Where has your second throat gone?

     I did not quite fully grasp the circuitous roots, the continuous appeal, and the credible chaos of slam poetry until I read Patricia Smith’s essay “The Second Throat: Poetry Slam” in Blueprints: Bringing Poetry into Communities (Poetry Foundation/University of Utah Press: 2011), which you can read as an e-book at the Poetry Foundation website here.  The 300-page tome includes essays by established poets and rising stars who discuss the programs they've introduced into diverse national and international communities. The book also includes a toolkit that pulls strategies discussed in the essays and encourages people and organizations interested in bringing poetry into their own communities at various levels and through various means.

     But back to Patricia. In the context of slam poetry, she describes our anatomical throat thus: "Our first throat is functional, a vessel for the orderly progression of verb, adjective, and noun.  It's the home of our practiced, public voices." This description makes me think of my left brain, grammatically correct verse, and clear, organized, well-lit thinking. But it is Patricia's description of our second throat that slams the nail on the head, so to speak. She says our second throat is a "raw and curving parallel pathway we use to sing the songs, tell the stories, screech the truths that any fool knows should be kept silent."  Aye, there's the rub--sing, tell and screech.  Now I know. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but it's second throat of stage poetry that wins fans. It also picks up detractors, those that do not like screeching, I am guessing.

     Most people, Patricia says, live all their lives without discovering the second throat. Do you know where your second throat is? Have you discovered it yet? Do page poets want a second throat? Do stage poets abandon their first throat? Why make the distinction between page and stage? Is there a need or desire to bridge the two? Is reading your poetry well an indication of a poet's literary talent? Do stage poets want to be page poets? And what of page ones? Do they tend to raise their eyebrows at the the stage ones? Do these questions matter, as doesn't the world need all the poetry it can get to enrich people's lived realities? 

     Singing the song. Poetry is an oral art, no ifs ands or buts or stage or page poetry about it.  Poets must sing. Sherwin Bitsui notes in his essay contribution, "Converging Wor(l)ds: Nizhone Bridges and Southwest Native Communities,"that in Navajo thought, language is sacred. A poet's words offers a voice where poems "might fly free from their interior lives to astonish, astound, surprise and emerge from years of silence." That sounds a lot like slam poets who tend to be confessional. Can slam poets sing away tensions and conflicts, sing the good language found in poetry or prayer or chant, sing so that language is "in alignment with a deeper cosmological and spiritual knowing" as Bitsui states language should? Bitsui speaks of youth defining daily realities for themselves and hints at how to do so by quoting Joy Harjo, who asserts that poetry must "reinvent the enemy's language." Certainly, slam poetry does that. It sings the cage away.

     Telling the story. Does poetry change anything in the telling? Anna Deavere Smith worked in diverse neighborhoods in New York City and Los Angeles with Jews, Koreans and blacks, turning her oral history interviews into theatre. Has telling their stories changed the way they perceive each other culturall? If, as Deavere Smith believes, "that deep, deep, deep inside our culture we profoundly desire to remain separate from those we perceive as different," then what good is telling the story? Deavere Smith is adamant in the importance of telling. She notes "language is the way in, telling our story and listening is the most important." It appears enough to be able to declare spaces to tell our story to foster further conversation down the line. If there is no possibility of community without collaboration, then slam poetry is at best a public sphere. It is a collaborative community space where people can come out of their safety zone and tear down the walls that separate us through identity, intellect, art, or politics.  Slam is where the telling is more important than the outcome. 

     Screeching the truth. The truth comes in all forms, so why shouldn't it be delivered in every form as well? But screeching like an owl is different from screeching like a banshee. They've both got their rightful and effective purposes. Screeching is an act of defiance, and sometimes histrionics or trendy wordplay is what the stage poem is about. Smith notes that her four-time slam poetry champion title mattered in that a roomful of strangers invested in her story. It mattered in that the slam environment helped [the strangers] find ways to tell stories of their own. And for that alone, slam poetry has changed the face and throat of poetry.

So Local, Yeah? Or Not?

The questions “What high school you went?” and “What was your first encounter with Bamboo Ridge?” served to sort and place each reader at Sunday’s Bamboo Ridge Issue #100 book launch.  Before reading his or her story, each reader was asked to answer those tell-tale questions. Some refused to disclose their alma mater, saying it was top secret or responding with a “yes, I went to high school.” Others launched into semi-nostalgia or apologist-tinged conversation.  Only in Hawaiʻi can a high school alma mater serve as ʻohana identification or neighborhood bragging rights.  Inevitably, the high school connection can lead to conversations that go something like this:  “So you know my cousin, den? Oh yeah, my ex-wife is one Menehune. Oh, nah, what year you wen grad? Aww, shoots, I get plenny family ovah deah. My neighbor’s uncle’s friend’s sister wen grad dat year, too. You know her husband, we went to da same elementary school.”

And so it goes.  So local, yeah?

Just like the latest Bamboo Ridge issue that contains the work of 70 authors, with a portfolio of artwork by Cane Haul Road artist Grant Kagimoto, along with selections from its100-Line/100-Word Online Contest, as well as a special tribute to Hawaiʻi’s own Beat poet, Albert Saijo.

So local, yeah? Or not?

The book launch and reception featured 14 of us, and it was marvelous to hear, see, touch, laugh, gasp, raise eyebrows, emote, ponder and wonder at the variety of literary work that Hawaiʻi produces. From the two Lees—Lee Tonouchi and Lee Cataluna; to college professors Susan Schultz, Gail Harada, Brenda Kwon, and Ann Inoshita and scholar Sylvia Watanabe; to neighbor island school principal Darlene Javar to retirees Moriso Teraoka, Michael Little and Beryl Allene Young. And then there was one of my favorite Filipino poets, Elmer Omar Pizo, whose work received the Editor’s Choice Award for Best Poetry. He talked about the hazards of composing poetry, the divinity of a trapped dead rat, and the plight of butchering a young goat. Darlene Javar read a powerful poem about the death and subsequent unclaimed body of a transgendered person. What binds locals also separates. What identifies locals also blurs.

So local, yeah? Or not?

            The readers and their works made me wonder, what does it really mean to be local? For all intents and purposes, is the word a primary referent to ethnicity and functions as such to identify certain racial? Sometimes is seems like it, but more often than not, it speaks to a shared experience of a group delineated by geography, social class, culture, social mores.  For real? Or not? What does a local writer write about? What does local poetry look and sound like? If “locals” don’t act like “locals” are they still “local”? Don’t erroneously call a Hawaiian local because you could be majorly offending them by lumping them in with other immigrants and settlers.

So what does it mean to be local, really? What does it mean to be a local writer? Is being a local writer a step down from just writer? I’ve been called a local writer, an immigrant poet, a Filipino writer, an Ilokano writer, even a Pacific poet. I guess I’m all that at simultaneously and at differing times with various audiences.

            Well, here’s an example of what it means to be local. After the reading ended, a woman approached me to comment on a line in the “Apo Baket” poem I had read. She began to share her experience with her immigrant grandparents, their hand rolled tobacco toscanis, and other cultural accoutrements. She asked me how I came to know the historical roots of putting the lit end of a Filipino cigar in one’s mouth while smoking—the stanza is:

I watch from inside the screen door, her profile puffing

That familiar Ilokano toscani, her cheeks sucking air,

The tabako’s fiery end insider her mouth, a habit of survival

To withhold any glowing red light from wartime Japanese.

I told her I wasn’t exactly sure if that was why old Filipino women put the lit end of a cigar inside their mouth to smoke it.  It was true of my grandmother, but since it was poetry, I didn’t exactly lie because someone told me (I think) about the peculiar practice. She seemed a little disappointed. But after an animated discussion about higher education, poetry and local literature, we discovered that she is my older sister’s friend’s sister, who went to the same high school as I did. Somehow my transgression was minimized and all was well.

Only in Hawaiʻi.  So local, yeah? Or not?