I ran across an article in my local online newspaper today about Gayle Danley, an award-winning slam poet. I've read, just a little bit, about slam poetry, since it's currently our most vibrant oral poetic expression. It's been around long enough (Danley says the 1980s) that academics have come sniffing around its clubs, eager to dissect and analyze it, compare and contrast it to what has gone before.
I did a Google search and turned up Danley's TED-Ed talk. Between that, and the local news article where she instructs middle school students to write, "You can't do that to me!" and then find a memory, and a poem, to match, I get a strong impression of an emotionally vivid and immediate form, deeply personal, with its truths laid out raw and stripped.
It's compelling.
I caught a glimpse of this last year, when I was preparing for the Oldcastle Memorial Poetry Smackdown. I was having difficulty writing two poems - a satire and a courtly love poem - because I didn't believe what I was writing. I was engineering words - making them match meter and rhyme while having some meaning. It was craft, but it wasn't art.
I have frequently thought of myself as a craftsman or wordsmith. I'm really not a fan of the "muse" concept, particularly as it's used to excuse giving up on writing. "Oh, I can't. My muse isn't speaking to me." I have experienced inspiration - but I've also written to spec. Apply butt to chair and fingers to keyboard. Write!
But when I asked myself, "If I can't believe in what I'm writing, what can I believe in?" I got my answers, and got my poems out. And they were better and more honest poems.
Not all SCA-appropriate poetry needs to be intensely personal lyric. It would be terribly inappropriate in a ballad, with its frequently remote and unaffected narrator, or in an epic of great deeds. And some of the period forms purposefully sought a highly artificial and stylized manner, and it would be wrong to project modern ideas of "real!" poetry into that.
But...
Wulf, my Wulf! Your seldom-comings made my mind troubled, not missing meals.
Elias Carel, you're such a phony!
With small barefooted steps I go, through the cold and through the snow...
Vivid imagery expressing deeply felt emotions has its place as well.
Comments