“Remember: when they look right through you, you’re still there.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Guante, EJ Schoenborn, & Sabrina Benaim! Congrats poets!
In-Depth Look: Muna Abdulahi – “Explaining Depression to a Refugee”
Appreciating poetry is often about patience: sitting with a poem, meditating on it, and re-reading it multiple times. With spoken word, we don’t always get a chance to do that. This series is about taking that chance, and diving a little deeper into some of the new poems going up on Button.
“I wonder why the depression test asks me to rank how often I cry and not why I don’t cry at all?”
While spoken word practice is sometimes framed as creating “a voice for the voiceless,” many writers, practitioners, and thinkers have pointed out why that particular phrase is problematic. There’s a passivity in it, as though some people were just naturally silent, as opposed to silenced— by oppressive systems, circumstances, and people. No one is truly voiceless; society just isn’t always good at listening.
I wonder if a more appropriate framing might be that the poetry slam stage is a space in which we can cultivate dialogue between voices, a space in which stories that do not often get a large platform can be shared, celebrated, or validated. This poem, after all, is doing some important work. We’ve seen a recent rise in poetry about mental health, as more and more people come to spoken word as a way to process, advocate for, and express ideas related to that topic. But in the US, how often is the phrase “let’s talk about mental health” code for “let’s talk about white people’s mental health?”
This poem breaks from that tradition; Abdulahi’s lens/perspective allows her to not just write “about” depression, but to say very something specific about it, in the context of her experience. The language here about family, tradition, culture, and balance; the repetition of the image of “running” (which works both on a literal and figurative level), the fragmented structure of the poem– it all comes together to communicate something complex and vital about the intersections of refugee/immigrant/diasporic experiences and dominant narratives about mental health and depression.
In-Depth Look: Bernard Ferguson – “Love Does Not Want This Body”
Appreciating poetry is often about patience: sitting with a poem, meditating on it, and re-reading it multiple times. With spoken word, we don’t always get a chance to do that. This series is about taking that chance, and diving a little deeper into some of the new poems going up on Button.
“How we were made to bleed, and then made a nation out of dying.”
In workshops and cyphers, we talk sometimes about clarity of meaning; the question usually revolves around how important it is that the audience (a loaded term) “gets” the poem right away. Especially with spoken word, where the hearing of the poem is the only chance to absorb it– as a writer, what is the value of clarity? What are the dangers of seeking it at the expense of other stylistic impulses? Complicating things, “clarity” is definitely a relative term– poems outside of our specific experience as readers or listeners may feel confusing or abstract, when what they’re saying is actually perfectly clear for some other audience.
This poem might be a good entry point into that conversation, since it is perhaps a little less straightforward than a lot of the other poems featured on Button’s channel. But while that lack of straightforwardness might mean that this poem doesn’t go viral and rack up a billion YouTube views, it powers the poem in other, perhaps more important, ways.
Note how this poem is driven by a dialogue between abstract and concrete: the swirling, dynamic juxtaposition of big ideas/concepts like Love, Country, God, Heaven, Nation, and Lineage, next to concrete, imagistic words like Body, Mist, Wind, Bleed, Sea, and Reflection. Some of their pairings are explicit, and some only manifest beneath the surface of the poem. This gives the poem a dreamlike quality, that forces the audience to reckon with the larger ideas relating to home, grief, and loss in a new way, to seek to understand from a new angle. I would argue that that challenge– to push the audience to reconsider/revisit/reckon with ideas– is one reason we write poems in the first place.
“I loved you the same way that I learned how to ride a bike. Scared, but reckless. With no training wheels or elbow pads so my scars can tell the story of how I fell for you.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Michael Lee, Kristen Jewel, & Rudy Francisco. Congrats poets!
Appreciating poetry is often about patience: sitting with a poem, meditating on it, and re-reading it multiple times. With spoken word, we don’t always get a chance to do that. This series is about taking that chance, and diving a little deeper into some of the new poems going up on Button.
Because my biggest poem is a “number poem,” people often ask about that approach with regards to their own writing. In that question, though, there’s often a hint of suspicion, as if poems built around numbered sections represent some kind of poetic cheat code, an easy way to sound deep without really justifying the structural conceit. And sure, that happens.
This poem, however, is a great example of how a number poem can work, and work beautifully. At its core, a number poem is a way to fragment an idea; to use a visual metaphor, I think of number poems as less photorealistic and more impressionistic. Rather than offer some big, authoritative thesis statement about a topic, you can build an idea out of smaller pieces; the substance of the poem is contained both in those pieces and in how those pieces relate to one another.
In this poem, the separation of the main idea into smaller sections allows Smith to deploy a whirlwind of concrete images– the fire, the tampons, the stitches, the gallbladder, the hurricane, the bones. Because the poem is already fragmented, those images get to stand on their own as they appear. That fragmentation also allows different sections to provide context for one another. For example: …when I was reminded to be humble, when I was taught to be polite, when I was raised to be a Christian, all forgiveness and long suffering, when I was beaten into being a good girl… connects the deeply personal to larger ideas about society and culture, expanding the “work” of the poem in a powerful way.
“If you tear the part that says ‘peanut’ off of a peanut butter jar, that does not make it butter. That does not make it any less brown, any more yellow.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: T. Miller, Patrick Roche, Raych Jackson, Ephraim Nehemiah, & Melissa Lozada-Oliva. Congrats poets!
