“My depression is like that guy lifting directly in front of the weight rack.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Nora Cooper and Olivia Gatwood!
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’ve decided that I will not speak unless I can say the complete truth. This has made it so much harder to talk about the things that are really important to me.
The most common critique of slam poetry is that it’s predictable, or “tropey,” to use an increasingly useful pop culture term. We talk about the same subject matter, using the same structural and poetic elements, through the same delivery style. On one hand, I think this critique misses the mark, especially when it comes from outside the culture (see points #4 and #5 here for a few more thoughts on that), but on the other hand, it isn’t particularly difficult to see why that critique exists– we could, as a community, challenge ourselves to explore new angles on issues, push our writing into more interesting places, and strive to create work that doesn’t sound like everyone else’s.
That larger context makes this poem particularly interesting. While the “gimmick” (and I don’t mean that in a bad way) of the poem is obvious, there’s a deeper impulse at play in how the poem uses negative space. That silence isn’t just for drama’s sake; it’s embedded in the writing in a way that directly counters that charge of predictability. The “father” section, for example, could be read in multiple, conflicting ways, which captures something profound about the nature of both that specific relationship, and the larger idea of the truth as something that is messy, sometimes contradictory, and difficult to grasp. Poets are sometimes expected to be able to “illuminate the truth” in just three minutes; this poem functions as a critique of that, while simultaneously being an example of what that work might actually look like.
If you like Singer’s work, there’s much more available online.
“Now, when it comes to the actual picture taking of ya dick, you can’t just do the overhead aerial shot. You gotta add variety. Show how the size stacks up against inanimate objects: a remote, a Snapple bottle, a Bath and Body Works 3-wick candle…”
Congratulations to Omar on topping 250,000 views on this hilarious poem. Check out more videos from Omar here and here.
“Her fist is balled the way a boy would grip her hair in a kindergarten class or at any age that boys put their name on things.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Blythe Baird, Omar Holmon, and William Evans. Congratulations poets!
In-Depth Look: Hanif Abdurraqib – “At My First Punk Rock Show Ever, 1998”
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.
“We come here to see blood, like all boys who sneak past their sleeping fathers in ripped jeans.” ———
There are a lot of things to comment on in this poem– the power of its opening and closing line, how efficiently it’s constructed, how an entire relationship is illuminated by just a few scenes and lines. I’m particularly struck by how Abdurraqib uses place; right away, the title is evocative, but the first few lines go even deeper into what this place is– and what this place means. It’s one thing to understand “punk show” on an intellectual level; it’s something else to feel it– both in terms of its sights/smells/sounds, and the emotional energy that crackles through the relationships present in the poem.
For aspiring poets (maybe those readying their chapbook submissions), this is a valuable lesson. We sometimes think of “setting” as a fiction term, but poems have settings too, and especially with spoken word, creating a concrete, specific setting can do an enormous amount of work in terms of bringing the audience into the poem. It gives the reader (or listener) some ground to stand on, so they can be more fully present and open to the other elements of the poem.
Find more of Hanif Abdurraqib’s work here, and be sure to check out his new book, “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us,” here!
“If I got paid for all my emotional labor, I’d hire an unassuming, relatively attractive white man to follow me around so every time you don’t believe me, he can just repeat what I said so then, like, you do believe me.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Melissa Lozada-Oliva, RJ Walker, and Ry Irene. Congratulations poets!
“We are the women who dare think of ourselves as more than a fuck. When we lend our thoughts to breath, we know often we are speaking the words that will kill us.”
Congratulations to Tonya & Venessa on topping 250,000 views on this remarkable poem. Check out more videos from Tonya and Venessa here and here.
