“A girlfriend will come over to you house and help clean up your kitchen. A woman will come into your life and help clean up your credit.”
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 and Thomas Fucaloro. Congratulations 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.
“Somewhere in this coward’s mouth is a brave heart’s confession.” ———
It’s possible to talk about what performance adds to a poem; but it’s also possible to talk about what it takes away. A poem on the page has a different (not better or worse, just different) set of tools to use to do the work that it wants to do. For example, page poets use line breaks and enjambment to create conversations between ideas, to shine different lights on words that may mean one thing in one context, and something very different in another. Seeing the words next to each other, seeing how the lines break, seeing how the poem “moves” on the page, is a different experience than listening to a poem.
While spoken word poems can still use juxtaposition and transitions to do some of that work, this poem takes it to another level. One can picture, while listening, where the lines might be breaking, and how the different ideas flow in and out of one another, mirroring the thought-stream of someone dealing with anxiety. It’s a powerful exploration of what a poem can do when its form, content, and delivery intertwine and work toward a common purpose.
“I suppose we wear our traumas the way the guillotine wears gravity; our lovers’ necks are so soft.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Andrea Gibson and Reagan Myers. Congratulations poets!
“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.
