“Hello, love. Hello, moment allowed above the surface like a dolphin at war.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Toaster, Franny Choi, & Melissa Lozada-Oliva. Congrats poets!
Don’t miss Melissa’s incredible book, PELUDA, now available!
In-Depth Look: William Evans – “Bathroom Etiquette”
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.
Aspiring poets ask about writer’s block a lot. They tend to also ask questions like “where do you get your inspiration?” a lot. Of course, these are good and natural questions, but I also remember when I was just getting started, asking the same questions; I remember asking them less out of curiosity and more out of fear– the fear that every poem has to be some monumental, earth-moving feat, the fear that if I’m not constantly producing I’ll fall behind (whatever that means), the fear that I don’t have anything to add to the larger conversation.
My favorite answer to that question is brought to life by this poem. William Evans has a gift for presenting “small,” slice-of-life moments, and then really digging into them to explore how history, and policy, and experience, and culture, and more all add up to create a moment. When you can cultivate that kind of critical lens, when you can challenge yourself to really see what’s going on inside– or behind– a scene or situation, you become able to see poems everywhere. This piece takes the most seemingly throwaway social interaction (two coworkers joking about an email memo about urinal splashguards) and excavates something profound about history, bodies, memory, lineage, and even white supremacy.
Note the subtle emphasis placed on the “my” in “But my grandfather…” at 1:26. The whole poem turns on that point. The whole “seemingly throwaway situation” turns into something else. When people ask me about writer’s block today, that’s my answer: it isn’t always about trying to access some brilliant truth outside of yourself; it’s about taking the time to find the “something else” in a scene, moment, or memory to which you already have access.
Find more from William Evans here, and get his new book here!
“There is nothing rational about love. Love stutters when it gets nervous, love trips over its own shoelaces. Love is clumsy, and my heart refuses to wear a helmet.”
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.
“Do you know that? What it means to come from catastrophe? To have no word for homeland except the crack of bone?”
Franny Choi’s work is always inspiring in its willingness to challenge the audience, to withhold easy answers and cultivate a more critical understanding of complex issues. This poem approaches that work by using personal narrative as an entry point into an exploration of something potentially abstract: how power isn’t just about armies and economics; it’s about whose definitions we accept, and who gets to set the terms of engagement for battles both physical and cultural.
That could be an essay. That could be a book. That could take any form– but as poetry, there’s a heightened awareness of the relationship between language and matter, between the symbol and the thing being symbolized. Note lines like “My mother’s tongue is a snipped string, a stripped stinger,” or “…except a myth that we were once whole, except a hole, rising from the ground, oh holy, holy the fractures through which lava comes…” I hear that wordplay, that use of assonance and consonance, that focus on homophones– not just as fun poetic pyrotechnics, but as the poem’s content (its interest in questions about language, identity, etc.) being elegantly reflected in its form.
One other thing I’d like to point out: the hand gesture at 2:47 is a fantastic example of how spoken word choreography doesn’t have to be super complex or flashy to be effective. That small movement does so much work as the poem approaches its conclusion.
“You love me like the family walking through Horror-Land holding hands. You are not stupid, or careless, or even brave, you’ve just never seen the close up of a haunting.”
Congratulations to Brenna Twohy on topping 1,000,000 views on this remarkable poem. Check out more videos from Brenna here and here.
“Everything happens for a reason. For instance, I busted the windows out your car so you could get the air I assumed you were talking about when you said I was suffocating you.”
Congratulations to Joyce Lee on topping 100,000 views on this incredible poem. Check out more videos from Joyce here and here.
“Fat girl walks into the doctor’s to ask about anti-depressants and gets prescribed exercise instead, because obviously her depression is because of her fat, and obviously fat bodies never exercise and stay fat.”
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 and Neil Hilborn. Congrats poets!
