writes.
An earth day awareness of being on a lake surface….
–
cliff’s treeline higher
water table dropped again
canoe-view: tiers dry
rockface lines calcified
guilty wince for new well drilled
—
From One Deep Breath Prompt. If you’ll go around, don’t miss Trailing Light with her line on gardening about manna on my spade or Mike McCulley’s set of haiku including the profound observation,
“to build a web
it takes
one spider“
Watch 2 poets compose poems in real time. 15 minutes worth of it being composed at QuickMuse or have google make a random string form poem (Would this be computer-generated flarf?)
For those who don’t read at the other, a cross-posting.
The closing act of the spring writers festival was leaving on a blissful high note –a performance of 800-year-old poetry of Rumi by the Mushfiq Ensemble and Coleman Barks.
The Persian music was by 2 men from Afghanistan, sometimes singing the Sufi’s words in the original tongue. A woman from India and a woman from Canada completed the Ensemble with the guest from the southern U.S., Coleman Barks.
The voices, violin and harmonium, each so much like a human voice, and tapping of tabla (drums) and plucking of other instruments blended into each other.
Together they did a kind of jazz-feel jam, reading each other, fading into and out of the words of Rumi.
Barks interspersed his performance with flows to how Rumi’s movement made life the worship: silence, discourse, movement, gibberish, music, jokes, and watching the behavior of animals as kinds of scripture.
You can’t explain the poems of Rumi. They were spontaneous speech. “These poems are a medium you swim in”. Interspersed were Nasrudin jokes, stories of meeting people who can recite Rumi in different languages, meeting government officials who at diplomatic functions begin a strong debate. His translator explained it was not political but over drunkenness in the poems of Hafiz versus Rumi, soemthing he could never see happening in the U.S. cabinet. There were poems by Bark himself of indulgent grandfatherness. And that cyclical repeating words until they dissolve.
Some notes of what he related…repeated in a way of haiku repeated in air, except in this case to his mellow deep voice of the south to accompaniness of singing and instruments. Out of context of the body of sound and rhythm, they lose most, but I note to myself what I can of the holiness if inner listening of an audience with one ear and tongues sold.
When he spoke of his grand daughter and going to her soccer game, her team lost and the opposite team paraded chanting we won, we won and his grand daughter got up on the seat of the convertible and pumped her arm and chanting we lost, we lost, 10-zero, we lost with as much enthusiasm. Good losers don’t laugh last/ they laugh continuously
By the end the entire auditorium by the end instantly gave a long ovation, no hold outs standing because others are standing. The group will have another performance at the national library on May 18th. You can hear some of their music sample here.
If you want to hear some of the poems, The Voice of Longing, Coleman Barks CD of Rumi.
The idea of randomizing Lampman more has happened. I threw a cover on the bed and the new sonnet with different set of rhymes made their individual word way to the floor. Before recording what I had. That’s the way the poem crumbles. So, what have we here upside down and following paths of chaos?
Was red the swift night and a song
sound might
sunny heard
stirred a knowing echoing
and could
heard sunny
retained
weight two
all but listening
shadow light mouth
ever maker of
not sad
(cross-posted at www.pagehalffull.com/humanyms)
I’ve got a review copy of The Spoken Word Revolution Redux. It is book 2 in a series on the history of Spoken Word. It is by the publishers who put together Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath (Book and 3 Audio CDs). I got that title years ago from a poetry festival. I still listen to years after I got it. Just to hear Auden and Gertrude Stein in their own voices is very cool. They improved the layout in this one by having an index that cross references track numbers to page numbers.
Intro
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser does the foreword. In it he says there that he feels performance poetry meets one of the basic human needs. One is happiest when doing what our ancestors had to do one to survive — one must cook, one must garden and one must tell stories. Writing is one step removed from this gratifying shaman state of artist-priest. Kooser says, performance poetry is “less revolutionary than – dare I say it – reactionary” against dullness and the “peculiar rectangle of words arranged on a page that poses a kind of riddle that one must solve or die” and dowdy old geezers who are for Literature with a capital L.
That’s up to debate but good debate always moves the field forward. For myself, I don’t know who those geezers might be. Perhaps they all died before I was born. Nonetheless it’s a good lively read.
The whole undertaking is ambitious. How to catch what is current and the essence and reduce down to the key samples that are in themselves excellent and are key indicators of those works that are left out for reasons of time and space. It’s the challenge of any anthology to select these seminal poems for an anthology.
Structure
Redux, published by sourcebooks has a CD with 75 tracks of spoken word and page poets, hip hop poetica, dub poetry and music. It’s like a Rough Guide, a survey anthology from poetic device devising a meditation or telling a memory to amped yell. And every sung note in between the poles.
There are 7 chapters. The first is slammers and laureates with sub-sections of women take the slam and the elders. Part 2 is legacy from Corso to Kerouac to Lerner. Part 3 is music and poetry connection. Slam poets and slam poets writing in form are followed by a chapter on those writing abroad (Germany, Australia, Jordan and more). Youth and hip-hop poetic are the last two foci.
The CD contains less than half the poems that are in the text (about 150 poems total). Although I’d like to have heard them all, that choice makes sense. If they entirely overlapped and duplicated each other, wouldn’t that have made one of them extraneous.
Considering that it’s a literary survey and not a literary magazine it would have been more useful to have bios with a bigger context, written in mini wikipedia style, rather than whatever one sentence the poet submitted. Most did however list some way to find more by them.
Some big personalities are explored in essays. Between one essay is by Henry Taylor, (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,1986) and another by Slam originator Bob Holman, you’ve got the value of the $25 U.S. cover price alone.
Taylor’s essay is 9 pages long and talks about his journey though poetry from academic formalist to slam poetry, still navigating between both “worlds”. As an undergraduate he heard live in the 1960s basically every big name in US poetry. He talks about being one of the readers when another reader took far more than the allotted time and how he and the other reader decided how they what they would do with their thin slice of the pie and all the ruminations of what performance is and what a poet owes to the audience or doesn’t. Holman’s 4 pages are devoted to memories of Robert Creeley.
My main complaint with this is after the build-up of how so much of his poems rests in the presentation, person, voice or Creeley himself, you turn a page and the CD is of Holman reading Creeley. Surely some archive could have been dug out and authorized. Likewise, the poem Thirty Again? slammed on stage by an 90 year old. That I’d want to hear not only read.
There’s a smattering of world voices, i.e. England and Caribbean from America but largely northeastern U.S. Part of the narration is done by one of the editors and organizer’s of this project — Chicago Public radio poet, and high school English teacher Kevin Coval.
There’s a dual market aim — general audience and high school classes, the latter comes out in the graphics and feel of the book (but perhaps it would only seem so to people who have also dealt with a lot of textbooks). A general audience who wanted to explore what this slam poetry thing is without going out, or having heard some and wanting to know the history and general context and range would be well-served.
It’s hard to generalize over so many poets and pieces. There were times in the book and CD that I felt the choices showed the nature of slam poetry to be topical based. There’s a grasp to record a piece of anthropology of a time and place, usually the northeast U.S. youth voice. A lot of the poems are narrative and recorded live bring in the audience reaction as part of the context.
The Poetry
Some narrative poetry lines overlap stand up comedy and storytelling such as Taylor Mali, repeat US slam poet winner. I’ve heard him before on youtube. He tweaks my sense of humor. Included here is his poem on his dad and his idiosyncratic system for labelling keys so no intruder (or anyone else) would know what fits what.
More free form is David Lerner with his rant against what this is not — “no grab bag of word play of sensitive thoughts and gracious theories word play over how many ambiguities can dance on the head of machine gun” in his poem entitled Mein Kampf, tapping the feet and brains of audience to incite rebelling against consumer society and the blindness of it.
Derrick Brown mixes singing then switches to late night radio tones with spoken words such as “We swerved home in black laughter” in Kurosawa Champagne. It’s as goosebump raising as Simone Muench in Tom Waits, I Hate You “for the way your voice snags my skin…plucking nightingales from a piano writhing as if it were my ribcage being played.” I’d really have to quote the whole thing to do it justice.
Or e.e. cummings put off your faces, Death for day is coming as a jazzy choir arrangement. This is clearly a CD and book to go through slowly over a lot of days hitting the pause button often.
A poem that keeps cycling back through my head is one by 2001 National Poetry Slam Individual Champion 2001, Mayda Del Valle which goes in part i’m crossing borders/abriendo puertas/ tongue waggin’/ clicking the roof of my mouth/ rolling ere’s / comiendo ese’s/ yo tengo el toque de tito’s / timbalero / kimbara kimbara kimba kim bam bam / kimbara kimbara kimba kim bam bam / writhing on my lips / i’m riding waves of / language deconstruction// wear ur hardharts / little chicken heads/ coz the alphabet is falling from the sky!! // I’m daring to deliver dialects not commercially created/ and destroy ur nit-wit imbecilic notions of / what language i should speak
Some powerful, some subtle, some political, some personal, some raw, some lyrical, some stories, mostly urban. A lot of poetry that reaches me in it, and a lot that doesn’t (which is par for course). Poetry is made by the audience meeting the word and what is started by the poet is being completed in the reader/listener.
There is a youth focus, but it travels well through time so far. Between backgrounds (on prose poetry on hip-hop poetica) to descriptions of people, passed on and present, and a lot of poetry and stories of lives, there’s a huge amount of resources in this book and it bears rereading. In fact, I already started re-reading it before I got to the end.
Vid Link: Max Middle Sound Project videos does a whole other take on poetry performance [now with correct link].