“Crash or Connection?” was how Lillian Allen opened the convocation –- months spent getting us all to the aerie, and then a car crash, it was all too much. But not for Lillian. For her it’s all on the table, so let’s get busy. I first came across Allen’s work in her magnificent LP Revolutionary Tea Party. It was 1985, pre-Slam, spoken word was just getting started, and Lillian was already rushing to the barricades with an all-women’s, all-reggae (dub) spoken word album -- mind blowing! Let me tell you, I can’t think of anyone better to hammer the gavel than Ms. Lillian. She asked for questions of us all: One, how you came to spoken word, or poetry, or whatever you call it as one is wont. Two, where has it taken you. Three, what have you done with it. Four, your current projects and affiliations, and Five, your drain. It’s a good place for any of us to start. My first poem in the third grade, or how even in the second grade, when the teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, I said “an actress” and in the laughter following I learned that the word “actress” was not just a prettier sounding word for actor. Even as a youth I was so politically correct. No gentrification for Bobby.
So Lillian kicked things off herself with a poem. Ideas are not lonely things, she said, reading a poem for healing, for our ancestors, for future generations. The eyes of the walls are no longer impenetrable, she said. The fragility of nothing. She spoke of Bob Marley, the self as a metaphor in Bob’s poetry. And when she ended the poem, she ended her “turn.”
Sheri-D welcomed us next. How to come together more and help each other more, network more, always more for Sheri-D. And then Kateri walked in, back from her adventures of the morning. Perfect timing, to give a poem to the Keepers of the Land who care for the poem, to the Four Directions. And then, as an Elder, I spoke to the Spoken Word itself. I spoke of orality as a consciousness, asked everyone to please read everything, especially Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy. And four other books: Griots and Griottes by Thomas Hale; the aforementioned Vow to Poetry by Anne Waldman; Hip-Hop and the Classics by Michael Cirelli; How to Make a Living As a Poet by Gary Glazner. And we spoke about the new nomenclature: orature.
D. Kimm spoke for Montréal, her French-accented English lilt sentences sang us into a performance mode at which point she stopped short and asked us when the big joke occurs, would you please explain it to me? It occurs to her in her dream that we all dream our own life. And what we want to do is not to bring that dream to reality, but bring reality to the dream. You go outside, she says. It’s snowing. It’s a poem and as far as her connections, she says she doesn’t have any.
Dwayne Morgan spoke of his early days as a poet, when at age 12 somebody came and asked him to write something. And he did. And he hasn’t stopped since. Now he has performed in ten countries, published five books, four CDs, Up from the Roots Entertainment is his company, he has edited an erotica anthology, and he was able to get the Urban Music Association to accept spoken word as a prize category and then, guess who won the award? Congratulations to and for Morgan. We talked a bit about how the Grammy in the spoken word category seems to go annually to Garrison Keillor or Hillary Clinton, how spoken word as a genre of poetry has not yet been accepted in the US….
Ian Ferrier spoke next. He came to spoken word from poetry with our mutual friend Fortner Anderson. They used to create carts, those tapes that radio stations use with public service announcements on them -- they called them Wired on Words, and made them in both French and English.
Sheri-D spoke of a genre that did not exist when she began. She spoke of having beer bottles flung at her at a reading. She talked about “performance” being considered as some kind of visual art, bent to its vision, and indeed in most colleges if you find a performance department it will be in the visual arts department. She carried a gun, to shut up the crowd, wants her historic reference to be the Beats. She saw a wonderful scene, but as the Beats were moving into positions of authority it became competitive and bitchy, snotty. Now maybe the spoken word scene has matured and we are at a point where the snottiness can go away. The only way to go forward is together, shared.
