Earlier I mentioned that some of the teams were being not-so-cooperative with my efforts, but I one of the media relations people from the Padres told me to contact this other guy who works for the overarching MLB. That conversation was rough because if I can't convince him to ask the teams to work with me, then I will have incomplete results.
I have begun outlining my site, and what kinds of representation I want graphs to show, but without those finalized results, it's really difficult to move forward. I also found out recently that I won't be using the MLB.com backdrop. Hopefully this doesn't set me back too far, but my work schedule is shifting to long hours to make up for that.
This next week will be tying loose ends on my reading, writing text to put on my site, and beginning to set up the format of the site now that I have Dreamweaver access. Good luck with putting the finishing touches on your stuff. It looks like I'm going to need a lot of good luck.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
Epilogue From Takeo
One weekend in July, I took a guided tour in Harlem. Being a poet, I've had a sort of amateurish interest in the Harlem Renaissance, in Langston and Zora and the like. In the Schonberg Center for black culture, we stood over a large circular mosaic that depicted parts of Africa, America, and the broader African diaspora, and written all over was lines from Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers":
My last day in New York was meeting Amiri Baraka in workshop and watching his performance. I told him how my dad in '67, then a Filipino farm boy at the age of 12, first picked up his book somewhere in the California Central Valley and got inspired to be political and passed that consciousness down to me. In a humble way I, as I am today, had descended from his words, and now here I was, full circle, shaking his hand.
After that performance, I knew that it would be the last time (for a while) that I would see the many great poets I had met out there. It was a series of very affectionate goodbyes. The many poets I had interviewed and spent time with had become my friends. I realized that quite honestly, I would miss them. I had become so adjusted to the environment here that I started to think myself as one of them, a young New York poet. And quite honestly, that's basically what I was.
Now that I'm back in the Bay, where the air is cleaner and a car makes more sense than the train, it all feels quite surreal. Like a big flurry of a dream. I've accomplished a lot of research and a lot of work, but the things I remember most are the infinite specificities of the people I had the privilege to meet and know a little about. And maybe a little like falling in love, those memories are something I keep close to my chest and feel a little giddy about because those images are my own little secret to myself.
- I've known rivers:
- I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow
- of human blood in human veins.
- My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
- I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
- I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
- I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
- I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went
- down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn
- all golden in the sunset.
- I've known rivers:
- Ancient, dusky rivers.
- My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
My last day in New York was meeting Amiri Baraka in workshop and watching his performance. I told him how my dad in '67, then a Filipino farm boy at the age of 12, first picked up his book somewhere in the California Central Valley and got inspired to be political and passed that consciousness down to me. In a humble way I, as I am today, had descended from his words, and now here I was, full circle, shaking his hand.
After that performance, I knew that it would be the last time (for a while) that I would see the many great poets I had met out there. It was a series of very affectionate goodbyes. The many poets I had interviewed and spent time with had become my friends. I realized that quite honestly, I would miss them. I had become so adjusted to the environment here that I started to think myself as one of them, a young New York poet. And quite honestly, that's basically what I was.
Now that I'm back in the Bay, where the air is cleaner and a car makes more sense than the train, it all feels quite surreal. Like a big flurry of a dream. I've accomplished a lot of research and a lot of work, but the things I remember most are the infinite specificities of the people I had the privilege to meet and know a little about. And maybe a little like falling in love, those memories are something I keep close to my chest and feel a little giddy about because those images are my own little secret to myself.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
PUME parents as an inspiration
As I have mentioned in my previous blog posts, one of the major projects I've been collaborating on has been a Literature Review on teacher equity and what seem successful strategies in reducing the high teacher attrition rates. Besides conducting this research, I have also been helping with a education equity campaign in the Central Valley. I was first introduced to this predominantly Mexican immigrant rural community during my first week at the internship. For the past seven months, one of my supervisors has made a weekly three-hour drive to meet with local parents who are concerned about the local schools their children are attending.
This group of parents came together in January to form a parent activist group called Padres Unidos, Mejores Escuelas (Parents United, Better Schools). The parents identified one of their main priorities the drinking fountains at the schools as their kids were complaining of drinking brown water with small particles. Since most of these parents, if not all, were Spanish monolinguals who worked long hours in the local fields, many of them had never stepped into their children's schools. After a few weeks, some of these parents (mostly women) were trained to conduct inspections at the school sites, and over 80 complaints were failed to the school district. Although money is available to remedy some of the problems at the schools (including the fact that the drinking water has been tested at a lab and has been found to be contaminated), the principal and school district administrators have failed to ask the state for some funds.
So after many months of learning the ropes of the American education system, the PUME parents continue to advocate on behalf of their young children. They may not speak English, but they sure have hopes for a better future for their kids. Last Thursday I attended a meeting at 6pm (which would guarantee a better turn out since parents are out of work by then) and was surprised to see over 25 faces (most of whom I had seen for the very first time). It was very inspiring to see all those parents, most of whom had just gotten of a 10 or 12 hours of working out in the hard conditions of the fields, and see them come together for a meeting on how they can help improve the educational opportunities available to their children.
This group of parents remind me of the NCLB parental involvement provisions I read about a few weeks ago. I would like to think that all parents are interested in the education of their children, however, some lack the tools necessary to advocate for their children. Teachers and administrators need to be more conscious of that and approach parents without allowing preconceived notions affect that school-parent interaction. I am hopeful that with the formation of more active parent groups like PUME, school personnel will be sympathetic in listening to their concerns.
This group of parents came together in January to form a parent activist group called Padres Unidos, Mejores Escuelas (Parents United, Better Schools). The parents identified one of their main priorities the drinking fountains at the schools as their kids were complaining of drinking brown water with small particles. Since most of these parents, if not all, were Spanish monolinguals who worked long hours in the local fields, many of them had never stepped into their children's schools. After a few weeks, some of these parents (mostly women) were trained to conduct inspections at the school sites, and over 80 complaints were failed to the school district. Although money is available to remedy some of the problems at the schools (including the fact that the drinking water has been tested at a lab and has been found to be contaminated), the principal and school district administrators have failed to ask the state for some funds.
So after many months of learning the ropes of the American education system, the PUME parents continue to advocate on behalf of their young children. They may not speak English, but they sure have hopes for a better future for their kids. Last Thursday I attended a meeting at 6pm (which would guarantee a better turn out since parents are out of work by then) and was surprised to see over 25 faces (most of whom I had seen for the very first time). It was very inspiring to see all those parents, most of whom had just gotten of a 10 or 12 hours of working out in the hard conditions of the fields, and see them come together for a meeting on how they can help improve the educational opportunities available to their children.
This group of parents remind me of the NCLB parental involvement provisions I read about a few weeks ago. I would like to think that all parents are interested in the education of their children, however, some lack the tools necessary to advocate for their children. Teachers and administrators need to be more conscious of that and approach parents without allowing preconceived notions affect that school-parent interaction. I am hopeful that with the formation of more active parent groups like PUME, school personnel will be sympathetic in listening to their concerns.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Last Full Day in New York City
Dang, well... Today is indeed my last day at Urban Word and my last full day in New York, seeing how my flight leaves tomorrow. I think when I get back to the Bay Area (if you wanna meet, Jennifer, it's an option), I'll be able to write more follow-up/reflection posts on this blog that are a little more interesting. I tend to find myself to be a better retrospective writer than a day-to-day reflective one, for better or worse.
But in either case, Urban Word finishes off its summer workshop series today as well with legend Amiri Baraka, who will teach a workshop and then perform at night afterward. We've been anticipating this with much... heh heh... anticipation. This Tuesday's Revoliterature revolved around studying Baraka and his work, and what was really interesting was that the majority of the young poets there weren't familiar with his work. Basically in order for the instructor to get them to understand how badass he is, he had to explain that he and Saul Williams once visited him, and that Baraka "schooled' Saul with poetry. That made most of 'em go "daaaaaannnnggg."
Last week's "celebrity poet" was a particular poet whose identity wanted to be protected, and who I confess I never heard of before the workshop series, but she was quite outstanding as a workshop leader. She used the anniversary of the Nagasaki bomb as an entry point to talk about points of view and the usage of rhetoric, and then really challenged the young poets with really intense writing exercises. Sometimes the students were so locked into what they conceived to be a "spoken word" voice that conceptually, about half of them did not come to understanding the kind of unconventional writing approaches that she was issuing (e.g. she wanted the students to write fake news articles from multiple political perspectives-- while about half of the students managed to write satirical propaganda pieces, the other half jumped into poetry-speech mode in which they just wrote a poem addressed to the government). Yet, the workshop facilitator was fully supportive of everyone's ideas even if they strayed dramatically from the prompt. It was quite impressive, and quite moving when she used atomic bomb poetry to move the momentum of the workshop forward.
The following several days were quite busy with an extensive series of interviews with youth poets of extremely divergent viewpoints. One poet insisted that "all poetry is rap," not the other way around. Another poet brought her boyfriend along for the interview, who fell asleep on the table next to us as we deconstructed ideas of writing. A third poet continued on about chakras, energy, Zen Buddhism, and inner and outer voices. The diversity of perspectives here is quite intense, but looming over all poets constantly is a sort of New York aesthetic that they either choose to embrace, to cater to, or to reject altogether. Mike Cirelli described how when YouthSpeaks expanded to New York and became Urban Word, there had to be an aesthetic adjustment. Hip hop in New York is indeed a way of life, far more so than I had ever seen before anywhere else, in which you can be starting up a cypher in the freaking garment district and folks will just start walking up and joining it. The intersection of hip hop with spoken word is intense here, and I tend to find that young poets are more likely to start making self-produced albums before chapbooks.
So many instructors know this and adapt accordingly. Gary Glazner, instructor of Applied Poetics (and the producer of the very first national poetry slam), was very detailed in describing how, in his poetry workshops, his primary emphasis was the delivery of poetry, and exploring the great ways in which that expands the public voice of young people. He was particularly interested in collaborative poems, choreopoems, and developing pre-written classics into big performance pieces. For example, several of us in his workshop met outside Lincoln Center on Saturday to perform Howl at a Summer of Love celebration, and that performance involved splitting up the lines between seven people, as well as an intensive set of choreography. For our last Applied Poetics, Glazner led us in what eventually became a poetry cypher that used "We Real Cool" as a repeated motif, but incorporated our own poetry and a ton of supporting beat boxing/chanting in an exciting improvisational technique.
What's also really interesting is the ways in which poetry seems to very, very indirectly approach social activism. While the Urban Word admins (my coworkers) I've talked to explain that they themselves have values that are very community-oriented, they have explained that with the exception of this summer, social justice has not been something that directly taught to them. Rather, it develops organically from what Cirelli said was "honoring their voices." The creation of a safe, student-centered space generates an incredible amount of agency and desire for changing the world, but it's usually pretty unconscious. When asked directly about social justice by Glazner, the poets there really had a hard time answering the question of "How can you apply poetry in original ways for the community?" The responses usually revolved around innovative ways of performing in general, but the idea of using poetry as a political weapon was not exactly something that came naturally. Yet, quite clearly, based on the kind of work these poets were creating, they were revolutionaries already in a sense, which is something they may or may not have been conscious off.
But anyhow, I'm gonna miss the city. My work is not really done here, however, I have to admit... I'm planning a return maybe in winter break to continue the research.
But in either case, Urban Word finishes off its summer workshop series today as well with legend Amiri Baraka, who will teach a workshop and then perform at night afterward. We've been anticipating this with much... heh heh... anticipation. This Tuesday's Revoliterature revolved around studying Baraka and his work, and what was really interesting was that the majority of the young poets there weren't familiar with his work. Basically in order for the instructor to get them to understand how badass he is, he had to explain that he and Saul Williams once visited him, and that Baraka "schooled' Saul with poetry. That made most of 'em go "daaaaaannnnggg."
Last week's "celebrity poet" was a particular poet whose identity wanted to be protected, and who I confess I never heard of before the workshop series, but she was quite outstanding as a workshop leader. She used the anniversary of the Nagasaki bomb as an entry point to talk about points of view and the usage of rhetoric, and then really challenged the young poets with really intense writing exercises. Sometimes the students were so locked into what they conceived to be a "spoken word" voice that conceptually, about half of them did not come to understanding the kind of unconventional writing approaches that she was issuing (e.g. she wanted the students to write fake news articles from multiple political perspectives-- while about half of the students managed to write satirical propaganda pieces, the other half jumped into poetry-speech mode in which they just wrote a poem addressed to the government). Yet, the workshop facilitator was fully supportive of everyone's ideas even if they strayed dramatically from the prompt. It was quite impressive, and quite moving when she used atomic bomb poetry to move the momentum of the workshop forward.
The following several days were quite busy with an extensive series of interviews with youth poets of extremely divergent viewpoints. One poet insisted that "all poetry is rap," not the other way around. Another poet brought her boyfriend along for the interview, who fell asleep on the table next to us as we deconstructed ideas of writing. A third poet continued on about chakras, energy, Zen Buddhism, and inner and outer voices. The diversity of perspectives here is quite intense, but looming over all poets constantly is a sort of New York aesthetic that they either choose to embrace, to cater to, or to reject altogether. Mike Cirelli described how when YouthSpeaks expanded to New York and became Urban Word, there had to be an aesthetic adjustment. Hip hop in New York is indeed a way of life, far more so than I had ever seen before anywhere else, in which you can be starting up a cypher in the freaking garment district and folks will just start walking up and joining it. The intersection of hip hop with spoken word is intense here, and I tend to find that young poets are more likely to start making self-produced albums before chapbooks.
So many instructors know this and adapt accordingly. Gary Glazner, instructor of Applied Poetics (and the producer of the very first national poetry slam), was very detailed in describing how, in his poetry workshops, his primary emphasis was the delivery of poetry, and exploring the great ways in which that expands the public voice of young people. He was particularly interested in collaborative poems, choreopoems, and developing pre-written classics into big performance pieces. For example, several of us in his workshop met outside Lincoln Center on Saturday to perform Howl at a Summer of Love celebration, and that performance involved splitting up the lines between seven people, as well as an intensive set of choreography. For our last Applied Poetics, Glazner led us in what eventually became a poetry cypher that used "We Real Cool" as a repeated motif, but incorporated our own poetry and a ton of supporting beat boxing/chanting in an exciting improvisational technique.
What's also really interesting is the ways in which poetry seems to very, very indirectly approach social activism. While the Urban Word admins (my coworkers) I've talked to explain that they themselves have values that are very community-oriented, they have explained that with the exception of this summer, social justice has not been something that directly taught to them. Rather, it develops organically from what Cirelli said was "honoring their voices." The creation of a safe, student-centered space generates an incredible amount of agency and desire for changing the world, but it's usually pretty unconscious. When asked directly about social justice by Glazner, the poets there really had a hard time answering the question of "How can you apply poetry in original ways for the community?" The responses usually revolved around innovative ways of performing in general, but the idea of using poetry as a political weapon was not exactly something that came naturally. Yet, quite clearly, based on the kind of work these poets were creating, they were revolutionaries already in a sense, which is something they may or may not have been conscious off.
But anyhow, I'm gonna miss the city. My work is not really done here, however, I have to admit... I'm planning a return maybe in winter break to continue the research.
lit review on teacher equity
Over the last six weeks, one of the major projects I have been helping with has been writing a literature review on teacher equity, more specifically on how to recruit and retain qualified teachers. I have read various studies and have concluded that most researches are in favor of better teacher development programs and more support from school administrators.
As I may have mentioned before, teacher attrition is one of the biggest problems in the state. Multiple studies have demonstrated that teacher quality is one of the principal factors affecting student’s performance. If we expect kids to make significant improvements on standardized exams, than we should begin by looking at who is teaching them and whether they have undergone the right preparation programs to learn how to be most effective in the classroom and what pedagogy has proven to be most successful.
Before I began working on this literature review, I always tended to focus on dilemmas in urban schools, such as classroom overcrowding, high drop out rates, teenage pregnancies, English Learners, etc. Although these problems are certainly present in smaller rural communities, my attention seemed to be captured by school districts in LA, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, etc.
Now that I have read multiple studies on teacher quality and the huge problem with recruiting and retaining them, my focus has shifted. Yes, I still believe there are major issues that require a revamp of the whole education system; yes, I still believe more money should be invested in high-poverty and high-minority schools (which tend to be the lowest performing schools too). But there are also major problems with how qualified and prepared are teachers to teach.
As I may have mentioned before, teacher attrition is one of the biggest problems in the state. Multiple studies have demonstrated that teacher quality is one of the principal factors affecting student’s performance. If we expect kids to make significant improvements on standardized exams, than we should begin by looking at who is teaching them and whether they have undergone the right preparation programs to learn how to be most effective in the classroom and what pedagogy has proven to be most successful.
Before I began working on this literature review, I always tended to focus on dilemmas in urban schools, such as classroom overcrowding, high drop out rates, teenage pregnancies, English Learners, etc. Although these problems are certainly present in smaller rural communities, my attention seemed to be captured by school districts in LA, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, etc.
Now that I have read multiple studies on teacher quality and the huge problem with recruiting and retaining them, my focus has shifted. Yes, I still believe there are major issues that require a revamp of the whole education system; yes, I still believe more money should be invested in high-poverty and high-minority schools (which tend to be the lowest performing schools too). But there are also major problems with how qualified and prepared are teachers to teach.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
FLY updates
It has been quite a while since my last post. As my deadline approached, my work seemed to grow exponentially for the four lessons I was assigned to show the Director. Simple reformatting seemed to take hours, not to mention packing in weeks of research into short, hour-long lessons. When the day finally came to present the completed lessons, the Director asked us to hand in printed versions so she could make edits. The meeting went well but both myself and the other person working on this project had our lessons handed back to us for revision before the meeting was even over. By just glancing over the lesson plans, the Director pointed out serious problems with how we presented the material. For example, one of my lessons covered basic banking services. I included a worksheet with examples of how to endorse a check along with information about how to sign over a check to someone else's account. It didn't even cross my mind that this could easily help an at-risk youth commit crimes of forgery and theft. I guess I'm not as cynical as one has to be to help these kids while keeping in mind their susceptibility to criminal behavior. Another problem arose with my immigration lesson. I didn't think that the lessons would need approval from donors and that the material had to be acceptable to conservative right-wing donors. I am struggling with how to include information helpful to immigrants who are in danger of deportation and separation from their families while avoiding being accused of helping "criminals". As for the other two lessons, they still need work because they have been re-worked by others before me and are still in need of being engaging for the youth. I've decided to change the Domestic Violence lesson into more of a guide to how to have healthy relationships because many of the youth have not been raised in healthy environments with models of positive relationships. They really do believe doing favors for their gang-banging partners like buying drugs or doing drive-bys are adequate ways to show love.
I've been gone for the last week and a half and without internet so I'm just getting back to work on these improvements. I'm excited for the next two weeks because we'll finally get to go into Juvenile Hall to pilot some lessons. Tomorrow we'll be going into a ranch unit(kids in juvenile on the waiting list to be sent to a less restrictive and more rehabilitative program on a ranch) to observe the Director teaching a lesson for which an actual lesson plan doesn't exist. She is an incredible instructor and has been teaching lessons on VOP(Violation of Parole) for years but has not created an actual lesson plan. So tomorrow we'll observe her teaching then write up a lesson plan for all the other instructors to begin using. We'll test out one of our new lessons next week without the Director. That should be exciting and I'm thrilled to finally get to work with the youth.
In other news, the Leadership Program at FLY is having their annual retreat for 40 new youth beginning the year-long program. It'll be three days in the wilderness. Well not really, more like in cabins with bunks and a fireplace. I'm sure it won't be any rougher than a one-room double in Wilbur. I just decided today to attend and it is this weekend. It should be a lot of fun with team building activities like a ropes course and beach olympics. I 'm really looking forward to spending quality time with the youth and FLY staff. It beats sitting in front of my computer working on lessons.
I'll post later this week with updates about our time in Juvenile Hall and how the preparations for the retreat are going. Hope everyone is doing well. Ciao!
I've been gone for the last week and a half and without internet so I'm just getting back to work on these improvements. I'm excited for the next two weeks because we'll finally get to go into Juvenile Hall to pilot some lessons. Tomorrow we'll be going into a ranch unit(kids in juvenile on the waiting list to be sent to a less restrictive and more rehabilitative program on a ranch) to observe the Director teaching a lesson for which an actual lesson plan doesn't exist. She is an incredible instructor and has been teaching lessons on VOP(Violation of Parole) for years but has not created an actual lesson plan. So tomorrow we'll observe her teaching then write up a lesson plan for all the other instructors to begin using. We'll test out one of our new lessons next week without the Director. That should be exciting and I'm thrilled to finally get to work with the youth.
In other news, the Leadership Program at FLY is having their annual retreat for 40 new youth beginning the year-long program. It'll be three days in the wilderness. Well not really, more like in cabins with bunks and a fireplace. I'm sure it won't be any rougher than a one-room double in Wilbur. I just decided today to attend and it is this weekend. It should be a lot of fun with team building activities like a ropes course and beach olympics. I 'm really looking forward to spending quality time with the youth and FLY staff. It beats sitting in front of my computer working on lessons.
I'll post later this week with updates about our time in Juvenile Hall and how the preparations for the retreat are going. Hope everyone is doing well. Ciao!
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Beau Sia, Life-Saving Poetry, and a Tornado
Sorry for the late post... last week meant intermittent internet access. My family flew into the city and I kind of had to show them around in addition to working, so I wasn't on for very long throughout the week. But anyway, it's actually been a pretty eventful week last week, as well as this one.
Last week saw a workshop and performance by Beau Sia, arguably the most successful Asian American spoken word artist in the business (you may remember him as a bodega clerk in "Hitch"). He's famous (or infamous) for his very direct, comedic poetry, and is frequently referenced as the quintessence of funny spoken word. But despite his rather comedically eccentric workshop-leading style, he came to us with a fiercely intellectual workshop set-up in which we really interrogated the problematics of activism for the sake of satisfying one's conscience. At the performance, he performed an extremely intense piece referencing Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter. Folks familiar only with his funny work were surprised and astounded by his poignancy, and it was quite a lucky experience for us, seeing how he had just written the poem a day before. He took a creative risk and tried performing songs, as well, which he very metatheatrically kept referencing as being pretty bad (he's not much of a singer, though a great poet and stage presence). In either case, I snagged him for a possible spoken word performance at Stanford, so I'm kind of excited about that.
Many interviews conducted as well... One poet I interviewed was quite literally homeless, and described how poetry, again, literally saved his life from addiction. This same poet was about to head off to compete in the adult National Poetry Slam and was extremely critical of other poets, acknowledging but not agreeing with a non-judgmental egalitarian "everyone can write poetry" sort of ethos. Later that same day I interviewed one of Urban Word's first students,
who avoided the adult poetry slam scene for that community's rejection of that ethos; this poet was more interested in using spoken word as a means for helping teens. I'm trying to figure out to what extent emphases on aesthetic clash with and harmonize with emphases of community... it's interesting. Though I do find that aesthetic-emphasized poets tend to value the archive, while community-emphasized poets tend to value the repertoire, though this of course means no 1:1 relation, nor are these categories I just named off at all definitive.
Applied Poetics has been fascinating; I haven't really discussed that workshop at all yet, have I? It's the only workshop with a consistent instructor (rather than rotating ones), and he's extraordinarily charismatic and clearly has experience working with both very young and very old poets. Interestingly, against the tendency I've seen with most older poets, he emphasizes performance over writing; we've been doing collaborative poem delivery, reciting "Howl" and "We Real Cool" in large Greek-chorus style. But he's really, really interested in the pragmatics of poetry. Today we visited an Alzheimer's center in Brooklyn to read classic poems to the outpatients who came. Contrary to expectation, it was not completely smooth: one of them heckled us, and another who enjoyed our performance got angry at said heckling and ended up almost assaulting the other. Fascinating. But the vast majority of the folks who were there were starry-eyed at the performance, and were very sweet in their thank-yous.
Unfortunately, only one other student, me, and the instructor made it to perform, due to rather interesting events this morning. Crazy enough, much of the public transportation was defunct for the first half of the day due to a tornado-- yeah, that's right, a tornado-- blasting its way through Brooklyn last night. And last night, I had my window open. That was interesting. And comedic. And wet. The very metal door of my housing facility was torn from its base. I was impressed.
So yeah, tornadoes in Brooklyn. Bizarre. Oh, one other thing: as I've announced on Facebook, I've sold out to the Man. And by "the Man," I mean Rupert Murdoch, and by Rupert Murdoch, I mean MySpace. I set up an account. But the reason why I mention that is because everyone else does it here. I mean, everyone. There's an entire community of poets that is trying to make it more or less professionally, and MySpace is how they get gigs. It's insane how, no matter where I perform, five or six people will just walk up to me and ask me if I have a myspace... everyone expects every poet to have one. Talking to other poets, I've discovered that poets have managed to rack up tens of thousands of dollars and national tours... all through myspace. "If you want to network, you'd be insane not to have a myspace," says one poet. "I've gone across the country free of charge because of myspace. I never even met these people in person before I got hired!" So I thought, oh, hell, why not, for kicks, I'll start one up. Sure enough, three hours after I had set it up, a poet who remembered me from another venue I had performed at walked up to me and told me he really loved my work and asked me for my myspace. Insanity. Curse you, Rupert Murdoch.
Last week saw a workshop and performance by Beau Sia, arguably the most successful Asian American spoken word artist in the business (you may remember him as a bodega clerk in "Hitch"). He's famous (or infamous) for his very direct, comedic poetry, and is frequently referenced as the quintessence of funny spoken word. But despite his rather comedically eccentric workshop-leading style, he came to us with a fiercely intellectual workshop set-up in which we really interrogated the problematics of activism for the sake of satisfying one's conscience. At the performance, he performed an extremely intense piece referencing Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter. Folks familiar only with his funny work were surprised and astounded by his poignancy, and it was quite a lucky experience for us, seeing how he had just written the poem a day before. He took a creative risk and tried performing songs, as well, which he very metatheatrically kept referencing as being pretty bad (he's not much of a singer, though a great poet and stage presence). In either case, I snagged him for a possible spoken word performance at Stanford, so I'm kind of excited about that.
Many interviews conducted as well... One poet I interviewed was quite literally homeless, and described how poetry, again, literally saved his life from addiction. This same poet was about to head off to compete in the adult National Poetry Slam and was extremely critical of other poets, acknowledging but not agreeing with a non-judgmental egalitarian "everyone can write poetry" sort of ethos. Later that same day I interviewed one of Urban Word's first students,
who avoided the adult poetry slam scene for that community's rejection of that ethos; this poet was more interested in using spoken word as a means for helping teens. I'm trying to figure out to what extent emphases on aesthetic clash with and harmonize with emphases of community... it's interesting. Though I do find that aesthetic-emphasized poets tend to value the archive, while community-emphasized poets tend to value the repertoire, though this of course means no 1:1 relation, nor are these categories I just named off at all definitive.
Applied Poetics has been fascinating; I haven't really discussed that workshop at all yet, have I? It's the only workshop with a consistent instructor (rather than rotating ones), and he's extraordinarily charismatic and clearly has experience working with both very young and very old poets. Interestingly, against the tendency I've seen with most older poets, he emphasizes performance over writing; we've been doing collaborative poem delivery, reciting "Howl" and "We Real Cool" in large Greek-chorus style. But he's really, really interested in the pragmatics of poetry. Today we visited an Alzheimer's center in Brooklyn to read classic poems to the outpatients who came. Contrary to expectation, it was not completely smooth: one of them heckled us, and another who enjoyed our performance got angry at said heckling and ended up almost assaulting the other. Fascinating. But the vast majority of the folks who were there were starry-eyed at the performance, and were very sweet in their thank-yous.
Unfortunately, only one other student, me, and the instructor made it to perform, due to rather interesting events this morning. Crazy enough, much of the public transportation was defunct for the first half of the day due to a tornado-- yeah, that's right, a tornado-- blasting its way through Brooklyn last night. And last night, I had my window open. That was interesting. And comedic. And wet. The very metal door of my housing facility was torn from its base. I was impressed.
So yeah, tornadoes in Brooklyn. Bizarre. Oh, one other thing: as I've announced on Facebook, I've sold out to the Man. And by "the Man," I mean Rupert Murdoch, and by Rupert Murdoch, I mean MySpace. I set up an account. But the reason why I mention that is because everyone else does it here. I mean, everyone. There's an entire community of poets that is trying to make it more or less professionally, and MySpace is how they get gigs. It's insane how, no matter where I perform, five or six people will just walk up to me and ask me if I have a myspace... everyone expects every poet to have one. Talking to other poets, I've discovered that poets have managed to rack up tens of thousands of dollars and national tours... all through myspace. "If you want to network, you'd be insane not to have a myspace," says one poet. "I've gone across the country free of charge because of myspace. I never even met these people in person before I got hired!" So I thought, oh, hell, why not, for kicks, I'll start one up. Sure enough, three hours after I had set it up, a poet who remembered me from another venue I had performed at walked up to me and told me he really loved my work and asked me for my myspace. Insanity. Curse you, Rupert Murdoch.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)