Bravo Soulspeak!
Soulspeak was happening at The Rainbow Mountain School auditorium on State St. the last Saturday of September.
There were too many empty seats! Where were you? This is a wonderful new venue for the Word. Congratulations to the school on their new performance space, and their invitation to Soulspeak. Kudos to Mel Kelley, VIP (very important person) director of Soulspeak. Mel tells me the next slam, a Cosmic Happy Slam, will take place November 1, at Odyssey Community School. Soulspeak’s Wordshops are free. Contact Mel at slamashevilleyouth.com, and on Facebook.
These poets are passionate. They are brave. They are truth tellers. Nothing gets past their rocking syllables. I am glad they will be around to vote when I have passed on to my great reward in the sky. They are our future.
Their subjects are my subjects, our subjects. Consider: guilt, absent fathers, visions, love, throwaway society, fear, anxiety, confidence to love oneself, baseball, animals (by a carnivore), Nicoli’s first line was, “I love animals.” It was one of my favorites of the evening.
There were more male voices than female. Judges gave Hope the evening’s prize. Hope wrote, “To anyone who wishes there were less of themselves, you are a landscape. I love being a landscape!”
In all honesty, words won the evening. There is freedom in the voices of these 12 to 21 year olds. There was a first time presenter who ragged on grief. Take heart, I wanted to tell him. Take heart! You are in charge. Liam Kelley Black, slam master, presented a poem on his grandfather’s dementia, another highlight of the slam. His poem told the story of destruction in slow motion, and death as change of season. Bravo, Liam!
These poets took on guilt, race, yoga, speaking to trees, self destruction. As I said, these poems are our poems … when we have courage.
Guest poet was Matthew Foley, a teacher from Charleston, S. C. His textbook is the world. I will never forget his presentation/poem on his first day as a teacher. Oh, I wish he’d been there for me in middle school and high school! He is a hero! Matthew Foley is my teacher-god! Please elect him for President. Yes. We need a poet in the white house. (Believe me, Soulspeak could put him there!) Check out his work on Soul and Flowering, Poetry by Matthew Foley online. Read, We Could Be Oceans, published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014.
There were members of the WCU Truth Writers club telling their truth on stage and in the audience. They bragged on their professors.
There were judges. There were also judges among the audience who clapped, snapped their fingers, hooted and hollered their approval (or disapproval of the judge’s decisions). We were a rambunctious bunch. I wish you’d been there.
Up to now, I haven’t tried a slam poem. I do feel one coming on. Here is a mini slam the evening gave me:
Word-arrows flung
quivers of them
stung the air.
I was there.
Maybe you won’t agree with me, but I believe there are slammers in poetry history. Walt comes to mind. Imagine Mr. Whitman with a microphone! Imagine him closing his eyes and letting loose:
For You, O Democracy
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees
along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes,
and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy,
to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.
Rave on as only you can, Walt! I chose this poem because it is short (for a Whitman poem.) His complete poems are a text of the world, (the one Matthew Foley studies) the world of a wound-dresser, runner, farmer. They include verses to a president, an astronomer, and life. Hear him roar!
Soulspeak poets, you are paying attention. You are doing it with your wild and precious lives. Carry on!
Joanna Klink, Montana poet, writes: “Poems are acts of attention. They return us
to our capacity for awareness and changes.”