For a self-professed poet, I sure do a whole lot of “not writing.” Why, just the other day, I didn’t write a poem about a conversation I didn’t have with a friend I haven’t seen in several years. I didn’t sit down at my not-computer, turn on the not-screen, and write a bunch of non-words on an invisible page. I then didn’t pause for a second, re-unread what I hadn’t written, and de-revise what wasn’t on the page until I hadn’t churned out a literary anti-diamond.
All that means is that I played Playstation while thinking to myself, “I should really be writing something right now.”
I had some pretty big plans at the start of 2010 for my writing, but I seem to have lost a lot of the desire I once had for poeticizing (a word I didn’t know existed until I wrote it). I think a lot of my creative energy has gone from poetry to the sketches I’ve been working on – which is kind of a shame. I mean, I like drawing, but I’m definitely much better at poetry than I am at art. Of course, you could say that I’m pretty bad at both of them, since I’m neither a Shakespeare nor a DaVinci. To that, I say, “Hey… that hurt.”
I recently rekindled my interest in poetry by attending a Poetry Slam on Monday night. The slam reminded me something I’d long forgotten – poetry is a performance. Sure, most poems are written on paper, but that doesn’t mean their meant to be read in silence over Sunday breakfast while light pours in through the window, highlighting the dust specks dancing on the air to the tune of children laughing in the front yard. I mean, I don’t even HAVE a front yard.
The poets at the slam were INTENSE – but not so much that I couldn’t take them seriously. In fact, I think I take them seriously because of how seriously they didn’t take themselves. They laughed, joked, cheered and heckled – all of which I can really get behind.
And, when they read their poetry, they PERFORMED. They beat their fists to the tempo of the text they spat. Their heads bobbed with energy, sometimes even drooping to capture the emotion.
Now, the poems weren’t all perfect. Some were less refined than others – I got the sense that many put more effort into showing off how they could move to their poetry than they did into what they would actually say on stage. And a lot of people seemed to confuse poetry with political preaching – not that there’s not a place for political opinion in poetry, but, if you can’t say what you want to say in a poem artfully, you’re better off writing a letter to the editor.
I felt particularly bad for a gifted man who took the stage and expressed all the fears he had, as a parent, for his children, pulling examples straight from the headlines of violent crimes against minors. His words were powerful, his fears palpable – then he started throwing in descriptions of laws passed in the name of child victims. The effect could have been powerful, but his description of an Amber Alert seemed to come straight from the Wikipedia page – all fact, no art.
I walked out of the slam feeling like a bad poet – not just because I hadn’t written much new poetry in a while, but because the poetry I wrote simply didn’t compare to what I heard delivered on that stage. These were poets who had a real ear for the rhythm of words and the harmony of rhyme – a characteristic often missing from my own verses, which often seem to me to be more like quaint anecdotes than actual poems. Oh, and their poems were much longer than mine. My poems would probably take about thirty seconds to perform, while some of these poems lasted a full three minutes (one poem went for ten, but… well, it wasn’t actually that good).
The conclusion I ultimately came to is that I’m not THAT kind of poet. These writers modeled their work more after the Beat poets, while my poetry is more akin to… some… other poets… that you’ve never heard of… that are awesome and… stuff.
Still, I felt inspired by the experience. I got a couple of ideas from listening to the poetry slammers perform that I may have to turn into full poems some day. I also think I might have to “steal” a few poems that I think I could actually write better. I’ve missed the feeling of being a writer – that false sense of intellectual superiority that comes with the ability to type a clever rhyme on a page.
What I think I’m missing, I think, is a community – and this may be the reason I’ve been so successful with my sketches and NOT with my writing. I have a goal to do a sketch a day, and I have two or three friends that keep tabs on me (and I on them) to make sure I get the sketch done. The writing, though? It’s just me.
I don’t think I’ll ever be part of the Salt Lake City Poetry Slam community – I mean, my hair’s messy, but I don’t have dreadlocks – but I’ll definitely go back for another reading.
