be the land of red white and blue
if the color of the day is orange?(1-5, 12-15, 18-20, 24-27, 29-36)
“Oranges” is a really great piece for several reasons: 1. It begins in the childlike wonder of locating objects in the sky (the sun), then 2. quickly moves from that space to begin a political discussion, which 3. swerves into a socially conscious speculation of the world. I love the moves it makes, the risks it takes, and its willingness to fall flat on its face, pick itself up, dust itself off, and fly again. This is a high-momentum poem, pulled by voice and rhythm, free associations and sound. Its frenetic energy mirrors the subject: the terror of waking to a day that is at once beautiful (sunny) and on high-alert. The color orange shifts shapes and is yet stabilized by fear; we all understand the terror alert colors by now, orange alert signaling the apocalypse. Yet, this fear has been unwarranted, and Michele shows where our fear and terror should be located: poverty in a country that is wasting dollars with alert systems. At times, the poet cannot seem to step out of a preachy tone—“we have our heads up our a$$es”—but mostly sticks with observation and speculation.
Michele’s poems are playful and provocative, energetic and sensuous in her voice and tone, buoyant and bountiful. Like the best Spoken Word poems, her words travel miles, reaching to her heart, her politics, her spirit. She writes in “Ars Poetica”:
from the words I took
call me a vocabulary crook
don’t need a dictionary or any book
to leave my competition shook
when i lick my lips and put a leer to my look
then, my flow is off da hook
This is a contemporary, urban voice writing a traditional poem, using the language of contemporary speakers, as well as the rhythms and sound effects of street musicians. The end rhymes remind me of “Jabberwocky” and other poems written for young writers, but reading the poems causes me to wonder if Michele is playing around with the “idea” that a poem has to rhyme. Michele is an intelligent poet who reads, listens, and engages with her audience, but this is not a poet who will sacrifice heart for head, seeing the two, instead, as existing in the same room. Michele writes “cave poems,” poems that enter the depths of the soul and wrench out whatever pains and joys, whatever exuberance and vulnerability, can reach the hearts of the multitudinous masses. Dana Gioia wonders if poetry can matter, and I say, read Michele Michele, and ask new questions.
While I will not advocate a new, continued, or redefined canon, I am writing towards a literacy campaign that promotes writing on its own terms. The project of a Spoken Word poet, I believe, is different than the project of an academic poet, and without doubt, different Spoken Word poets have different projects, as do academic poets. Our job is to ask: what is this poem saying? How is it saying it? Why and to what end? I am not suggesting that writers should eliminate tastes or preferences, but to decry a poem because it does not fit one’s personal standards is to show a limitation in wanting to understand and listen to the world. It is only after we are capable of entering into poems the way, for example, cubists entered into a painting, or the way a child enters a circus, that we can begin to appreciate poems and the poets who write them.
Works Cited:
Anglesey, Zoë, ed. Listen Up!: spoken word poetry. NY: One World, 1999
Devynity. Tha Spoken Word Joynt. NY: Furious Imani Publishing, 2000.
Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture,
Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2002.
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Sister Outsider: essays and speeches.
Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.
Notes: the epigraph can be found at http://www.pw.org/content/tale_10_cruelest_months
Picture 1 courtesy of Monkey Paradox Productions (c)2008.
Pictures2 courtesy of Metta Sáma
Picture 3 courtesy of Mahogany Browne
No comments:
Post a Comment