Performance Poetry Groups Nationally
We trespass on each other's space on a regular basis, sometimes on purpose, sometimes accidentally. If the bomb were a joke, it also carried with it another metaphor for another concept: poetry. In "Louder Than A Bomb", a documentary made in 2012 out of a Chicago production company, the film highlights at least four spoken word performers from throughout the country. One of the young poets, Adam Gottlieb, says "Writing a poem is not changing the world; meeting new people, and understanding new people, and really feeling inspired by people different than you, I would like to say that that's changing the world, and if not, it's definitely coming much, much closer" ("Louder Than a Bomb" trailer, 2009). While Philadelphia is smaller than Chicago, the Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement has attracted 18 teams in 2013 to its Friday afternoon performances, and nearly 250 kids fill the audience from 4:30-6:30pm in the city's Franklin Institute Science Museum upper floor auditorium. While kids can be heard yelling "Don't be nice!" at the beginning of a piece, that encouragement has an ironic twist to it, in that the teams competing against one another serve primarily as one large team, cross-pollinating one another's work with styles, techniques, and subject matter. While the premise is not unlike the Louder Than a Bomb scenario, students in Philadelphia have developed a unique approach to addressing more than just interpersonal issues, and have moved on towards confronting peers' behavior outside of the realm of the poetry community. Recent poems have included speaking out against flash-mobs, street harassment, and gun violence, in addition to poems about body image, sexual identity, and homelessness.
As poetry teachers, we have several agendas, among them raising the literacy levels of our students so they can not only read a greater diversity of poems independently, but also in order to fathom the work so deeply as to turn their own poems into works of social significance. For instance, in PYPM Program Director and Latina poet Denice Frohman's "Weapons" she describes visiting West Philadelphia High School in 2012:
The security guard…..asks me if I have any weapons
I hold up my book; he doesn't find that funny.
Tells me to empty pockets, walk through metal detector, 8:03am…..
She is there to talk about poetry with 122 of West's students, but also much more:
I ask them if they have dreams.
11 students raise their hands, barely above their shoulders,
as if they are sitting in history class, unsure of getting the wrong answer…..
But they are far too familiar with the right to remain silent…..
The Principal is afraid they will leave with weapons,
I am afraid they will not know the ones that already exist.
(reproduced with special permission from the author, Denice Frohman)
Frohman refers to how the students believed "poetry is what old white people do", and do not connect what she does with what they could be learning inside a school classroom. In Michel de Certeau's "The Practice of Everyday Life", he writes about what Frohman relates through her poem when he says "the everyday has a strangeness that does not surface" (de Certeau, p.93). He goes on to say "A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city." (ibid) The metaphorical city is the City of Brotherly Love, where I was born and where my students and I live together, is intertwined with the language with which we attempt to define it. Laurence Perrine in "Sound and Sense-An Introduction to Poetry" wrote "Poetry is as universal as language, and almost as ancient. The most primitive peoples have used it, and the most civilized have cultivated it" (Perrine, p.3) He goes on to say that "poetry might be defined as a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than does ordinary language." (ibid) Language has different uses, and it is with this in mind that we look at some specific poems by young people and adults that seek to address bilingualism in performance.
Def Poetry Jam, a famous TV show from the late 1990s in New York featured two brothers from Camden, New Jersey I've met and hope to work with at some point as I assemble my own city of poets for this poetry unit around language, once wrote and performed a poem called "Dreams Are Illegal in the Ghetto". In the team poem, the two brothers alternate lines with one another, riff off what the other says, and create the picture of an American family as Anglo and dismissive of minorities as could be. The two authors imagine what if it were their dream, and not someone else's reality, but are interrupted by the musical refrain "Dreams are illegal in the ghetto…". Let us imagine a place where we need not dream of anyone else's reality, but like the great novel of vignettes by Italo Calvino "Invisible Cities", can picture something so illusory as to be seductive, for as one character says to another, "With cities, as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears . . . and everything conceals something else." "Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours." (Calvino, p.44)
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