The slam hat of destiny chose me to go last in the first round and subsequently first in the second round which is my least favorite order, but it was still intensely awesome. I slammed Happy Hour and Afraid to Know me (a first time performance piece on race). I didn't win. I came in at the bottom of the second round, but had I not gone 3 seconds over I would have knocked last year's NATIONAL Slam winner out of round 2...which to me is a major accomplishment. As it was we tied at 26. 8 and there were six of us in round 2. The other 2 poets who didn't advance, were both stellar: one was this guy who came in 2nd place the first time I slammed and took 1st the second time I slammed. He already has a place in the grand slam coming up in April. The other poet competed in the grand slam last year.
It's been interesting to start getting to know people. The other poets have been really supportive and cool about my work. I'm not an every week poet. My Wednesday nights are always jam packed, either with sparring or meetings for work, so I'm a once a month poet at best. But now I am beginning to know who is who. Entering a new community is a little intimidating. It was really good slam, packed with amazing poets. When the host read the list of poets in the slam and more than one of them was a slam champion, it kind of freaked me out a little, but once I'm there, I'm there, and my friends had come to support me. I hate the waiting. I like getting there early to get a good table and have a drink, but after listening to 6-8 poets on the open mike, then the featured performer (who totally kicked ass..I love you Gary Warmwater!), I am antsy to get it over with. It's strange to go from looking forward to something all week to just wishing it were over, but that's what happens when I have too much time to think. I was also a little nervous because I slammed some deep shit last night.
Some poems just come to me, mostly in the early morning or late at night when its still dark and I don't really want to get up or turn on the light. I've taken to keeping a notebook next to my bed so I can just lean over without really even having to wake up all the way. Other poems take forever. I write a stanza or a verse and then its just there until I remember to come back to it, sometimes months, even years later. The poem I slammed in round 2 was one of those poems, a conglomerate of two separate poems I have been working on for the last four months that I didn't realize were the same poem until I sat down and youtubed Barak's speech about race relations. I really liked what he had to say, partly because he didn't chicken out. This was a speech where he could have just condemned Reverend Wright and completely invalidated everything he had to say, and I was kind of waiting for him to that as it would have been a very politically expedient thing to do, but instead, he showed some guts and really dug into the meat of all the things we never say in mixed company in a way that was respectful to all parties. I couldn't have done it. And really I'm not in the stage of my life where I want to do it. I want to tell the truth and be unapologetic about it.
While I was writing and re-writing the poem, which still isn't really done yet, I was having all these grad school flash backs. I remember watching the movie the Color of Fear, which is actually really good and worth watching. It's a documentary of a retreat with a group of multi-ethnic men who go to a retreat to talk about race. This is up there on my top 10 list of things I never want to do: be trapped for a whole weekend with guilty white people who think they can ask me anything about my life....like they are entitled to have me share my most intimate and sometimes painful memories for the benefit of their education. So they can really "know what its like", when they clearly can't ever know what its like. And when they get close they freak out and run the other way. So I was remembering my white classmates reaction to the movie and how they didn't want to talk about what was actually said, but only about how the black man in the movie kept yelling. It was so frustrating because they were so uncomfortable that they couldn't even process that what he was saying was the truth. Last night I slammed an angry poem. I will post the poem, but not today. It's still a work in progress. It's one of the first times I've actually been able to articulate this visceral emotion that lives within me and explain a little bit about why.
I talked to my mom a few days ago and she told me this story that just made me sick. She was listening to Story Corp on NPR about a woman remembering her grandmother. Her grandmother saw her painting her finger nails and told her that they didn't used to be able to do that. She questioned her grandmother further because that seemed crazy and her grandmother told her about the time when she was a little girl. Her mother worked in the house of a white woman, and one day that woman threw out some old nail polish. The little girl took it from the trash and painted her nails. Later she went to a store in town and when the store owner saw her hands he grabbed then and told her niggers couldn't wear white lady's nail polish. He took a pair of pliers and ripped off every single one of her finger nails. Let me repeat that. This white man took a pair of pliers and ripped the finger nails off a black child simply because he could.
What he did was reprehensible, but what to me is even scarier are the crimes that have been perpetrated against people of color in the name of the law, by our own government. Now that slavery is over, now that "Indians" have casinos, and Japanese people have received their checks for the internment, we're just supposed to forget it ever happened. Get over it. Move on. Well thanks for the PSA, but I'm just not ready yet. It seems to me like the equivalent of a rape victim being told by her rapist that now that he knows he did a bad thing and he sent her an apology card, she should just get over it. He made things all better right? He gets to dictate how she's supposed to feel and what is a suitable compensation for the damage done. What kind of sense does that make? Yeah, I'm still angry. And I talked about it, and it was interesting because some people were really not ready to hear me. I got a range of scores, but more interesting was the total silence, the little shocked gasped...it's so weird to have my writing be interactive. I'm so used to just sending it out into space and then maybe getting some feedback, but the immediacy of the slam is kind of intoxicating. Sometimes its very call in response, the audience feeding off of you and vise versa. Last night it wasn't like that at all. But it was worth it.
It's been interesting to start getting to know people. The other poets have been really supportive and cool about my work. I'm not an every week poet. My Wednesday nights are always jam packed, either with sparring or meetings for work, so I'm a once a month poet at best. But now I am beginning to know who is who. Entering a new community is a little intimidating. It was really good slam, packed with amazing poets. When the host read the list of poets in the slam and more than one of them was a slam champion, it kind of freaked me out a little, but once I'm there, I'm there, and my friends had come to support me. I hate the waiting. I like getting there early to get a good table and have a drink, but after listening to 6-8 poets on the open mike, then the featured performer (who totally kicked ass..I love you Gary Warmwater!), I am antsy to get it over with. It's strange to go from looking forward to something all week to just wishing it were over, but that's what happens when I have too much time to think. I was also a little nervous because I slammed some deep shit last night.
Some poems just come to me, mostly in the early morning or late at night when its still dark and I don't really want to get up or turn on the light. I've taken to keeping a notebook next to my bed so I can just lean over without really even having to wake up all the way. Other poems take forever. I write a stanza or a verse and then its just there until I remember to come back to it, sometimes months, even years later. The poem I slammed in round 2 was one of those poems, a conglomerate of two separate poems I have been working on for the last four months that I didn't realize were the same poem until I sat down and youtubed Barak's speech about race relations. I really liked what he had to say, partly because he didn't chicken out. This was a speech where he could have just condemned Reverend Wright and completely invalidated everything he had to say, and I was kind of waiting for him to that as it would have been a very politically expedient thing to do, but instead, he showed some guts and really dug into the meat of all the things we never say in mixed company in a way that was respectful to all parties. I couldn't have done it. And really I'm not in the stage of my life where I want to do it. I want to tell the truth and be unapologetic about it.
While I was writing and re-writing the poem, which still isn't really done yet, I was having all these grad school flash backs. I remember watching the movie the Color of Fear, which is actually really good and worth watching. It's a documentary of a retreat with a group of multi-ethnic men who go to a retreat to talk about race. This is up there on my top 10 list of things I never want to do: be trapped for a whole weekend with guilty white people who think they can ask me anything about my life....like they are entitled to have me share my most intimate and sometimes painful memories for the benefit of their education. So they can really "know what its like", when they clearly can't ever know what its like. And when they get close they freak out and run the other way. So I was remembering my white classmates reaction to the movie and how they didn't want to talk about what was actually said, but only about how the black man in the movie kept yelling. It was so frustrating because they were so uncomfortable that they couldn't even process that what he was saying was the truth. Last night I slammed an angry poem. I will post the poem, but not today. It's still a work in progress. It's one of the first times I've actually been able to articulate this visceral emotion that lives within me and explain a little bit about why.
I talked to my mom a few days ago and she told me this story that just made me sick. She was listening to Story Corp on NPR about a woman remembering her grandmother. Her grandmother saw her painting her finger nails and told her that they didn't used to be able to do that. She questioned her grandmother further because that seemed crazy and her grandmother told her about the time when she was a little girl. Her mother worked in the house of a white woman, and one day that woman threw out some old nail polish. The little girl took it from the trash and painted her nails. Later she went to a store in town and when the store owner saw her hands he grabbed then and told her niggers couldn't wear white lady's nail polish. He took a pair of pliers and ripped off every single one of her finger nails. Let me repeat that. This white man took a pair of pliers and ripped the finger nails off a black child simply because he could.
What he did was reprehensible, but what to me is even scarier are the crimes that have been perpetrated against people of color in the name of the law, by our own government. Now that slavery is over, now that "Indians" have casinos, and Japanese people have received their checks for the internment, we're just supposed to forget it ever happened. Get over it. Move on. Well thanks for the PSA, but I'm just not ready yet. It seems to me like the equivalent of a rape victim being told by her rapist that now that he knows he did a bad thing and he sent her an apology card, she should just get over it. He made things all better right? He gets to dictate how she's supposed to feel and what is a suitable compensation for the damage done. What kind of sense does that make? Yeah, I'm still angry. And I talked about it, and it was interesting because some people were really not ready to hear me. I got a range of scores, but more interesting was the total silence, the little shocked gasped...it's so weird to have my writing be interactive. I'm so used to just sending it out into space and then maybe getting some feedback, but the immediacy of the slam is kind of intoxicating. Sometimes its very call in response, the audience feeding off of you and vise versa. Last night it wasn't like that at all. But it was worth it.
1 comment:
U ROCKED REJJ!!!!!
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