In fact, poets should be applauding that poetry is getting any attention at all at this level. That’s what some poets keep telling me anyway.
But that’s the rub, isn’t it? We want our art form shared, but we want it to cover our agendas, not Def Poetry Jam’s (and by extension, Brave New Voices…which just sounds like louder, more cynical versions of the Tired Old Voices). We want voices that sound like ours, that tell stories other than the ones that slams and open mics have become sick with and made us easily lampooned. We want these instances to express our many senses of humor, not just our redundant pains. We want the world to see our exceptions that weren’t always exceptions. We want them to hear us emote with a whisper, not just a cracking and loud bluster.
Read the rest of this installment of Poetry is Doomed here.
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4 comments:
Hi Jeff-
lets hear it for the "Many, with sense of humor" the humorous senses - the funny taste, the hilarious smell of!?@! the tickling touches, and seeing the damn joke, whatever it is.
Did you hear the recited poem by Jamaica Osorio - at the white house? Check it out. I've got a link on my blog.
Tamam
Hi Tamam!
Ironically, I felt the need to follow this post with a defense of why I don't write happy poems. Of course, humorous doesn't always equal happy, but that's the sort of nuance I'd like to get out in the world more.
I'll admit that Osorio's poem was dragging for me until she started introducing Hawaiian words, and then all of a sudden, boom, she found her power. Not that I have anything against poetry of victimhood - it fulfills an important role and can be done well. But for me, this performance starts to transcend when she taps into the other voice, making the English voice a borrowed one. There's a particularly nice turn of phrase in the middle, in English, that was something like "no roots, just rats." Great succinct colonialism image there. The way that her Hawaiian occupies more and more of the space of the poem as she progresses into the lineage at the end is where this really shines, structurally.
Or so I think. Hopefully not in a top-down white male (i.e.-in-this-case reacting merely to content) kind of way, but just looking at the bones of what she performed.
This may be a woman's thing, but the feeling she brought to the poem wasn't so victim-like, but seemed to me like a vocal wave carrying first the mixed energies – the two cultures, then the Hawaiian collective, shaking with dignity and power.
And what you said about it shining, yes. Felt fresh to me - in all meanings of the word.
I want to read a humorous poem that has not one iota of the happy face in it. I like that kind of funny.
Ah, I'm with you on the shift from mixed energies of two cultures to one shaking with power. "Wave" is a nice metaphor for what happened in that poem. I think the more I listen to it, the more I get that the first part has to be shaky to set up the growth in the latter parts. I may have been overly critical having heard many poems like that first part many times - the history of those poems in my head wanted to get through that portion more quickly, since it wasn't necessarily grabbing me with anything new. Both a fair (if you're on a national stage, we expect that your language will at all points be as fresh as that in the latter half of the poem) and an unfair (at the same time, taken in a relative vacuum, the language generally holds together if a bit loose in its extended metaphors for my taste - again, in the first half only, as I loved what happened beginning about halfway through) critique, so I apologize and don't for it.
Are you willing to expand on "not one iota of the happy face?"
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