How To Train for the World Heavyweight Poetry Bout Championship... & Lose!
Part I: A View From the Ring
You could, of course, just show up with your greatest hits bookmarked, jot a casual reading order, some options to reply with when your opponent’s poem dances your way.
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After all, he's on a 60-day reading tour |
Sherman Alexie does that. After all, he’s on a 60-day reading tour as “The Toughest Indian in the World.” He’s got a 60 Minutes crew on the road with him. Does readings & book signings on a daily basis. He’s got his stand-up experience. He’s ready for the 1000 folks at the Taos Poetry Circus World Heavyweight Poetry Championship Bout at the Sagebrush Inn, 6/17/00. But he’s also made a decision not to repeat any poems he’s read in previous Bouts (he’s won against Jimmy Santiago Baca and Wanda Coleman using 18 poems), a decision that sends him scouting back and forward -- it’s a generous stand. But then Alexie is so damn prolific, his poems so engaging, that it hardly matters -- his new book, One Stick Song, is just out from Hanging Loose Press. It’s a winner. He’s a winner. I should know. I’m the guy he beat.
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as “The Toughest Indian in the World” |
On the other hand, you could follow another path, the one in which you’re not a poet/best-selling novelist on a book tour. In such a case you might spend the months between Anne MacNaughton’s phone call invitation in December to challenge Alexie and the Bout itself to mull and prep, then arrive five days early to go into strict training with Coach Glazner at his desert adobe. That’s the way I did it. Like many poetry events,The Bout is a once in a lifetimer, lucky if you get to do it. To participate means to make your own terms -- the amount of labor, thought, love that goes into engaging with the event goes a long way towards fulfilling that event, as well as giving you backsies.
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a daily regimen of poetry |
My backsies was primarily from the sweet coaching of Poetry.about.com’s Southwest Museletter correspondent, Gary Glazner, who took time off from producing Slam America, the 30-day, 100-poet cross-country tour set to launch from Seattle on July 9 and end at the National Slam in Providence August 8. Gary put me on a daily regimen of poetry physical, mental, emotional.
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“Don’t write poems -- just say what’s in front of you” |
I’ll write more about How to Train For the National Poetry Bout -- and Lose! in a future feature: how the Gambian griot, Alhaji Papa Bunka Susso, got me started on preparing for the infamous 10th round, the Improv Round, by saying, “Don’t write poems -- just say what’s in front of you”. . . . how John Rodriguez, the 26-year old Bronx po-phenom, made several surprising top ten lists of my work, and asked the tough questions, “If you don’t do ‘Performance Poem’ (in which I run out of the auditorium), will you feel you took it as far as you could?”. . . . and how I did a mock Bout with Gary as Sherman and the Santa Fe desert as audience. Very tough audience.
For now, let’s concentrate on Coach Glazner’s Po Workout Regime, with special attention to his insights into the survivor/victim poem/therapy vs./& the art of writing dichotomy: Is this move of today’s slam and other perfpo’s a deepening of the poet’s connection with the audience, or an attempt at stoking an emotional connection without attention to the art of language? Can bridge?
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a deepening of the poet's connection with the audience? |
Sherman is an Indian; everything he writes is about Indians. It’s angry stuff, and it’s funny stuff, and universal truths do get revealed: but what it’s about is something that needs to be said until we get it, and we don’t, and that is the horrific economic situation of Indians in the US. I’m a white guy, middle class, and have never thought of myself as a member of the Survivor’s Club; I’ve always looked on my father’s suicide when I was two as a life-defining event. I’ve written a couple of poems (“A Jew in New York,” “Tiny green flash, no thing reverses”) and Skip Gates wrote up the story in a New Yorker profile on Mouth Almighty Records. “Let your father help you,” is what Gary said, “allow your father to help you.” So I combined the two poems, pasting “Jew” into a hardcover Collect Call of the Wild. We also strategized that it would be a powerful end to the first half if I’d perform the faux country & western collaboration I’d created with my brother Stu, “I’d Rather Be Crazy than Stupid (So How Come I’m Crazy for You?),” which is out-there funny. And then, over the applause, tell the story of how the poem came to be, how the lines from the poem, “They’re after me! I got no brain! / I’m goin Crrraaaazy!” were actually the last words of our father after he drank the poison, words telephoned to our mother from the Cincinnati Greyhound Bus Station.
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or stoking an emotional connection. . . |
I got off to a bad start -- lost the toss. That could be the end right there. It’s extremely difficult to turn the round around when the Ring Girl Whitney, a 6’ Drag Queen in Grace Jones-Princess Layla couture (Whitney is great, I love her, as Sherman [drats!] sez: “You make me reconsider my life choices”). . .
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. . . without attention to the art of language? |
. . . then I started with a praise poem for the Bout which I’d been composing over the past two weeks: researching with Juliette Torrez and Gary and other New Mexicans to get the names of all those who really made the Bout happen but never got public recognition. This is another move Papa Susso taught me, and since then I’ve been commissioned by The San Francisco Art Institute and California Lawyers Guild to write praise poems for events. But instead of taking a deep breath and setting myself, I rushed to perform. My visual of an accordion of paper dropping after I said “I thought I’d start with a little poem” didn’t read, got little laughter, and for some reason the four-minute warning occurred when I was at the three-minute mark. Worse, I didn’t take John Trudell’s advice (a must-hear is Trudell’s new CD, Blue Indians) and just burn through the whole poem regardless and let ‘em ring the bell and take the penalty for Poetry! Instead, I floundered some names and didn’t get over. (I lost the opening round 2-1).
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Was it fear? Or sense? |
I could go on, round-by-round. Instead I want to just say that I did what I thought was a great version of “Crrrraaazzzy,” then walked off without the PS of the suicidal Last Words. Gary met me backstage, I put down some Act II poems I wanted to discuss with him, we wandered outside and had a heart-to-heart of full moon men. Decided to flip “Performance Poem” up next to grab the energy. I explained, I explained, how I was real down and just didn’t feel close enough to the audience. . . (Have I mentioned Sherman’s brilliance? Have I mentioned a NY perfpo guy in a black 4-button suit and a leather porkpie in Indian country?). . . to feel I wanted “to share” the intimate tale of my father’s last words. Was it fear? Or sense?
What I did will be recounted in the next installment. Let me just say to you who will challenge Sherman next year in the 20th anniversary Taos World Heavyweight Poetry Championship Bout: hire Gary.
--Bob Holman
There's more to this story: the poems themselves. Read on for Bob's praise poem for the Bout, the combined version of “A Jew in New York” & “Tiny green flash, no thing reverses” & “I’d Rather Be Crazy than Stupid (So How Come I’m Crazy for You?).”
Onward to Part II of this article.
