I’m out of town next week, and so one of my intrepid TA’s has agreed to be in charge of next week’s class, in which discussion will be based upon the video I talk a LOT about, Juan Felipe Herrera’s “A Natural History of Chicano Literature.” I’ve just watched it again, and am in the process of making notes, important points, issues/ideas relevant to our continued and expanding discussion of the democratization of poetry, and poets of color movements being closely tied to social justice issues and community activism.
The democratization of poetry is interesting to me, in terms of it being much needed, i.e. wresting it away from academic institutions, and expanding the definitions of American Poetry to be more inclusive of poetries that expand genre and use of language, poetries that are inextricable parts of social and political movements. We continue to discuss the importance of having our own physical and intellectual spaces to create new languages and terminology, to create, disseminate, discuss our poetries. I’m operating here on a given (for me) that we are dealing with hybrid and/or hybridized communities and identities, hence hybrid and/or hybridized language and art (as opposed to fractured communities and identities). Hence, Kearny Street Workshop, the Basement Workshop, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the 1973 Floricanto, and the fluidity of these.
Thinking on the need to expand the boundaries of poetry, I’d pointed out yesterday evening that Pietri and Piñero were poets and playwrights. I talked about the live performance, the “spoken word” not as a new thing, but as a continuation of a very old, pre-literature talkstory tradition. In this Herrera video, he says, “We need as many different mediums as possible to express as many realities as possible.” Think about the art of these social and political movements including dance, guerrilla theater, murals, silk screened posters, song, and indeed, poetry that is a rallying cry, a call to action. So the immediacy of our poetry, communicating what is urgent, charging a space and those who inhabit it to feel, to act, and indeed, to pass it on. The audience then as a empowered participant, empowered by a sense of responsibility to DO.
That said, I won’t let go of the book as one important way of documenting our lives, dreams, histories, as one way of our stories growing and traveling beyond our known frames of reference. In Herrera’s talk, he’s brought a stack of chapbooks and books, and in these are so many lives documented, many who would otherwise have been forgotten or overlooked by history, by media. Think of the chapbook and even the book as moment in time, a specific memory — for example, Truong Tran’s very limited edition DIY chapbook dedicated to Itzolin Garcia. Another writer Herrera discusses is Oscar Zeta Acosta, and his story of Robert in The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), which he read/shared/performed at the 1973 Floricanto. Robert, the young vato suicided by the cops, is remembered, and also important, Oscar Zeta Acosta is remembered, his work, his compassion are remembered. He disappeared one year later. No one knows what happened to him.
I think, we need those who knew him to always talkstory about him, as Herrera does, by reading to us from the book. We need the video recordings of him, perhaps especially as he tells the story of Robert and the autobiographical lawyer character trying to do right by Robert and his family (Video 1 | Video 2 | Video 3 | Video 4). And as I watch these videos, it becomes heart wrenching, to hear what befalls Robert’s body; it becomes heart wrenching to see in this reading, Acosta fight back the urge to weep. This is not affectation or performance, and maybe we wouldn’t see this pain in the text. Still, we need his books, the very words he wrote. I feel like all most folks know of him is Hunter S. Thompson’s version of him, and the more popularized Benicio del Toro version of him in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
As I am writing all this, I think of something that’s always coming up in class (and that I am always bringing up in class), especially about these historical movements: the presence of women artists in more balanced numbers, even the prominence of women artists. Why not prominence? I feel like nationalist projects are traditionally treated as the province of men (and conversely, domestic projects the province of women). Beginning the semester with Julia de Burgos, reading (up to this point) Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Lois Griffith, I’d hoped would balance out the gender disparity. But it’s stark, and so do we accept it as indicative of “the times,” or do we attribute it to traditionally male dominated arts and social scenes and even good old fashioned machismo? So that’s one criticism; certainly, social justice movements, those which point out societal wrongs, should ideally also see misogyny as one of these wrongs.
I want to also be critical of the performance space, or the culture of the performance space. While I value it as that democratized incubation space, as a participatory, alive space, it’s necessary for me to point out that our performance spaces are by no means perfect spaces, even in community settings. I know I am always quick to point out when bravado in performance supersedes the quality of the poem. But I realize it’s more clear to state it this way: I always wonder to what end do we continue validating poets whose work refuses to grow because they refuse to hear and/or dialogue with fellow community members of differing beliefs and experiences. I wonder how many individual community members sacrifice their own beliefs and integrity because they need that community approval, because it’s against community spirit to dissent. How should I support those whose politics alienate others by redrawing dividing lines?
I want to think about how my previous sentences are related to traditional heteronormative and masculinist gender roles, and how these can and do manifest themselves in our community performance spaces. How many women earn the praise of their communities for creating and performing work outside of proscribed gender boundaries/expectations/subject matter. Moreover, too often, I hear of or witness women and LGBT folks alienated in these democratized spaces by misogynist or homophobic work and behavior. I am asking these questions, based upon my own experiences in community performance spaces in which I should feel “safe” or welcome, and don’t, or no longer do. I am very sure I am not the only one who feels like this.
There’s very much here that resonates for me in several dozen directions. What I can say here is likely very random and taking shape as I say it here, and in-progress.
I started writing poems in 1968 (14 years old), in the context of the multiple and constant political insurgencies (with their ebbs and flows) of the time, and I started writing with a conscious sense of poetry as a potential tool in political and social movements, one of the many atmospheres that pervaded everything in those years.
I get dizzy these days trying to tangle through the maze of questions about books and online media and live performance, and clearly there’s a lot of water in this that hasn’t settled yet. I can’t conceive of having become a poet without print books. (Not print books exclusively, by any means, but as one central element.)
What amazing clues do we have of the possible arcs of our many cultures, and our place in them, because of cave paintings, stone tools, petroglyphs?
I keep remembering that the story of Gilgamesh survives (what there is of it that survives) on pieces of clay tablets; while there is computer data 30 and 40 years old that no one is able to access any more because the hardware doesn’t work any more and no one knows how to fix it.
One of the difficulties I’ve run into sometimes with performance spaces and cultures has to do with what I guess I want to call the aggressiveness such scenes sometimes seem to require. If I’m reading poems to a room where people are sitting at tables talking, coming and going, dishes clattering, etc. (just to talk about one common example), it often becomes necessary to read a certain type (or range of types) of poem, to give my speaking voice a certain volume level and an attitude of self-assurance, to catch and hold people’s attention and attention span.
I can imagine reading a soft or quiet or shy poem in such a space, though to do so often means going against the grain of the space and the crowd (and, sometimes, the acoustics). Ringo Starr on David Letterman said once that one of the reasons the Beatles stopped doing live concerts was that it became to difficult to do their music — especially anything other than full blast force and volume — surrounded by a concert hall or stadium of people screaming at the top of their lungs.
In her book The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser says that the difference between art and entertainment (and I’m paraphrasing slightly here) is that art tries to get us to concentrate on what it’s bringing to us, and entertainment tries to distract us from what it’s not bringing to us. This distinction has become crucial to me to an ever greater degree over the years, in making my own poems.
Hi Lyle, thanks for this comment. I do like what you are saying about the clay tablets which have kept alive the old epics, etc. As I come to publish more online, in e-journals and such, and rely upon documentation also stored online, I also think of servers being wiped, etc.
In the meantime, my first DIY chapbook, of which I printed ~100 copies, which I *sometimes* hope would just go away, manages to pop up in some unexpected places!
Re: the aggressiveness of the performance spaces you mention above, I get what you are saying; not every poet or performer can work with that kind of space. I am a different person, I’ve experienced, when reading to a very loud and bustling room, whereas the way I’d been writing in recent years has come to rely on nuanced language and more gentle tones, which I can’t communicate well in these bustling spaces. I’ve been able to convert some of this work into more aggressive performance, minus nuance, but I feel like I’ve outgrown my need to perform so aggressively.
My biggest problem with the aggressiveness of such spaces is when it can become bullying, chauvinistic, and when the quiet nuanced work is judged to be less “political” or “relevant” to the community – with little regard as to its actual content.
The poet writes because he/she has to. The level of a poet’s professionalism, that of a career poet, is measured by the number of published books, readings, reviews, and quality of the endorsements (blurbs) found on the poet’s book and the notoriety of the fellow poet or critic (MFA grad) who graciously provided that blurb. The poet who avoids all that I’ve mentioned, must have another means to gaining a “foothold” in the literary world. That may take the form of live “slam” style readings, performances in the bar room instead of the classroom, or the refined venues where people patronize poetry in bourgeois settings. If you want an audience, you may not have one as a presenting professor or a student, unless, it’s “mandatory” that the class must attend a reading towards their class grade. The poet has few NON-POET “fans” that are drawn to the poet on the sheer skill and talent expressed in the poet’s words. I’ll stop here, I am merely stating the obvious. Who attends poetry readings? OTHER POETS.