“Black boys in this country cannot afford to play cops and robbers if we’re always considered the latter. Don’t have the luxury of playing war if we’re already in one.”
“memory taps a gun to your inner skull & demands you bring back the dead”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Sabrina Benaim, Donte Collins, and Corbin Louis. Congratulations poets!
Wait no more! Sabrina Benaim’s debut book, Depression & Other Magic Tricks, is now available! Don’t forget to grab a copy of Donte Collins’, Autopsy, as well!
In-Depth Look: Sam Sax – “Written to be Yelled at Trump Tower…”
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.
“Every poem I have ever written is trying to get closer to the people I have lost.” ———
The other day, poets Clint Smith and Eve Ewing engaged in a couple of great Twitterthreads about the politics of being labeled a “spoken word poet” or a “poet.” This is an age when more and more artists from the slam scene are finding success in the realms of publishing and academia, but the distinction has always been muddy. So many of spoken word culture’s brightest stars– Patricia Smith, Saul Williams, Bao Phi, and beyond– are also award-winning page poets; the next generation is already continuing that trend.
Sam Sax embodies this as well as anyone. As a poet, he’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, & The MacDowell Colony. His new book, Madness, is the winner of The National Poetry Series selected by Terrance Hayes; his upcoming second book, Bury It, is the Winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poems.
But Sax is also a striking performer. This poem, exploring intersections of capitalism, artistic expression, exploitation, and loss, is already so tightly constructed and consistent in terms of its imagery and thesis; the performance, though, particularly through Sax’s intentionality around tempo and rising/falling tension, adds further layers. While the stereotype that spoken word is about using performance to make up for flat writing will likely persist, Sax shows that at its best, spoken word and slam poetry are about artists using performance to give their already-powerful writing added texture, depth, and meaning.
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 say my anger is my greatest joy, and I become a heaven on fire.” ———
One of poetry’s most important functions is to communicate ideas in ways that honor their complexity. Speeches, academic papers, or thinkpieces don’t generally capture what this poem captures in terms of the relationships between hope and fear, resistance and rage, empathy (in a critical sense) and spite. These juxtapositions play out not just in the poem’s substance, but in Harris’ delivery as well– it’s subtle, but note how the poem “moves.” From the first line to the last line, while the overall volume/tone doesn’t shift much, the emotional charge builds and builds, finally setting up the devastating repetition of “I hope” lines that close the piece.
“I sat there, let her read me like a manual, each second a page to learn how this machine body worked.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Dylan Garity and Jose Soto. Congratulations poets!
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Jared Singer, Anna Marie, Olivia Gatwood, & Paul Tran. Congratulations poets!
“My mom does not need to make space for you, but if you’re cool enough, maybe she will. Can you handle her cool?”
Congratulations to Melissa and Jonathan on topping 100,000 views on this great poem. Check out more videos from Melissa Lozada-Oliva & Jonathan Mendoza here and here.
