Donne be not proud...

Sorry for the influx of videos; there's just so much good stuff online that I want to share. But last night I was up until the wee hours of the morning watching spoken word/slam poetry (not quite cool enough to know which is right) online. This is very new for me. Now, I've always been a fan of poetry, but mostly the olde stuff (yeah, olde-- Shakespeare, Donne, Keats). The not-so-olde, too (Plath, Hughes, Auden). But mostly, I thought real poetry was written by people who were already dead, so their words were serious. In my eyes, being dead gave poets something living ones couldn't have: respect.

So, I sat comfortably in my squishy academic couch and snuggled up with their words, which, still inexplicably, meant more simply because the poets themselves weren't around anymore; I didn't know what they looked like, the tones of their voices...it was all open to interpretation. On my squishy academic couch, the words rested permanently on paper like they were engrained in stone. That's what would last.

But this slam poetry thing, man, it's turning everything upside down. Not only are these poems spoken aloud, they're performed, with hand gestures and facial expressions, with not a snap in sight. Moreover, these poets are ALIVE...living, breathing, screaming, laughing, loving human beings whose voices echo off the walls. When I first saw a video of Rives, I was blown away. I needed a minute to think. I went back to that once marshmallowy academic couch of mine to reassess, but the couch felt different. It felt lumpy. Had the couch changed, or was it just my ass?

The most influential poems of all time-- Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Mahabharata, to name a few-- were oral epics that were performed and passed down. Though fundamentally, the story stayed the same, it sounded a little different every time. And what about the monologues from Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, or Arthur Miller that make you cry like a little bitch? Different every time. So maybe this is poetry: not just the dead stuff, trapped on paper, but the stuff that catapults out of a mouth and lingers in the air... not set in stone, but traced in sand.