Another Post from Takeo

Sorry I'm doing a poor job being up-to-date with updates and such... again... but here goes...

It's kind of exciting in that this week, the intensive summer poetry workshops actually begin at Urban Word. The last several weeks I've been pitching in with preparation type stuff... mostly recruitment, logistics, that sort of thing. But this week, they're actually going down, and they look absolutely exciting.

One workshop, entitled "Revoliterature," revolves around social justice poetry; looking at a lot of politically conscious poets and how they use poetry to produce social change in the world around them. Very pertinent to my project, and I'm going to try to audio-record the process so as to study the sort of techniques that are employed. Another workshop is entitled "Applied Poetics," primarily about the practical application of poetry to one's everyday life; again very exciting in the sense of spoken word poetry as a liminal process. And then there's the "Write the Power" masters class, which brings in famous poets to work directly with the young students, and at Urban Word, they're not kidding: Amiri Baraka is teaching the final workshop (literally the last day of my internship).

Definitely been out and about interviewing different folks and their perspectives on poetry. Reading Victor Turner's "Anthropology of Performance" while simultaneously talking to folks about their work is extremely eye-opening. The sort of primordial performance studies-type writing that Turner elaborates upon (especially when he compares/contrasts his views with Erving Goffman) is giving me a great theoretical base with which to examine things. Naturally, not everything fits sociological/anthropological theory, and it's really exciting to see how ideas of structure, process, and performance get affirmed but sometimes stretched by my findings. I'm really intrigued by Turner's idea of the "social drama," and how that manifests itself in the context of spoken word poets. Prof. Elam in "Taking it to the Streets" explains how El Teatro Campesino utilized the very real social drama of the UFW strike, such that a Luis Valdez acto produced a ritualized, liminal space where the possibilities of change were boundless. In the case of the spoken word artist, there does not necessarily need to be a single "event" (or "crisis," by Turner's terminology) for the poet to be engaged in directly in the moment: i.e., there does not need to be a rally for the poet to recite in. Rather, the open mic session becomes a sort of rotation of three-minute crises that the work both responds to and invokes simultaneously. Definitely something I've been thinking about as I go from performance to performance, open mic to open mic...

I'm also really trying to get a handle on the more aesthetic analysis of the experience... i.e. how does a community regulate the aesthetic of spoken word. Going from Spanish Harlem to Bed-Stuy to midtown Manhattan, I'm noticing certain patterns in-group, but my ability to analyze is based off of my own experience writing and teaching spoken word in a kind of self-trained, "naïve" sense rather than in any formal grounding in English classes. Furthermore, I've remained intrigued by the ubiquity of "poet names"-- in what sense is a different identity being performed once the poet enters a stage space. And to bring it back to Turner, in what ways is that space liminal-- that is, an in-between ritualized space-- or liminoid, which imitates the liminal but with a universal understanding of its fiction?

But yeah.... More to come...