Last Saturday I performed an assortment of instrumental compositions, songs, & poems at Circle Thrift & Art Space in downtown Richmond. It was a unique treat to share my creative output with a roomful of supportive acquaintances, & new & deep friends; & this gathering put me at ease, freed me to present my work in an informal & humor-filled way.
Several special conversations followed, which I hope to expound upon soon, but first I want to share the immediate reaction I had to a trusted friend characterizing the performance as ‘pretty’.
The comment was meant to be a compliment (as anyone would assume), but for reasons that took a few minutes to parse out, I felt puzzled & conflicted.
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Professionally, I teach music and poetry at Virginia’s max security juvenile correctional center, mostly to resident high school students between fourteen to twenty-one years old. & a personal highlight from last semester was the time that one particularly dismissive & unfriendly resident lit up in response to a poem I had just drafted about beauty in the world’s troubledness.
This was a real surprise coming from someone with a reputation for menacing & confrontational behavior. Then more recently, I’ve had several reactions from other residents along the lines of ‘damn, that went hard!’ to the softest, eeriest song (#2 here) that I included in Saturday’s setlist. The seeming incongruency between the soft song & those reactions has amused & inspired me.
These responses are encouraging because they suggest that this ‘niche art practice’ can communicate something, even to young people who’d never ordinarily elect to engage the sorts of sounds & words I explore. (Perhaps it helps that this art is so uncluttered by overt technicality, leaving more room for the exchange to be about other kinds of communication & investment.)
The compliments are sincere, & all the more valuable coming from folks who would be entirely justified to respond dismissively or derisively. They are far from ‘initiated’ into my teeny ‘art peer’ group, or my creative ethos.
I do aspire to make art that’s pretty, yes. But I also aspire to make work that’s true/raw/real. Robust enough to have value in the world, outside of my delicate niche art peer circle. This is an aspect of the dichotomous notion of ‘rugged poetry’ I’ve been pursuing especially the past couple years.
I tried to articulate this & found myself reaching for this quote from Amiri Baraka...
“The poets out of the Black Arts movement in the sixties is where rap comes from.
...we started bringing the music & the poetry & stuff together. We wanted poetry that you can take out of the classrooms, that you can read in bars & taverns, that you can read in playgrounds, that you can read on the street. That's what we did in the sixties.
I used to tell my students: “You think your stuff is good? See those guys digging a hole in the street there?
When they get a minute off to eat a sandwich—go read them a poem. See if you get hit in the head.
If you don't get hit in the head, you've got a future [as a poet].”
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Amiri Baraka on PBS’s Sounds of Poetry with Bill Moyers, 1999 (ca. 16m15s - 16m46s)
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