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.