Thoughts on Slam Poetry, Competition, & the Wounded

Today, at 12:21 pm, I wrote in my iPhone: "What happens when you compete with your wounds?"Lyz Soto--poet, community organizer, and activist-- said that, not me. This question is haunting: whose wound wins? And what's the prize? Just as the question is central to Lyz's concerns with SLAM poetry (especially as the Executive Director of Youth Speaks Hawai'i), it has me thinking about the page & stage as platforms for our suffering and the consequences of performing our wounds.


Who wins when we write out our suffering - the inflicter of pain or the inflicted? Who wins when we perform it? How does one perform suffering? Is this disingenuous on the stage and/or on the page? Do we suffer less or more after writing? After performing? And then what happens...do our wounds close up after a few hundred readings of our individual and communal devastations, inflictions, or even our slight pains?

As I learned today in Lyz Soto's wonderful talk, supported by the Center for Biographical Research, SLAM originated as a stunt. A publicity stunt that is. How do you get people engaged in listening to,  writing, and performing poetry? You make it a competition. You have rules. You are strict (no props allowed, 3 minutes with a 9 second grace period) about these rules. You have judges who round up or down in decimals. But what's being judged? From what I gather, a good portion of winning depends on your ability to follow the rules, as you are supposed to ignore content to some degree (if that's even possible). Why then does it seem like the one who has suffered the most is the winner?

I was a judge, twice. One time I judged a poetry contest while I was still a M.F.A. student myself. My street cred was undeniably lacking. The second time I was a judge at a Youth Speaks Slam. It was over a year ago at Farrington High School. I'm not a SLAM poet, not event close. However, I enjoy listening, and I also organize community literary events under Mixing Innovative Arts. I think that Youth Speaks, and all programs that offer communal support through literature, is a vital part of the growing community (& sustaining that community) here in Hawai'i (& elsewhere, of course). As a judge, I felt obligated to weigh content and form and performance equally. But then the SLAM started. Teenage sufferer after teenage sufferer took the stage. How could I honestly give these young poets scores based on their experiences with trauma? Long story short - I don't think I can ever judge at a poetry slam again. I enjoyed the energy of the event, the electricity the performances, but as a "judge" I felt too uncomfortable throwing a number up at the face of someone who had just told me one of their secrets. Hey, secret sufferer of bullying, you're a 6... but YOU, who have suffered from years of sexual abuse are a 10! Not for me. 

The poetry I write and read doesn't engage in this type of behavior. Page poets are deemed more civilized perhaps--in our parchment clouds of quiteude-- or, perhaps we're all "winning" in other ways: publications, poetry prizes, honorable mentions, AWP talks, awards named after dead white dude poets, and so on. But let's face it, most of us are losing.

But maybe the page poet is just a wimp unwilling to show her fear of failing on public grounds. Or maybe the act of performing work on a stage as long and wide as the SLAM stage just leads to more suffering. The suffering is no longer yours - a private thing. You've shared it with an audience who genuinely cares (& responds with snaps and sighs, and occasional yelps). Your suffering goes public. Is this cathartic? Do you lose some part of yourself?

I'm not sure.

Lyz talked about how she stopped SLAMMING because it was no longer good for her, or her family. That it posed a potential danger: becoming numb to the experience. This is an interesting point. So I've been thinking about this and its application to all venues of writing. Some memoirists can write four or five different versions--in book form-- of a spouse's death. Sometimes I write 5 poems in one sitting about my dead grandmother's ghostly visits. I probably have about 100 or so "mom" poems. The fact that I'm still writing, even over-writing, my traumas must mean that there are so many different versions of them. Or maybe it's just an unhealthy and self-indulgent act. Who knows.
There is nothing cohesive here for me to say. Just some rambling. I don't have an answer to any of the questions Lyz raised in her talk today, or for the questions I've been formulating since the talk.  But I appreciate and am thankful for Lyz's story, her questions, and her answers -- which are damn good. You should talk to her. Everyone should.
I think the discussion is worth continuing, especially for those who are active in any literary community--SLAM, an old fashioned reading series, a writing group, a literary magazine, whatever. For me, writing through or out of my wounds doesn't prohibit me from processing a trauma, nor does writing make me relive that trauma in any sort of way that seems genuine to my experience of it. Maybe it's because my wounds are so buried in sound and white space and ambiguity. Maybe it's because there are so many different versions of that experience, a new one unfolding each time it is put into words. Or maybe it's just temporary relief.

Teaching & Productivity

More often than not, teachers get bogged down with their own class planing, grading, and to-do lists that sharing their lesson plans, reading lists, tips, and experiences becomes hardly a priority. But what if we had the tools to make community building-- across disciplines, and across geographical boundaries-- happen so that our own courses become more efficient by gathering information (testimonals, course materials, and all that other pedagogical good stuff) in one place? I think by taking a hint from start-up culture in the tech industry we can perhaps use project management softeware to do such things!

I know what you're thinking....my classroom is NOT a business, and education shouldn't be run as one.  Although I share that sentiment in more ways than you know, I do think that the Tracky software gives us educators an awesome opportunity to not only integrate our classroom secrets with a high-tech application that can be accesses anytime, anywhere, but that is facilities communication that otherwise might not happen - conversations about department struggles, course ideas, education materials, and much more.

Check out some of my ideas for how TRACKY can possibly help our curmudgeon faculty members become more vocal, productive, and innovative on my guest blog at Tracky.com!

ENG 313: First Day Exercises

Dear fellow creative writing teachers, 

I'm getting pumped to teach my ENG 313 class. So pumped that I pretty much blanked on what I wanted to do on the first day of my Process Writing (Poetry and Flash Fiction)course (this tends to happen in the overwhelming state of the beginning of the semester). In case anyone else has this problem, I wanted to share what I came up with as possibilities for your creative writing classroom. Thanks to http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/ for Erin Belieu's wonderful poem, "Last Trip to the Island" as inspiration for my Mad-lib poetry exercise.

Enjoy -

Icebreaker #1 Exquisite Corpse: 

(Pictures: http://www.exquisitecorpse.com/definition/Morgue_%5Bthe_corpses%5D.html)

A little history about the Exquisite Corpse writing exercise:

“Among Surrealist techniques exploiting the mystique of accident was a kind of collective collage of words or images called the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). Based on an old parlor game, it was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution.

The technique got its name from results obtained in initial playing, "Le cadavre / exquis / boira / le vin / nouveau" (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine)” (http://www.exquisitecorpse.com)

Directions: Get into groups of 5 or 6. Someone will volunteer to begin the second line of the "story." The first line has already been provided for you, so please work off that.  You can look at ONLY the line just before your turn – do not try to reveal the poem to yourself. Don’t think too hard. Don’t try to make too much sense. Just write quickly when it’s your turn. Each team will have 10 minutes – you will pass the paper and write until time is up! Then, we'll share.

Icebreaker #2: Mad-lib Poetry

In this class, you will be doing a lot of collaborative writing. Here’s an exercise that will stretch your thinking of the “word” and connect with your peers based on your ideas about language.

#	SOURCE	VARIATION	MATCH
1	Pocket	book	Mike, Jenna
2	Fire	balls	Lehua, Tom, Steve
3	Tomato	garden	Rachel, Kai

1. Take out a sheet of paper and fold it into thirds, so that you make three columns. Title the first column “SOURCE,” the second column “VARIATION,” and the third column “MATCH” Number lines 1-15.
2. When I say a word, write is down in the first column. In the second column, you will write down the first word that comes to mind. We will do this 15 times.
3. Now, find others in the room that made the same word-connections as you. For example, if I said, “rose” and you wrote down “bush,” it’s your job to find other people who wrote down “bush.” The name of this person(s) will go in under the third column, written on the line that corresponds with the SOURCE and VARIATION.
4. Who do you have the most matches with? Find those people and get into a group.
5. WRITE A GROUP POEM: Now that you found your group (you may be alone!), you must write a COLLABORATIVE poem, using the words on your sheets. The words on your sheets will act as your word bank. Choose words together and fill in the blanks to complete the following poem:

LAST TRIP TO THE (NOUN)  

(Source text can be found here)

You're mad that I can't love the (noun),

but I've come to this (noun) landlocked
and some bodies feel permanently (adj.).
Like any foreign language, study it too late and
it never sticks. Anyway,

we're here aren't we? —
(gerund) up the sand, the water churning
its constant horny (noun), an openmouthed heavy

breathing made more unnerving by
the presence of all these (noun, pl), the toddlers

with their chapped bottoms, the fathers
in gigantic trunks spreading out their dopey
circus-colored (noun).

How can anyone (verb)
near something so worked up all the time?

I know the ocean is (adj),
but the hypnosis, the dilated pull of it, feels

impossible to (verb). And what better reason to
(same verb as above)? I'm most comfortable in

a (noun), a yellow-eared patch
of (noun), whose quiet rustling argues for
the underrated valor of discretion.

And above this, I admire a certain quality of
sky, like an older (type of person) who wears her jewels with
an air of distance, that is, (adverb),
with the right attitude. Unlike your (noun),

there's nothing sneaky about a field. I like their
(adj.)-girl frankness. I like that, (verb) in the dirt,

I can hear what's coming between the (noun).

By Erin Belieu

Wrapping up ENG273: Women and Poetry

One of my students writes, "I can understand it but I can't speak it." in her poem "Fillipino Ako". The poem's title, which translates to "I am Fillipino" is about her experience learning about her own culture through an academic foreign language course because, as she states, "I was never taught my native tongue." Her manuscript Identity encapsulates the ideas we've exchanged over the semester in my Women and Poetry course. 

A feminist poetics, something we've defined as a way of making art that breaks patriarchal structures in language, has helped my students imagine their lives beyond boundaries, dichotomies, and hierarchies. After today's class "exam," a poetry reading where each student chose one poem that best represents their poetry project - a manuscript that embraces a feminist poetics - I've learned something I already knew about poetry and teaching. It changes you. I'm overwhelmed with gratitude that each student had intimate conversations with at least one of the texts we read and discussed in this class. These conversations made their way to the classroom, which became a safe space to create and respond to poetry. I have students that, if they choose to and keep at it, can markedly change the direction of poetry in the future. I hope they will all keep writing. I hope they'll keep on reading our poetry mothers, like Sappho, Anne Carson, June Jordon, Sylvia Plath, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Alice Notley. 

The first book of poetry I ever bought was Audre Lorde's hefty The Collected Poems. I was fourteen years old, in a small Mizner Park bookstore on east Boca Raton called Liberties, which closed over a long, drawn out tenant-landlord dispute. I think it's now a restaurant called Uncle Julio's, where they make guacamole tableside. However, I'll never forget flipping through the pages of that book while sitting on the floor of the cushy bookstore. I was mesmerized by the white space and line breaks, and the line I still remember "Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof," which somehow resonated in my teenage girl heart. 

"Liberties" is a good name for this kind of place; a bookstore, a classroom, a poetics. 

I collected and assembled some of the lines of poetry from each student to create a Cento as a kind of keepsake for the class. I've gotten attached to the poem, to the students, to the experience of crossing literary boundaries with them. As one student put it, "Everything shifts." This is the poetics of ENG 273, Spring 2012. 

On Confession and Process

Do you ever have one of those teaching days where you're saying to yourself I'm totally nailing it! as you look up and all your students are nodding the way they do when an idea becomes the handle to a door and instead of just opening the damn thing, they've just unhinged the shit out of it and walked into the exciting realm of understanding? No?

Well, that happened for me today. But it took a while. And one student was one the verge of exploding with anger before that idea even became a door.

In the Contemporary Women Poets course I teach, we are reading Ariel: The Restored Edition, which includes the original order of Plath's manuscript, the facsimile of that manuscript, and a foreword by Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes.

Frieda writes: "We already have a gravestone," I replied. "We don't need another." (xix). She is referring to the English Heritage's placing of the prestigious blue plaque, which is given to honor the life of the poet. But what happened was this: English Heritage wanted to place the plaque where Plath committed suicide, not in the home where she wrote and lived. "I wanted her life to be celebrated, the fact that she had existed, lived to the fullness of her ability, been happy and sad, tormented and ecstatic, and given birth to my brother and me" (xix). Any daughter would want that--the memory of a mother who was dynamic in both her weakness and power as a poet, a mother, a wife, a human.

Thinking about "being" human -- feeling the full range of that weight -- can be difficult for beginning poets. Hell, it's difficult for me, now. Teaching "Confessional" poetry is both exciting and frustrating. How do we get our students to not only be vulnerable on the page, but also craft that vulnerability into what "we" might consider poetry? There is a process for this, and with that process comes lots of questions about how we write a poem.

Here is an exercise that provoked a student to think about the ethics of writing:

Step 1: Write a list of three secrets. These secrets must be something you would never tell anyone, ever. (Some students struggled with this first step: "I don't know if I want to write those things." "Good," I say, "write what you can.")

Step 2: Now take each "secret" and re-write it in a way that you could relate that experience to someone close to you. Make that secret more manageable to tell.

One student became angry, saying something to the effect of "I'm not going to try and communicate something painful that I've been dealing with for years for a class." I was thrilled. That anger reminded me of a graduate workshop I took with Richard Kenny at the University of Washington during my first trimester in the MFA program. We were discussing what could/should be written. A lot of people struggled with the ethics of writing - words that have the power to damage our family, friends, our relationships, and ourselves. At that time, I had a different take: "But they are just words," I said. "I'm not afraid to write anything." I was simplifying, and lying.

So, I told my angry student, "That's okay, in fact, I completely understand. I'm happy you bring this up. Instead, write about why the process of communicating your secrets is difficult." The student smiled, nodded. Now the student understood where I was going.

Confessional poetry isn't admitting what's deep and dark. It isn't telling the page that you're sad or happy or floundering or whatever. It's what's underneath all those words.  It's the process of concealment and exposure, and the war between those two acts.

After our writing exercise we examined Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher" and I urged the students to locate the "confessions" in this poem. Then we placed those confessions, literally located them in some image that we would later realize both reveals and conceals something about those confessions. This is when the doors came off. Like those "yellow candle-flowers" in spiny shrubs of "The Rabbit Catcher", something was burning. "They had an efficiency, a great beauty, / And were extravagant, like torture" (Plath 7). This poem is not an ars poetica, but isn't it? Doesn't the yellow flower dangle in front of us like a shiny carrot (poor rabbit)? Is that flower not what we are reaching for?

The process is both extravagant and torture; we find something extravagant in torture and something torturous in extravagance. My students will confess: writing is both wonderful and wondrous. It is also what comes before and after.

I thought I'd post the writing exercise I devised for this weekend's homework. I hope you find it helpful, inspiring, awful, difficult, and so on.

1. List 5 "confessions". For example "I have always been scared of my mother", would be a confession, or "I love to walk around my neighborhood at 3AM."

2. For each confession, write about where that confession is located, as in a place. For example ""I have always been scared of my mother / In the kitchen, she puts away the spoons" or ""I love to walk around my neighborhood at 3AM. / Each lamp post looks like a secret letter, spelling out a word when they are lit."

3. Pick ONE of those confessions its locale and write the first stanza to a poem. Contain at least one simile and one metaphor in the stanza. The stanza must be 6-8 lines. Post in the comments section of this post.

Ex:
I have always been scared of my mother.
In the kitchen, she puts away the spoons
like careful children tucked into tight sheets.
My mother shows her fossils at night.
Each crack glows like the fine linen
pressed into our faces.
She leaves before the morning,
dragging the spoons, leaving circles in the ground.

OR

I love to walk around my neighborhood at 3AM.
Each lamp post looks like a secret letter,
spelling out a word when they are tall, lit.
I cannot read in the early morning wind.
The word is inside a black mattress.
Don't lift it, spill every feather, every penny.
Instead, keep walking like the thinness of paper,
dragging the notes, never pausing to listen.

Write a Novel in November, Post #10

They are just words: the field, the shovel, the hole, the blouse, the glue holding the buttons, the buttons. A stick of yellow. A coming together, a reunion, a departure from, an isolation.  The buttons, the buttons. Mountains. Water. The river. The can. The Mountain Dew. The stethoscope, the optic nerves, the nervous hands, the twitching, the dirt, the planet. Be just. But justice was in the straw. He was sweating through his shirt from his shin down the shovel the snow was melting and she was digging stuffing the snow in her blouse and the sun thawed out the sun thawed her out the rhythm she was dancing his arms were up her palms facing him the dirt and the dirt and the buttons she was hot and the heat fell through his shirt she was holding him up check the heartbeat and back and the buttons and everything yellow and the river sang softly and everything was painful and white bleached from the sun around her neck the shape the shape was a word on a field. Pick it up. Plant it.