“How many legacies are intentionally left blank on newspapers before you realize that you can’t rewrite the history of a people if our histories were never recorded?”
Don’t miss this remarkable poem from Tu The Judoka, featuring at Button Poetry Live.
“A rich girl once told me she didn’t shop in thrift stores because they were ‘sad places’.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the top-viewed recent videos on the Button YouTube Channel. Today’s additions: Ariana Brown & Samantha Healy. Congrats poets!
“Someday I’m gonna have a child. She’s gonna have eyes like mine and such small hands. Just like she’ll need me alive then, she needs me alive now. I can’t say goodbye before I’ve had a chance to say hello.”
Don’t miss this beautiful poem from Neil Hilborn, performing at Button Poetry Live.
Make sure to check out Neil’s best-selling book, Our Numbered Days, now available! Keep an eye out for Neil’s forthcoming book, The Future, coming Spring 2018!
“If you develop an eating disorder when you are already thin to begin with, you go to the hospital. If you develop an eating disorder when you are not thin to begin with, you are a success story.”
Congratulations to Blythe Baird on topping 2 MILLION views on this powerful poem. Watch more videos from Blythe here and here.
“When this tongue speaks, it sings the stories of my ancestors, it prophesizes the lives of my coming generations.”
Don’t miss this stellar poem from Vanessa Tahay, performing during the finals of the 2017 Get Lit Words Ignite Classic Slam, the largest youth poetry tournament in Southern California. Order Get Lit Rising today at simonandschuster.com, and join the #LiteraryRiot at getlit.org.
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 need you to understand that this cacophony is the new language of my people.
I’m struck by this line near the end of the poem: “I don’t want you to apologize in English, or Canadian French; I want you to open your eyes.” As more and more events (including poetry slams and other spoken word events) adopt the practice of acknowledging the land and its original inhabitants, it feels like that line is an important addendum to that practice: it isn’t just about apologizing, or “acknowledging” colonialism and genocide; it’s about the more difficult work of taking a critical look at our everyday actions, our organizational practices, and beyond, to see how they either continue or interrupt that legacy.
The poem as a whole reflects this intentionality of thought, juxtaposing past and present, through the powerful image of the death of a color. What could be a challenging, abstract idea for a poem to build itself around is supported by wave after wave of concrete, narrative imagery– from the evocative use of the word “splatter,” to the family snapshots, to the video itself, which does interesting things with negative space and color.
Find more from Mitcholos here. Additionally, for people interested in the point about moving “beyond territorial acknowledgements,” here is some writing on that.
