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A very good friend of mine has been nominated for our city’s Poet Populist and on Monday Mr. Grubs and I left Bump with my younger brother and went to support our friend at the second of two “read offs.” The good news is my friend’s poems stole the show. Biased I might be, but there’s no denying he captured the loudest applause and the most laughs. The bad news is that he went last, which meant we had to sit through seven other candidates, two of whom were of the “spoken word” or “slam” variety. The worst news is that said slam candidates are most likely to win, not because they are better poets, but because they have, between the two of them, over 20,000 MySpace “friends” who are likely to vote on-line. I suppose that’s the point of the contest: Poet Populist is really a popularity contest.
Call me an esthete, but I just don’t dig slam. I can certainly appreciate its aims and concerns: (read: the plight of the underrepresented). And I’ll be the first to admit that there is true talent to be found in its performative nature. But as a language lover, I find most of it trite and unbearably steeped in identity politics. I can’t help but yawn at the tedium of a poetics that’s all about the “I,” about the the speaker’s political, cultural, societal views. A poetics that has very little to do with language itself. As its nomiker suggests, slam poetry is too “in your face.” It lacks subtlety. It slaps me silly with its politics. I’m reminded of the problem of voice-over narration, which doesn’t assume the audience is savvy enough to connect the dots on their own and need a narrator to tell them how to interpret the movie. D’oh!
Then too, I am writing from the perspective of a language writer: I wrote my M.A. thesis on language poetry, Gertrude Stein, the “prison house of language,” and the relative unimportance of “the subject” in modern poetry. At the end of the day, I’d much rather read a poem like this than listen to the rap(ture) of slam:
Maybe it’s our nature to be naming
the degrees of color, times of heat.
I love you, and we’re up in arms,
a shotgun wedding
where the present
is designed to keep
the past and future from forever
meeting. So the woman, calling
herself alone, expects to die like that;
and the man, who calls himself together,
goes from one state of affairs to the next,
thinking them discrete
like colors or decades made
to wheel, like destinations
made to map. Alive or dead, we make
a world of difference. Or so we say
as, over our heads, the sky turns
blue to red in a space of minutes.
– “When the Future is Black,” Heather McHugh
Yesterday Bump received his first “first birthday” present one month early: swimming lessons! His godmother (a/k/a Heavy-T) treated him to the lessons and together the three of us went for the first time yesterday. Bump’s reaction to his first time in a pool? Um…he fell asleep. Imagine the scene: in a circle of about fifteen moms and babes doing the hokey-pokey aquatic-style, there I was with little Bump asleep in my arms. He perked up somewhat when Heavy-T and I took him into the jacuzzi, but even then it didn’t take long for him to fall right back asleep. I guess it’s a good sign that he didn’t freak out as I had somewhat expected (he’s not very big on baths). But I’m hoping for a little more enthusiasm next week. We’ll take pictures next time (and we’ll bring Mr. Grubby) so stay tuned!
These t-shirts are from friends of ours in Seattle. We’re waiting for somebody to get us a Noam Chomsky turtleneck.
These pictures have convinced me I need to buy a more expensive digital camera. Pics taken by our good friend Doug during a dinner party the Fam and I went to last Saturday. Good times — all because of such good friends. The best part: how quickly the men stepped out once the conversation turned to having more babies!
Aidan TV
My son, the wine snob.
Bump, meet Mouse and Watson
I think we’re watching a Led Zeppelin video
Man vs Cat
Note the braille
Bump’s Likes and Dislikes:
Likes: my belly; sleeping in his massage chair; how daddy changes his diaper (for some reason whenever i do it he cries like , um, … a baby
Dislikes: being hungry, tired, or roused from a sleep too early for whatever reason (duh).
Thanks to my BFF Heavy-T, who seems to be able (and willing!) to care for Bump on a moment’s notice. She’s the ideal babysitter: she actually hates when we come home too early! So far, because of her, Dear Hubs and I have been able to see a great movie, sip cosmos at the The Moon Temple, and act like a couple again. This is a woman who volunteers at homeless and animal shelters on weekends while being a graduate student. She picks people up at airports at obscene hours and she brings food, wine, and juicy stories every time she comes over. She is a superstar–I’m so grateful to know her. And if she ever has to go on bed rest, I’ll be there day in and day out to bring her bonbons, bad 80’s movies, and gossip…just as she did for me. (Seriously, I was on bed rest for two months and she came to hospital all but one day.)
