Poetry is Doomed: A Rant in Three Acts
1.
He must have been 20, but not much more than that, and I'm being generous as it is. There was no polish to him, personally, let alone what may have been lacking in his work. If clothes make the artist - and they don't, but if they did - then he was going to subject the audience that night to some abysmal rap gone wrong. I'm artistically profiling, sure, but in the interest of protecting the community and public service.
He came only slightly later than advertised to his credit, but the room was filling up nicely by the time he appeared. We were only set up for an abbreviated open mic as it was, what, with the grand slam occuring that evening. He opted to spend the first fifteen minutes of his freshman visit to our show settling in, taking in the room, talking up another new attendee and sitting, waiting for the night to start.
After the first couple of poets took to the mic, he finally approached me and wanted to know if he could get on the list. I let him know that the list was at capacity. He looked astonished, then asked if there was NO way to fit one more poet on the list. I informed him that there wasn't, that we were really tight on time that night because of the slam. He sucked his teeth and returned to his seat. It occured to me at that point to start a provisonal open mic list, on the off chance that we moved through the night at a good clip and could fit more poets on after the slam. I informed Vernell to announce as much as soon as the poet on the mic was finished. Not a minute after this decision, he was dragging his bookbag out the door, his disgust a stench that followed him through the room as he left. If he couldn't read, what was the point?
It never occured to him to sit and watch the other poets. He had no ears. He has only a mouth, and he must scream.
2.
The film love jones can't slip out of the collective consciousness of black poets fast enough.
If I hear someone use the line "make love to my mind" one more time I will hurl the heaviest Pablo Neruda tome I can find at the offending wordshit.
Understand, I have nothing against the movie. I enjoyed it just fine whenever someone wasn't doing a poem (a merciful 5 minutes total if you bothered to count the art form's presence at all). It's a more-than-serviceable love story and Nia Long has to try really, really hard to do wrong in my book (like Held Up hard). I can even trace my own entry into the spoken word scene to the effect of the cool imagery of this film's meager and fleeting band of bards upon my own as yet unformed artistic voice. What black person, after seeing this film, didn't want to hang out in dark clubs, wear leather jackets and woo Nia Long-cool women by dressing their apparent lubricity in verse? What sister didn't want to have her thighs whispered to, or believe that by reading out of their journal they could net true, rain-soaked love in the end? How many Coltrane records did we buy that year, and how many poems did we write about his power?
To compound the ludicrousness of the matter, no such line actually ever appears in the three poems presented in the film. Despite this fact, you can likely trace its diarrhea-level use to the first open mic taking place the day after this film opened in 1997.
"Make love to my mind."
My bile is insitgated to eruption by the heavy-handedness of the point of this statement, despite the fact that there are worse and more common offenses in poetry. The blunt point of using this line by a poet, usually female, is to implore their fictive (or not) paramour (usually to-be) to not focus on their exterior beauty (beauty which we, the victims of the poet in question - read, the audience - must all agree is actual and not compare too much to, say, our own personal standards of beauty) but to instead find her virtuous of personality and intellectually sexy...regardless as to whether or not there is anything in the poem or her presentation to suggest that this is indeed the case.
And while the blatant jackhammering of morality to an audience is reprehensible enough, my greater beef with this line is its alarming frequency. It's sort of frightening to watch a cliche being born, in real time. It comes out of the womb of the groupmind a pleasing and informative thing; poignant even in some cases. Somewhere along the way it becomes popular, the captain of the football team that everyone wants to be seen with, or at least rumored to have slept with. Eventually it becomes too popular, like a good song played one too many times that turns the corner and becomes just "alright", or worse, the bottom of an enormous bucket of popcorn that we continue to nibble at, but have lost the flavor for and can now feel the labor of chewing. Whatever power this phrase ever had, it has been lost in the sea of sameness that passes for contemporary love poetry. I heard someone use it in a poem the other night and I audibly guffawed in astonishment (fortunately, the band she was reading in front of drowned it, and much of her poem, out). I thought, "People are still USING that? I mean, in EARNEST?"
"Make love to my mind."
What does this mean, exactly? Should I begin my missives to the apple of my eye with "Dear Nia Long's Cranium..."? Should I buy for her head sexy hats and bandanas? Should I whisper into your ear all good and beautiful things until you are ready for intercourse and only then cease using my "inside voice"? Please, I know what this means, but I want to know what the person who deigns to use such a line wants me to see in my mind as a result. All I can come up with is the fairly gross image of...well, I'll spare you the thought. You can likely surmise, from the utter transparency of the line, where this could only lead.
To close: there is no way to make it fresh again, not for years to come, and so we must put this tired line to rest. We must care enough about our art and our voices to, if not be bothered to seek out new words for the same things, be wise enough to not use the same ones over and over between us.
Make love to MY mind and quit prison-raping me with this grossly-overused snatch of literary laziness.
3.
Sonya Sanchez's liner notes for Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes' "Blue Notes and Ballads" are vapid to the point of implosion. Opening the jewel case of this CD should have exposed a black hole, sucking in all life with its banality. Much of her later work is insipid enough, but this little ditty is the literary (and I use that word begrudgingly) equivalent of sleepwalking with scissors in your hands in a room lined with tripwires.
An excerpt:
"It was the way they touched as at rest in bed or standing still in the evening air. They made us hear the music in our blood. And we sang. Lived. Moved from rural cocoons to black urban butterflies. Yeah, if you don't know them by now, you never will."
My beef isn't that this is bad poetry; it isn't supposed to be poetry at all. It's liner notes, and it walks and sits like liner notes in the living room of the package. What clutches my brain in burning snatches of painful hemidemisemiquaver is that this is simply how Sanchez communicates and it is brutally inane. The temptation to see the above and think, "Wait, that IS a poem! It's poetic!" is great but don't be fooled; she simply can't stop using the same metaphors over and over in her diatribes, be they poetry or prose. I want to shake the hand of the person who fails her English class.
This tripe is in place of any potentially useful (or hell, even common) biography information. ANY.
And how was your Saturday night?
He must have been 20, but not much more than that, and I'm being generous as it is. There was no polish to him, personally, let alone what may have been lacking in his work. If clothes make the artist - and they don't, but if they did - then he was going to subject the audience that night to some abysmal rap gone wrong. I'm artistically profiling, sure, but in the interest of protecting the community and public service.
He came only slightly later than advertised to his credit, but the room was filling up nicely by the time he appeared. We were only set up for an abbreviated open mic as it was, what, with the grand slam occuring that evening. He opted to spend the first fifteen minutes of his freshman visit to our show settling in, taking in the room, talking up another new attendee and sitting, waiting for the night to start.
After the first couple of poets took to the mic, he finally approached me and wanted to know if he could get on the list. I let him know that the list was at capacity. He looked astonished, then asked if there was NO way to fit one more poet on the list. I informed him that there wasn't, that we were really tight on time that night because of the slam. He sucked his teeth and returned to his seat. It occured to me at that point to start a provisonal open mic list, on the off chance that we moved through the night at a good clip and could fit more poets on after the slam. I informed Vernell to announce as much as soon as the poet on the mic was finished. Not a minute after this decision, he was dragging his bookbag out the door, his disgust a stench that followed him through the room as he left. If he couldn't read, what was the point?
It never occured to him to sit and watch the other poets. He had no ears. He has only a mouth, and he must scream.
2.
The film love jones can't slip out of the collective consciousness of black poets fast enough.
If I hear someone use the line "make love to my mind" one more time I will hurl the heaviest Pablo Neruda tome I can find at the offending wordshit.
Understand, I have nothing against the movie. I enjoyed it just fine whenever someone wasn't doing a poem (a merciful 5 minutes total if you bothered to count the art form's presence at all). It's a more-than-serviceable love story and Nia Long has to try really, really hard to do wrong in my book (like Held Up hard). I can even trace my own entry into the spoken word scene to the effect of the cool imagery of this film's meager and fleeting band of bards upon my own as yet unformed artistic voice. What black person, after seeing this film, didn't want to hang out in dark clubs, wear leather jackets and woo Nia Long-cool women by dressing their apparent lubricity in verse? What sister didn't want to have her thighs whispered to, or believe that by reading out of their journal they could net true, rain-soaked love in the end? How many Coltrane records did we buy that year, and how many poems did we write about his power?
To compound the ludicrousness of the matter, no such line actually ever appears in the three poems presented in the film. Despite this fact, you can likely trace its diarrhea-level use to the first open mic taking place the day after this film opened in 1997.
"Make love to my mind."
My bile is insitgated to eruption by the heavy-handedness of the point of this statement, despite the fact that there are worse and more common offenses in poetry. The blunt point of using this line by a poet, usually female, is to implore their fictive (or not) paramour (usually to-be) to not focus on their exterior beauty (beauty which we, the victims of the poet in question - read, the audience - must all agree is actual and not compare too much to, say, our own personal standards of beauty) but to instead find her virtuous of personality and intellectually sexy...regardless as to whether or not there is anything in the poem or her presentation to suggest that this is indeed the case.
And while the blatant jackhammering of morality to an audience is reprehensible enough, my greater beef with this line is its alarming frequency. It's sort of frightening to watch a cliche being born, in real time. It comes out of the womb of the groupmind a pleasing and informative thing; poignant even in some cases. Somewhere along the way it becomes popular, the captain of the football team that everyone wants to be seen with, or at least rumored to have slept with. Eventually it becomes too popular, like a good song played one too many times that turns the corner and becomes just "alright", or worse, the bottom of an enormous bucket of popcorn that we continue to nibble at, but have lost the flavor for and can now feel the labor of chewing. Whatever power this phrase ever had, it has been lost in the sea of sameness that passes for contemporary love poetry. I heard someone use it in a poem the other night and I audibly guffawed in astonishment (fortunately, the band she was reading in front of drowned it, and much of her poem, out). I thought, "People are still USING that? I mean, in EARNEST?"
"Make love to my mind."
What does this mean, exactly? Should I begin my missives to the apple of my eye with "Dear Nia Long's Cranium..."? Should I buy for her head sexy hats and bandanas? Should I whisper into your ear all good and beautiful things until you are ready for intercourse and only then cease using my "inside voice"? Please, I know what this means, but I want to know what the person who deigns to use such a line wants me to see in my mind as a result. All I can come up with is the fairly gross image of...well, I'll spare you the thought. You can likely surmise, from the utter transparency of the line, where this could only lead.
To close: there is no way to make it fresh again, not for years to come, and so we must put this tired line to rest. We must care enough about our art and our voices to, if not be bothered to seek out new words for the same things, be wise enough to not use the same ones over and over between us.
Make love to MY mind and quit prison-raping me with this grossly-overused snatch of literary laziness.
3.
Sonya Sanchez's liner notes for Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes' "Blue Notes and Ballads" are vapid to the point of implosion. Opening the jewel case of this CD should have exposed a black hole, sucking in all life with its banality. Much of her later work is insipid enough, but this little ditty is the literary (and I use that word begrudgingly) equivalent of sleepwalking with scissors in your hands in a room lined with tripwires.
An excerpt:
"It was the way they touched as at rest in bed or standing still in the evening air. They made us hear the music in our blood. And we sang. Lived. Moved from rural cocoons to black urban butterflies. Yeah, if you don't know them by now, you never will."
My beef isn't that this is bad poetry; it isn't supposed to be poetry at all. It's liner notes, and it walks and sits like liner notes in the living room of the package. What clutches my brain in burning snatches of painful hemidemisemiquaver is that this is simply how Sanchez communicates and it is brutally inane. The temptation to see the above and think, "Wait, that IS a poem! It's poetic!" is great but don't be fooled; she simply can't stop using the same metaphors over and over in her diatribes, be they poetry or prose. I want to shake the hand of the person who fails her English class.
This tripe is in place of any potentially useful (or hell, even common) biography information. ANY.
And how was your Saturday night?