They turned on music two minutes before the expected start time, and the songs didn't seem to fit any specific genre. Dyed hair and Minnesotan hat-scarf fashion filled the the audience, which was younger than that of the
Bly poetry reading. My notes summarize the tone of the event before it began as "These people must be beyond hipster, and one of the guys in the audience is probably Sheldon Cooper from
The Big Bang."
The event had several performers, with
Guante encouraging the audience to actively voice their opinions, whether through spoken feedback or snapping fingers. "This is the art of drawing breath," he said in his first poem. "...Know that you're not welcome here."
Here's Guante. I have no idea why they kept that blue screen up.
Spoken word probably requires some sort of mixed internal anger and reconciliation, because the poems crescendoed and decrescendoed across volume spectra like music. Subito pianos and fortes accented the ends of phrases. After his first poem, Guante shared a piece of unfinished work and asked the audience for ideas to improve it. "Three open letters to three younger versions of myself," he titled it. He didn't have a lot of "to be" verbs in his poetry and fiddled with word play and contrast, such as in "daydream to nightmare." He believed that the real question for himself was not how to be stronger, but "how can I use the strength I already have." He dug for a deeper truth in his past with fast-paced analysis.
This is Larissa and Chava working some sass into spoken word.
The next presenter, Larissa, sung her poetry. "He's at the bottom of the bottle," she said, looking off her phone for the first few lines. She also performed a dialogue with Chava Gabrielle. The U of M Women's Student Activist Collective sponsored the event, so to nobody's surprise, some of the poems addressed women issues. Larissa and Chava talked about slut shaming, using their hands and arms to act lines while they spoke. Chava later presented a poem on body image. It followed a format of letters between an enthusiastic Mia forcing an eating disorder onto hesitant and insecure Gabby: "Dear Mia, ... am I good enough yet... I just want to be beautiful... Love, Gabby."
Sometimes the performers slipped up on a word, but they recovered and rode smooth tides of lines. One of the poets, Aimee Renaud, spoke quietly and read from a notebook, but her topics held similar weight to that of others. She talked about how people associate words such as "giggle" and "chatter" to women instead of men, and how the perceived gender of a fork changes when compared to a spoon or a knife.
A blonde-haired lady (Thadra Sheridan?) really took advantage of the freedom that spoken word offers. She emphasized certain words more than others and paused within clauses, allowing sass, irony, and sarcasm to infiltrate her tone. "I don't have any track marks," she said, showing her wrists.
Tish Jones, another performer, began her poem before she even arrived on stage. "She walks this life alone," she sang as she strolled down the aisle of seats.
So that smudge in the middle of this great iPad photo is DeWolf performing off-stage.
Finally, the slam-winning
Jamie DeWolf showed up with plenty of swearing and subtle surprises in his lines. "You have the future in your fingerprints," he said, avoiding the cliche ending of "in your hands." He shared provoking imagery such as "angels strangle themselves with their own halos." I especially liked the "girl poems" that he wrote (yes, boys can write girl poems, too). "Flesh is an insult to what you are," he said as part of a rant to the common question, "Do I look fat in this?"
Even during the pauses between his poems, DeWolf continued the casual closeness between him and the audience. "Let me take off my hat so you can see how ugly I really am," he said between poems. He even stepped off the stage for the rest of the evening, mingling near the front row of seats. He asked questions to the audience before each performance, inquiring our background: do we have divorced parents? Do we have kids? Are we beautiful? Are we ugly? How many people in this room are in love?
"There are high schoolers here? Jesus," he said. His poems had many 20th-21st century and pop culture references, calling current teens the "frappuccino-fueled generation."
Towards the end, he showed some spoken word videos, which can be found
here. I loved "Ricochet in Reverse" for its manipulation of time in the Columbine massacre. The narration has gone under some technical special effects to make it feel more distant from the characters on screen and the poem drives the movement in the video. "Dylan fixes his stare on a girl he used to sit behind in Algebra class," Jamie DeWolf and Geoff Trenchard say, their voices slightly echoed. "Her bloodshot eyes reflect back without blinking." Even without the video, listeners can feel haunted by the language. Since the poem recounts the attack by going backwards through time, everything happens in the opposite action: "A nine millimeter slug rips out of a wall and flies through the heart of the last student, inflating his lungs as it passes. Eric and Dylan's cackling laughter rushes down their throats..." The video transitions to the poets sitting down in classroom desks. DeWolf and Trenchard discuss how both had felt that the "battered boy" within them thought that someone had finally "stolen the script to my fantasy life and made a movie without me on the set." Ideas edged towards the taboo. "They did it. Somebody finally did it," DeWolf whispers. They sympathize with the killers but also point out the flaws in the boys' reasoning for their act.
DeWolf ended the night with a poem about his great grandfather, L. Ron Hubbard, who founded Scientology. I found the contrast between Hubbard and DeWolf's occupations fascinating. "No sun big enough to escape his shadow," DeWolf said.
