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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Spoken word poet-performer my friend J. and I heard last Sunday.
(That was where I spoke my borrowed_words rather awkwardly - I'd tried to memorize a thing, and I am not memory, but that's okay. I heard many amazing people.)
If spoken word is the middle sibling between formal (metered) poetry and rap, it shows its family lineage by putting in a lot of assonance and consonance. Plus, there's also a lot of put-together references to things - well-arranged too, I mean, not just strung together stream-of-carelessly as happens in some lazier rap and yes, contemporary poetry.
Given that, what struck me were de Belen's poems about cartoons. He talked about what would happen to them in the real world (poor Dora the Explorer might be deported for being an illegal immigrant - hey, he didn't use the opportunity to say "deported" and thus further my kick-ass assonance and consonance thesis! - but I'm being silly) and it was both funny and sobering.
Here it is. I have the chapbook, called "In Real Life." ...One criticism with the written-down poems: I don't think they use punctuation to the fullest. I mean, dashes and pauses could imitate more of the sound things he was doing onstage. Still, that's kinda picky of me. You can't get the exact same effect in writing and speech anyway.
So I'll stop blabbing and give an example:
"How come Ariel had to get legs, why couldn't the dude be the mermaid?
Well, I guess having two legs makes it easier to walk away
When she gets pregnant"
and such. There was another cartoon-themed one about Ellen DeGeneres in the role of Dory in Finding Nemo (I think it was), but I can't find that one in the "In Real Life" book. Ah well.
Another thing he does is work with high school students teaching spoken word poetry, which, when I met him, I said was "really cool" (I'm very articulate). To the show he brought several of the kids he used to teach, now old people of 18 or 19. There were two girls who did an amazing joint piece on the theme of keeping secrets: they had a chorus part that they managed to say at exactly the same time. I don't know how they did it.
Part of it's having a more extroverted personality, part of it's practice. And of course being good with words, which can be learned - through cross-genre pollination, for instance! So even though I'm doing a more "academic" stuff with the poems I'm currently struggling with - one about Ezra Pound, the other called "Fanfiction Is for Teenage Girls" where each stanza is about a teenage girl from a book - I don't think it's in that much of a separate realm. (I am not quite In Real Life, of course. But other than that.)
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