Watching Taylor Mali do “What Teachers Make” (aka "Objection Overruled") via Web reaffirms: he's the Best. The Best... what? You tell me! Hie thee to thy RealPlayer, then report back....
While they're away, as Laurence Sterne would say (and if you haven't read Tristram Shandy, then hie thee to the second, third?, 1759 novel e'er writ, one which makes today's avant garde derriere!) And while they're away...
Let me just say that this is a Taylor Mali Moment. His new CD, Poems From the Like Free Zone, has just been released (from Words Worth Ink, available at PoetCD.com & Amazon.com), his first major book, What Learning Leaves, is due soon from wonderful Faith Vicinanza's Hanover Press, and this summer he was a member of the NYC/Urbana slam team that took first place at Nationals, his third national championship, a feat only he has accomplished. And, ah! -- his Web site is up and happening (www.taylormali.com), and has a funny, as-ever self-deprecating, bio.
OK, those who went to watch Taylor on Webcast are getting back now; what did you think? Adjectives come easy, no?
Mali's poems are CLEAR. They are almost always HYSTERICALLY FUNNY, often SENTIMENTAL, APPEALING, ACCESSIBLE. And SMART. In performance, they are performed, precisely, with choreographed pauses for audience reaction that are somehow never stilted. He uses facial and body gestures that seem natural enough in this polished presentation, but are in actuality the result of painstaking work: research, strategizing, a ton of experience, rehearsal, and Taylor's will to poem. “A poem,” as his motto goes, “is a terrible thing to waste.” Not a stitch of a Mali poem gets wasted in performance.
And what is a Mali Poem? It is either narrative (“My Mother's Ponytail”) or uses a language quirk, twisted 'till wrung out (“Totally Like Whatever”). Or both (“Like Lilly Like Wilson”). Listen to “The The Impotence of Proofreading,” where the writer has accepted all the corrects in Spellcheck, and you learn How to Read with your Ears. One more category I picked up from his new book: homilies about teaching. In fact, Mali is taking a sabbatical this year from his sixth grade math class at the exclusive Browning School in New York to work on a one-man show, Teacher! Teacher!
My favorite Mali moment comes in his rendition of “Playing Scrabble with Eddie.” Eddie's dyslexic, and loves to play head games with his understanding teacher. Eddie's dilemma comes when he gets the letters K-C-U-F. He looks at Mr. Mali to size up his move:
And I wonder what his dyslexic, rearranging mind
is doing with my eyes & my ears & my nose.
How many one-eyed, Picasso-faced English teachers
are staring back at him...?
These lines are delivered as Mali plasticizes his own physiognomy, making Jim Carrey seem like a beginner, absolutely getting both eyes on the same side of his nose, his mouth a crease from forehead to neck, his ears flapping like bat wings, all the while letting the poem progress, straight ahead....
A dedicated teacher taking a year off to create a show about teaching is the kind of contradiction Mali adores. While most would turn cynical at the vilification he's taken for his polish, his WASPy manner in the midst of a predominately boho scene, for being the strategist in a land of gut passion, he relishes the battles, thrives. Why, he even has an annual Retreat for Poets at his family's summer house, where everybody gets a scholarship! Start with his name: Taylor Mali -- what is he, a couturier from West Africa? Is he a poet -- or the voice of a Burger King commercial? (He does voice-overs and reads audio books: American Fairy Tales: From Rip Van Winkle to the Rootabaga Stories and Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World: The Extraordinary True Story of Shackleton and the Endurance, among others -- he's the only poet I know who uses his voice in this fashion.) The documentary Slamnation's press makes a point of calling him a villain, and links him to The Rules of Slam thusly: “The master of the loophole is chosen to write the rules for the National Slam.” Which he did. (For a description of Mali's work as “pep talk,” and a brilliant attack on Slam, and LangPo, check David Hess's “Slam Diary Extra” recount of the 1999 Nationals in the Winter 2000 issue of Nada.)
OK, the Tristram Shandy readers are trickling back.... Taylor Mali is the best representative of Slam technique, both aesthetically and sociologically, i.e., as a living, giving member of the SlamFam, that I've seen. If you have the chance to see him, go. To prepare, listen to the CD, buy his book, visit him on the Web.
But don't trust me -- I've known Taylor since he brought his Maine team into the Nuyorican -- talk about Kultur Shock! Their “haircuts” and “team jackets”! So, I gave Taylor's new disc the ultimate test: Bored Teenagers Three. That is, they started out bored, but as the first cut began to skewer their very own private language, like being inside their thoughts like -- hey, it took three cuts before they remembered they had something else to do. In Life Slam, that's a tenner.
Bob Holman
