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.