Front Region and Back Region
If there are the lives we live off the stage, providing material and content for a poet to sit in private and scribe his verse, there is also life on the stage, the microphone in front of the nose and nearby the mouth, an instrument through which we reach the audience. In "Regions and Region Behavior" by Erving Goffman, the author describes these two areas in terms of (1) "front region" (ie. the stage) and (2) "back region" (ie. life off the stage). Front region behavior of the type concerning performance poets is distinguished by being "in visual and aural range of the audience" (p.107). In the experience of teenage poets today, there is a near constant exchange between front and back region in the way performers are inspired to write, just as a jazz musician is soaking up the music of living until he can pick up his instrument and play with it again. More than just a formal front region as defined by the stage, the lights, an audience and a microphone, however, performance poets so enjoy the act of formal language performance they engage with the spoken word as a daily conversation with their intended audience and may feel as if cameras are watching and might YouTube them at any moment. For example, witness the spontaneity and immediacy of a poem like "F*ck I Look Like" by Kai Davis, who when she performed the poem that went viral on YouTube in 2011 was only an eleventh grader at Central High School in Philadelphia. Her off stage, or back-region behavior is never seen on video, but her public persona (front region) seems to blur the lines between anything private (back region) and the persona of an outspoken, outraged and downright confrontational student in her performance on stage, and her words flow as if she is in the thrilling exhilaration of spontaneous anger, where every word is like a football she carries tightly under her arm, dodging defenders and leaping high into the end zone. Witness her words yourself at: (www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NISakKDA_A).
I look like I'm not s'posed to be standing here next to you
Like we in the same class but your idea of Advanced is too advanced
And my mind can't match you
I think it's my vernacular
How I got twice the consonants and twice the apostrophes
So my philosophy can't be valid
How I speak slave and you speak slave master…..
Davis accomplishes fluency in both her own vernacular, using profanity like music, and also successfully criticizes the system in which she feels oppressed: the classroom, white society, and formal, grammatically correct language. In protesting against violent student Flash-Mobs, at another event Kai Davis was reported yelling, "The revolution must come or it's over for us!" (http://Philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2011/08/15/young-poets-speak-out). Surely she is a type of language revolutionary (she calls herself an "Identity Activist") and she represents the kind of response out of frustration and anger that I believe students can use to process into productive creative expression. She does so with true poetic flourishes, like the rhymes "slang/twang" and managing to connect the sound in "boss" with "flaws" in a near rhyme. Her comparison between Mark Twain's writing style and that of Maya Angelou points to a kind of consciousness celebrated and validated by departments of literary criticism and published works. The conflict stems from a deeper concern with language at its core purpose: she believes she is being marginalized philosophically because she doesn't talk right, and then when she does talk right, or at least get the right answers and "sound like I read a book before…", she gets criticized for acting "white". Her main criticism of her peers and her teacher is that she feels stereotyped and placed in a box out of which she is not free to roam and be herself: "all this is is self-hate…" seems to be her description of what is really going on. To go a little deeper, she may be cutting to the heart of the challenge against bilingual education, that there is a standard, grammatically correct speech, and that because she didn't grow up talking that way she is assumed to be not as smart as others, when in fact her insightful poem and her biting wit show nothing could be farther from the truth.
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