“He likes big women? And yet he’s not been thrown a parade?!”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Rachel Wiley, Jared Singer, & Alysia Harris! Congrats poets!
Make sure to check out Rachel’s incredible book, NOTHING IS OKAY.
After much deliberation and internal conversations, Button Poetry has made the decision to suspend the publication of Jared Paul’s Songs From The Bottom Of A Mineshaft. While we do understand that many people were anticipating the release of the book, we felt uncomfortable standing by this product.
In our work and everyday lives, we strive to honor the morals we set in place as a company around uplifting marginalized voices, making space for stories of both pain and healing, and honoring and protecting survivors of trauma. We look to take accountability and rectify any harm we have caused. While we will be separating ourselves from the publication of Jared’s book, we hope to continue to take steps in the right direction as a company and a platform for vital and necessary work. We hope you’ll continue believing in this vision.
“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!
