Audre Lorde, Political Consciousness, and a Poetry Slam

So the first day of "Revoliterature" went off without a hitch, more or less. Our workshop leader was an accomplished poet from the organization Louder Arts, and to my surprise, he didn't pull any punches in terms of intellectual challenge. The man whipped out a series of Audre Lorde and June Jordan poems that the students had to deconstruct and analyze. We were covering complex topics, particularly around discourses of power, and the idea of the erotic as a liberating force. Pretty heavy topic for high schoolers, I was thinking; while I was a participant of this workshop I took a step back and only contributed to the discussion when I felt it might open up interesting directions for poets to analyze. I did find that many of my suspicions were correct: the workshop leader made perfect sense to me because I had gone through three years of CSRE classes, but many (though not all) of the high school students were oftentimes lost. Fortunately, those students who did get a grasp of what she was saying were extremely patient and helped along those who were completely missing the point of Lorde's work; I was impressed with that steadiness, that patience, and how it remained a very nurturing environment.

What was fascinating about this particular workshop was that there was actually no writing-- it might as well have been one of David Palumbo-Liu's discussion sections (the conversation, in fact, really steered toward a lot of the same questions of his class Ethnicity and Literature-- you know what I'm talking about, Matt). The goal of the workshop leader, it seemed, was really to expand consciousness, rather than to examine the mechanics of the poetry. This makes a lot of sense to me; the ideal aesthetic in spoken word could be characterized by its "truth," its "authenticity." In becoming an astute sociologist, you become a better poet-- find the truth, and the poetry will follow. This reflects much of what an Urban Word admin told me in interview; he really wanted to see poets become more than just writers for their own sake, but also successful students and activists.

Later that night, I decided to compete in a poetry slam. Originally I had gone merely to observe and find interview subjects, but it turned out I would save two dollars if I competed, so I did. The poetry slam is a slightly different phenomenon from the open mic, and dramatically different from the workshop, and after three years of experience slamming in the college circuit, I could go on about it, but I won't. Suffice to say that it was really interesting (though not at all unpredictable) seeing how the poems were scored. As always, poems in the second half of the event got big score inflations (because the audience becomes conditioned to listen to the poems more closely by that time), and poets who had memorized their pieces, even if they were by and large cliché, always scored better than poets who brought up paper, even if the page-poets produced more poignant writing. Lots of verbal affirmation from the audience when they heard lines that they liked, but on most of these affirmative head-nods, I had heard lines I had heard a million times before (making plays on Dick Cheney's or Bush's names, or lecturing-- without using imagery-- how blacks are still oppressed). It seemed to me that the phenomenon was that there were affirmations for those things that folks already knew or agreed with, but then again, I didn't see much poetry that strayed outside of the general opinion anyway (mine didn't either). I may have also been imagining it, but I also perceived a bias toward male poets, and the woman poet who did the strongest projected and hit her points much like the men in the room. I don't think it would be accurate to say that she had a "masculine" method of performance to cater to a "masculine" aesthetic, but it seems to me that for whatever reason (perhaps institutional confidence in the public arena), the men did have a general advantage in the scoring.

By the way, I had the major disadvantage of performing first in the slam (the first poet almost always gets scored lower than usual, and I was no exception, scoring lower than later poets who would forget their poems midway through). Yet by some miracle, I've advanced to the semifinal round, which happens in a couple of days, so I'll let you all know how that goes....