Wendy Brown-Baez's Blog: Wendy's Muse - Posts Tagged "performance-poetry"

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These two things have been on my mind today: I have been impressed and inspired by the blog posted by Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples as a forum for poets to express their responses to the Gulf tragedy. And I reviewed the DVD I copied from the camera cassette of a poetry performance that Word Dancers put on at Borders Bookstore in Santa Fe entitled Laundry Lines.

The interweave between these is the idea of poetry as a tool for social change or to shed light on social topics. Word Dancers, a group of women that I wrote and performed with, chose poems that touched on themes such as women in wartime, loneliness and alienation, memory and loss, AIDS, slavery, women under the veil, the conflict in Israel-Palestine including female suicide bombers, even a poem about a female terrorist in Naples about to blow up the opera house. We spoke during the question and answer period about imagining ourselves in different personas. We would take on the roles of women in another culture, women who have no voice, women desperate to make a difference even if it requires sacrificing their lives, trying to imagine the depth of someone's terror, courage, outrage, and determination. We attempted to imagine with words and images a woman who has the same needs for love, respect, and safety that we have in a culture where she is hidden behind a veil, sent off to work in a factory where she is imprisoned, relegated to how many children she can bear or how hard she can work to feed those children. The responsibility of the artist to be a voice, a presence, a witness to those who are invisible and silenced is a responsibility we shouldered with words.

In this way, the blog posts at Poets for Living Waters are a voice for the way of life and the creatures being destroyed by the oil spill: the turtles, pelicans, sea mammals, fish, shellfish, crabs, lichen, seaweed.

Our outrage and grief must be tempered by envisioning a healed world, by imagining the waters clear and clean, the turtles and dolphins swimming freely, the pelicans scooping up fish and laying their eggs, the sands sparkling and the ocean embracing her sea mammals. It is our responsibilty as artists to portest the damage being done to our Mother and to envision Her as whole and perfect once more. As a poet, we can feel so small and powerless but the truth is that words are powerful and words can change the wawy we think, the way we act, and the way we unite to bless our planet, our Mother Earth with our presence.

http://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/2...

Today after weeks of below zero temperatures, the yard outside my window is covered with fog. This seems a fitting analogy for the liminal space between having sent off the galleys and arrival of the printed book. A threshhold between what I intended when I put the poems to paper and the reception by readers. And the holy hush that preceeds the moment of determining which poems I want to present to the public, and how.

I memorize certain poems and act them out dramatically. The poems in my first book Ceremonies of the Spirit were personal, love poems that spiraled from infatuation to consecration. Many had been performed before they were published. I had a blast dressing up in lace and draping my Spanish shawl over my shoulders while declaiming: "Dear Cordoba, I want you/ not only the way a woman yearns/ to trace the contours of her man's face/ not only the way she yearns to feel/the hot throb of his heartbeat/under her hand/ but with total abandoned pleasure..." or dance with "like an ancient dancer somersaulting against the windowpane" or "the moon / calypsoing over my raft as it// sails away to an island of palm / trees and white doves."

I have performed Ahmad's Mother at the exhibition The Revolution Shall Not be Televised at Altered Esthetics Gallery, collapsing near the floor while I howled with grief at the death of my son.

But the "in your face" hooker poem...this one I have not yet tried to perform in public. Afraid I can't walk provocatively with gray hair or is it the raw edge of honesty as she scorns her john and glorifies her pimp:

You think, mister, I didn’t
see that look on your face,
the way you looked at
my body. Take a good look
because I am your keeper,

your jail bait, your sin
and your forgiveness
all rolled up in one tight little ass.
I feel the power as I swing my hips
into your car seat.

I wait in the liminal space between myself and their personalities for the gestures, the colors, the tones of sorrow and joy, fear and mockery, confidence and loneliness to come through me as they came through on paper. I open myself as a conduit for women to speak who have not yet been heard: the women in the midst of war or revolution, the single mother on her knees pleading for her son's life, the wise woman with hormonal desires to be young and sexy again.
I wait for the moment when they inhabit me and take me to
the stage where you can hear their stories and celebrate their visibility.

At what point does a love of reading become the desire to write? In Writing as a Way of Healing: how telling our stories transforms our lives, Louise A. DeSalvo writes that many of us become writers due to something that happened in childhood: trauma, shocks such as loss, death, incest, violence, racism, homophobia, or just feeling misunderstood, outcast, other. At what point did this happen to me, that I began to pencil the first mystery novel in third grade? Was it because I had had congenital hip dislocation and spent a year in a cast and a year in braces? Did I feel abandoned by losing my mother’s attention when my brother was born? Was it the tension between my parents who were too young, too broke, and opposite in temperament? Was it when my mother left me in the care of my grandmother for several days? And yet: my grandmother was my first case of true love. I always wanted to be with her and went for sleep-overs every week-end until she retired and moved to Florida. And my brother, I bossed him around until he got big enough to fight back. I have the photos of our tea parties to prove it. And as for the casts and braces, my father built me a rolling platform so I could scoot around the house and yard. When I turned 7, I started dance lessons and cartwheeled my way to notoriety on the playgound.

It could be something born in our blood as well as a disposition to heal through rectifying, through explanation, through making sense of things, and raising our voices to be heard. Perhaps the stories my mother read to me before I went to sleep were the advent of the Muse. Perhaps I had a vivid imagination and making up stories was only one of the many ways I explored self expression. I also drew and painted, danced and sang, made up plays, and loved dressing up in costumes.

At what point does the gift of words become a necessity, a vocation, a way to interface with the world? Are most poets introverts, are writers naturally reclusive? And so more available to the task of writing down what we think about, what we hear in our inner ear, our inner voices? And what does that mean about the push to market and promote yourself?

I love reading my work, performing my poems, to a live audience. The feeling of connection, intimacy, revelation, removing the veil and removing my self, getting out of the way for the Muse to speak through me. The secret to good writing is transcendent awareness, to be in the “flow” as they call it. There are people who become addicted to the adrenalin rush of thrill seeking, of risk taking, the need to generate those hormones of flight or fight because their brain chemicals thrive on them, they feel more alive. There is always a risk when you are a writer. The risk of failure, of not being understood, of being mediocre, of rejection or criticism. There are other risks as well. The risk of telling the truth, exposing your own fragility and vulnerability to the public, the risk of discovering what you really feel and think, the risk of self awareness and no turning back. There is the risk of experimenting and exploration and the risk of falling flat on your face, of taking leaps and crashing to earth, of giving of yourself only to be emptied.

The risk of standing on stage in front of others is something I never imagined I would do. I begin my poem “My Goodness Girl” with an explanation of how terrified I used to be and how a shot of tequila was my "liquid courage". This terror calmed down after the first few poems and I felt in sync with my audience, saw their compassionate eyes and heard their responses of laughter or sighs or applause. Sometimes saw their tears.

There is controversy about applause at readings. At some, applause is saved until the end, which unnerves me even as an audience member. The cheers and applause and noisy raucous responses at slams were liberating and created excitement and solidarity.

But it is not for the applause that I have overcome my terror time and again to step out in front. And although I know now that I won’t faint if I make a mistake, that my terror will be reduced to butterflies and weak knees, it still surprises me. But the reason I keep going back out there is that I want to speak. Perhaps it is not the traumas and shocks and disappointments and sorrow and grief and fear that made me want to become a writer. Perhaps it was that as a child I was a chatterbox and was told to be quiet. Perhaps I just needed to finally take the stage.