Fighting Talk

I’ve been enjoying this book though I’m finding the contents fairly mixed, but for a rather retiring page poet like me it’s definitely providing food for thought. It was recommended to me as something potentially useful for the new MA module I’ll be taking on poetry and mixed media next semester, so I purchased and have been dipping in on our sometimes lengthy train journeys here. First there’s something of a problem in what prides and promotes itself as being ‘spoken word’ presenting itself as a page-based text only, so I’m having to imagine the performative edge many of these pieces undoubtedly have when delivered live, on stage.

For on stage is certainly where the thirty-five contributors like best to be. Actually the most fascinating and informative parts of the book are the brief autobiographical essays which preface each poet’s two poems published here. There is a sort of general tenor to them, though some buck the trend.

Mostly though, the women write about growing up feeling estranged, misunderstood, voiceless, and ‘different’ either through sexuality, ‘other’ biological and psychological gender identification, physical difference and disability, mental illness or just a general sense of disempowerment from being a woman in a bullying patriarchal world. Each finds a voice, a community, a sense of healing and release and selfhood by getting up on the stage (many at the Nuyorican Poets Café) and letting the anger and the personal experience and the ideals and the words themselves rip. I found myself thinking – perhaps if I’d done this when I was younger – it seems so seductively easy in a way, once you first go for it and stand up, and get that applause…

Some women here feel the urge to perform so strongly that they go on extended tours – Nomy Lam (though she says she’s taking well earned time out now), and the notorious ‘Sister Spit’ group, founded by Sini Anderson and Michelle Tea. Tea’s essay documented the riotous and undisciplined and unfunded touring of Sister Spit and reading this – my goodness, I felt old. Some contributors had specific experiences which inform both essay and poems – transexuality in the case of Julia Serano and also a ‘no-op’ transsexual – Lynn Breedlove formally of Tribe 8 who now prefers to be referred to as ‘he’ – this is how Breedlove identifies as part of his authentic identity. Some poems even though they could be classed as self-obsessed yet possess a level of detail, poignancy, and basically, raw energy that enables them to communicate and open up a vista of painful personal expertise for others. And some again just came over as good poems – well crafted but unforced, image rich and rhythmically subtle. Natalie E. Illum’s poems for example, this concluding ‘I am from (third cycle)’:

I am from the way you see me
in afternoon light, in shades of darkness.
I am from the ocean; salt and bone
entangled. The pulling tides and I
are whispering.

However. I did have concerns with other pieces in this anthology, particularly when personal rage at perceived injustices combined with political gender-based statements which constructed all women as ‘us’ and conventional men as the hated ‘them’. This seemed frankly a bit crude and my reaction is - despite being happy to define myself as generally feminist - against being corralled into any such gendered complicity. If you want to convince me, I need discussion and example, not what felt like being shouted at. And in terms of poetry my concern about some pieces where rage seems to take over is that language and poetry is being used in the service of some cause, rather than following the (admittedly difficult to define) path of poetry itself, luminous with all the nuanced possibilities of layout and language. This is fine of course, but perhaps shouldn’t be called poetry.

And that was exactly the argument I found in Tracie Morris’ essay ‘Ad-Libbing’.

‘”Spoken word” as a demarcation sustains an ambiguity about poetry, at least in contemporary American society, especially for younger people. Poetry, no matter how “orally based” or experimental – and from any tradition(s) – is dependent upon certain historical and cultural references. The writer is then able to decide whether to reinforce the “craft” of these traditions or reject them. The generality of the phrase “spoken word” (aka “talking in public”) includes poetry, stand-up comedy, preaching, dramatic monologues, storytelling, forensics, and even hawking jewelry on the streets of Greenwich Village. It really doesn’t mean anything specific. “Poetry” gets lost in the breadth of the definition of “spoken word”.

This seems exactly right to me, a generous but accurate perception of the spoken word movement and of this volume too – generous in its own way in containing a whole span of takes on its eponymous discipline.