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Did she just say poetry was useless?

November 30, 2008 By Leave a Comment

One of the things that I found particularly interesting about the 2008 StAnza festival was that Sarah Maguire, this year’s festival lecturer and director of London’s Poetry Translation Centre asked: “In the face of such gargantuan destructiveness, how on earth can we sit here and talk about poetry?” What use is poetry— or discussions among poets about poetry—in wartime?
To which a poet August Kleinzahler replied: “Poetry is useless—that’s part of its appeal.”

What can I say to this? I will let the poets of my generation answer because I suspect this statement has to do with how some members inferred that poetry was a middle class activity. See: http://www.pw.org/content/poetry_and_conflict_postcard_st_andrews_scotland

There are many spoken word events happening in Scotland, but the ones I was very interested in when I lived in the UK were the ones happening in Edinburgh because people talked about them a lot, particularly the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the largest arts festival in the world and covers all sorts of arts from theatre to music and dance with a total of 31,320 performances in 247 venues (yes it is one of the reasons I wanted to move to Scotland because Londoners made such a big deal about it). Anyone can perform at the festival; there are no rules, procedures or invitations. Needless to say performance poetry is one of the acts at the Fringe Festival. In 2007, Luke Wright threw a 2 day poetry party at Dr Roberts’ Magic Bus where he featured some of the UK’s best performers. The BBC was kind enough to report on this phenomenon:

There is also the Edinburgh Annual Book Festival, where the largest ever price (£5,000) was given to a poet – Kate Miller in 2008 for her poem, After the ban. According to the BBC the prize was launched by Scots poetry society Vital Synz and was sponsored by Strathclyde University. That is a sweet prize to win for a poem.

I have also heard of the Big Word poetry readings and the Poets on Fire readings happening in various parts of Scotland. Scotland also has slam events (which country doesn’t?) and has a national slam team.

In addition to all this Scotland also has the annual StAnza Festival. StAnza’s mission is to bring to audiences the best of poets, and practitioners in related art forms worldwide. The festival has featured poets from more than 20 countries, as well as leading American poets. Each year there are two themes; the themes for 2008 were Poetry & Conflict and Sea of Tongues. These themes brought poets and speakers with experience ranging from war poetry to critical analysis to service in a theatre of war as well as the largest number of non-Anglophone poets from both the UK and abroad ever to take part in StAnza. Here are some of the poets that took part in the festival.

Adrian Mitchell (Scotland’s Poet in Residence): To whom it may concern


Brian Turner – Here bullet

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The Thing 東西

November 28, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The Thing 東西

November 28, 2008

Black Friday

Afaa Michael Weaver

My grandparents look out from that photo at a world that I know would amaze and frighten them. The world is new…

My supervisor Hank was a realist, a white hat who knew the market value of work. Standing with him one day back in the 70’s as he watched the boxes of bar soap head down the conveyor system to the warehouse where trucks waited for them, he let out a simple truth.

“There goes a buck. There goes another buck. We’re making money today.”

I come back to that moment very often when I wonder why the world’s economic systems keep cranking along. It’s money and things, or it’s things and money. The causal relationship and possible value assignments may shift with the word order, but that’s the basic stuff of what people do with their creative abilities. Ideas become things.

William Carlos Williams said there should be no ideas except as they relate to things. His poem about the wheelbarrow fixes our attention on things.

Where do things go? After we use them as much or as little as we can, where do they go? Is it our ego that drives us to fill the world with things and the importance they can bring to our sense of who we are as human beings? Is our ego really the fear of being less than the world we inhabit, and feeling inferior to the planet? We drive ourselves to fill it with things made out of that same earth.

We are making the world over, taking from it the raw materials needed to make toys and guns, games and battle strategies, dresses and body armor. We are these incredibly small dots on this very large dot as busy as bees at the business of tearing little bits of our world from their resting places and making of them mechanisms and machines. Once we hit on the idea of making a machine that would turn humans into virtual machines that served actual machines, we were on our way to making things a fruitful enterprise and multiplying them in ever larger permutations.

We have a higher respect for ourselves when we make things that draw the envy of other people. That drives other people to outdo us so that they can get a higher respect for themselves. It is the game of life, or it is when life becomes a game. Some of us will even cheat and take the honest creations of our neighbors and make them our own, or we will take the praise they have won and lift it entirely to place it on our own lesser creations, even as we know they are lesser.

It begins when we look out on the world and feel the need to make it know we are here and to make other people know we are here.

Hank reduced it to its basic value—things are as good as their ability to bring us other things in the marketplace, and the marketplace is where egos meet and clash, or they meet and fall in love, or they meet and bond in enduring friendships.

So on a day when terrorists hide in Mumbai and shoppers trample a man to death, I wonder why it means so much to us to be able to stride out into the marketplace and be recognized, why we have these ambitions and why some of us will lie and steal in order to take the recognition other people have earned honestly in order to feel that same recognition. It’s envy. It’s the busyness of life, and as much as I accept that, I am still hurt when someone would steal something such as that from me. When it’s friends who do such a horrible thing, I wonder how far the road to forgiveness, especially as they think they did nothing wrong.

So I come back to Hank’s simplicity. What is a poem anyway but something we hope someone will want, somewhere, somehow. It is better to let the poems go into the world and accept that there are those who will appreciate it and whose lives will be touched as much as there are other poets who will steal a poet’s accomplishment and throw a jealous net into the air to entangle that appreciation and bring it to themselves.

What is a poem but something we must release, and who are we but the most vulnerable and the most ego-driven of all things that breathe? We are human, I suppose.

It seems more of us will have to let go if we are going to have enduring peace in our lives and lessen the chances that people will bring themselves to theft and murder in order to be convinced the world knows they are alive.

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Stick and stones may break my bones but words will shape me

November 27, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Today is thanksgiving and again I am amazed by the store we put by tradition and the celebration of history. This makes my concern for endangered languages even stronger because language is the fabric of a culture and its history; the languages we speak define us. Every language has its own proverbs and wisdoms. When I think of languages going extinct I think of endangered animals – we know that our great grandchildren will read about certain animals and hear stories about them as if they were legends, in much the same way that we hear stories about dinosaurs. And yet we never mention that these same children will read about nations and cultures in the same way – think of the Aztecs and the Incas.

Where the royal families of South Africa and Wales had the praise poets, the Gaels had these too but with a twist – their praise poets also recited their genealogy. At first I thought what vanity, but then I learnt that genealogy was very important to feudal nobility because it established ones right to land and power. In Scottish noble households there was a Sennachie, whose job was to research, maintain and recite all of the Clan chief’s genealogy. Families would sit for hours and hear their family trees recited centuries and centuries back, including all the great things that their ancestors had done. It’s literally the equivalent of the Sanusi in Africa. Why do we insist on cataloging our history? Why is it so important to have people carry our history?

It strikes me that people’s ancestry is a big part of their identity, which makes language that much more important. The ability to speak and let the world know where you come from was and still is very important, and even more important is the person reciting this genealogy (all from memory if you lived in medieval Scotland). The language used had to be specific, any misinformation and you could change the way a family viewed itself. So, whilst I agree that sticks and stones may break our bones, I get the feeling that words can shape us; which is perhaps worse than broken bones.

Michael Newton: “The oral tradition taught people the names and deeds of their ancestors and the ideals and values of their society, instilled in them a sense of pride and belonging, and made them intimately aware of the landscape around them. Needless to say, the Gaelic oral tradition hinges upon the language itself to transmit these names, stories, songs and all of the values and collective cultural experience they embody.”

In addition, this oral tradition shaped Gaelic oral traditions. Because of the importance attached to history, village bards tended to write about local events, characters and geographic information specific to their village. Accordingly, Gaelic songs and stories tend to focus on the relationship between place and person.

To quote Margaret Bennett, “The real identity was in the fabric of the people themselves: their language, their lore, their lifestyle, all woven into the very essence of their individuality. Most important of all to Allan’s generation was the mother tongue. They realised only too well that the Gaelic language had been the vehicle for carrying their Scottish traditions from one generation to the next. With its rapid decline, the traditions it upheld would be forced to follow.”

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The Anthropology of Youtube

November 26, 2008 By Leave a Comment

In anticipation of our website, Speak 2B Free has been making use of existing video technology by uploading videos to our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/speak2bfree and posting videos on our Speak 2B Free Facebook page. As we draw closer to the construction of a global community for the spoken word, we have already seen a community emerge of individuals who are Speaking 2B Free, by agreeing to be interviewed on camera, answering questions such as, “If freedom were an animal, what animal would it be?” and other abstract questions regarding freedom and the spoken word.

When given a chance to speak about freedom, more and more people have agreed to be filmed on our digital cameras. When asked about freedom within the context of the abstract, we have found that freedom varies from person to person, perception and respective circumstance, always remaining true to the individual. We come to understand that we are more unlike than unlike when we being to express ourselves and ‘being to live our lives when we tell our stories.’

In light of these Speak 2B Free happenings, I began thinking more about what cultural impact does individual expression have within a community. Earlier this week, a dear friend of mine called with that answer, bringing me to a link that shares the title of this blog post and the absolutely brilliant work of Professor Michael Wesch of Kansas State University.

In this video, Professor Wesch states that each time we forge a link between words on the Internet, we teach it an idea. It, being the machine itself. In turn, text no longer becomes a simple way to convey information, but lends itself to new connections. People who share links and connections also share the consequences of new levels of interaction in the exploration of self. Professor Wesch and his students explore these concepts in a study entitled the Anthropology of YouTube, using ethnography to uncover the impact of the web.

The consequences of such linkage give rise to a need to rethink the way that we communicate with each other. The way we view copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, and ourselves (CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO).

The Internet is no longer about information, it is about linking people. At the inception of the Internet, Professor Wesch tells the story of Steven Weiswasser of ABC who in 1989 wanted to know what the future of the Internet held. At this meeting, Steven said, “You are not going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the Internet.” Time has proved him wrong. Since the beginning of broadcasting in 1948, 1.5 million hours of programming has been produced. Within the first 6 months, Youtube surpassed that. Steven was incorrect in his position, and undermined the mediascape, a term that Professor Wesch uses to describe us in the center with the plethora of web information around it. When media changed, so did human relationships, and will continue to do so with Speak 2B Free.

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And the worst poet in history award goes to…

November 25, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The Scots really are off their heads. What the hell is a worst poet in history award? Yes, there is such a thing; in fact the poet who earned this award was fearless – he was booed off stage, harassed with eggs and begged to stopped performing and yet he persevered. May we all be so confident in our work!

How cruel can the world be? You can write 200 poems, perform most of them all over Europe and America and go down in history as the worst poet in the English language. Being a poet is already hard enough without these glorious awards.

So who is this poet? William Topaz McGonagall (1825 – 1902), a Scots man who claimed that, “The most startling incident in my life was the time I discovered myself to be a poet, which was in the year 1877.”

Funny how history seems not to appreciate that incident. He also considered himself an actor so his recitals of poetry are actually considered one of the early forms of performance art (that’s something that he is not often accredited with though). Interestingly enough William Topaz did not think his poetry was that bad since he once asked to be the poet Laureate and was, naturally turned down.

Of course, everyone has an opposite. You know like when you have a bad day someone always has a great day and it’s productive and everything goes according to plan in their world? Well, Scotland had Robert Burns who pioneered the Romantic movement and was a celebrity in his day – he drank, was fun loving and apparently he wrote the kind of poetry that made women fall in love with him and wait for it – forgive him for his indiscretions (he had a few children out of wedlock). Robert Burns is known as Scotland’s favorite son and is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and has a cult following amongst poets. He is best known for his ability to words to an existing tune. He contributed more than 300 songs to two major collections published in Edinburgh.

During Robert Burns’ day there were poets who were known for their ability to listen to folk songs that ordinary people sang and modify these into complete ballads. This reminds me a lot of Ci poetry and rap music again. There seems to be this link between cultures and at the same time there seems to be this link between words and rhythm. I wonder why this is?

One of my favorite songs/ poems from Robert Burns is Auld Lang Syne (which I remember from Huckleberry Hound):

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