NOTE: The YouTube videos in this post aren’t showing up. If someone knows how to fix this, that would be really fantastic. Here’s where I wish I were just a tad more tech savvy.
Now King David was old, advanced in age; and they covered him with clothes, but he could not keep warm.
I have been tinkering loosely & somewhat carelessly recently with poetry. It seems to me to be one of those things in which one starts out confident, important to himself, & with a kind of unabashed fearlessness of the “actual” world of poetry — the one of money, jobs, day-to-day. Inspired at first by Dr. Harding’s Performance Studies class last spring, my dealings have been minimal and mostly performative (not of my own, but in watching others do what they do best), and I will not try to posture like I know much more about performed poetry than names like Saul Williams, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and the figureheads of HBO’s Def Poetry.
Having slowly immersed myself in this recently, I was delighted to hear that slam poet Beau Sia was going to perform at Mary Washington last Tuesday, arriving to an empty room 15 minutes before the actual performance. Watching him perform his poetry, though, was certainly something far beyond even what I was expecting — it was personal, direct, emotional, shivering, uproarious, and completely LIVE. You can watch Sia speak on every season of Def Poetry as much as you want, but until you are close enough for his words to physically shake your ears & you can feel his breath from 2 rows back, the living poetry is still just words on a page. I would recommend the experience to anyone and everyone.
Which brings me to a post that in a sense has been a long time coming. Because you see, the absolutely fascinating thing for me about poetry is the method in which it is presented to the reader. A typed series of stanzas plastered between bound covers has its physical establishment in our hands, & as an English major I cannot deny that a large part of me really prizes that occupation of concrete space. But the performative reading is something so much more alive, enables the receiver of the poem to react with immediacy and directly to the author’s face — the space of the white page becomes an interactive space of bodies communicating, & at this point in my life there is little more that I treasure than that occupied, physical, human space.
The students of Intro to Creative Writing every year are invited to perform a piece or two at the Thursday Poems series at the end of the semester, & this means next week I have a chance to experience the role of performing poet for one of the first substantial times. It is unnerving, exciting, & a complete experiment in putting onself out there without pretensions or fears. It is reactive & human for both the performer & the audience, & I am greatly looking forward to being on the side of the former this time.
Because I have been watching Def Poetry with a certain level of intenseness the past month or two, I have come across several performances that have resonated incredibly deeply with me. So I guess this is where I share them:
Taylor Mali —
Rives —
Suheir Hammad (weep worthy!) —
Beau Sia —
Geoff Trenchard —
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/r1oQSXUzaOQ" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Steve Coleman —
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/R3bbpj2hX6w" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Gina Loring —
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/mmCxC0RnzQM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Am I jealous of the talent? Unabashedly! Do I still love it with all my passion? Absolutely.