Switch it up

Last week’s public performance component of Urban Word’s Summer Institute of Social Justice and Applied Poetics was a fairly formal affair. As I described in my previous Harriet entry, Theodore Harris presented work from his Our Flesh of Flames artist book, and Amiri Baraka read poems. The Bowery Poetry Club was packed, there were lots of older people in attendance, and the q&a was relatively brief.

Last night’s installment was almost the opposite: attendance was sparser (though respectable), the audience young and mostly Urban Word summer program participants, and the q&a led by featured performer Celena Glenn took up half the evening. I briefly mentioned Glenn in an earlier post as one of my favorite emerging poets (/performers), though someone who tours with CocoRosie, performs internationally with Grand Pianoramax, has won various poetry slams, and is looked up to by younger poets is hardly all that emerging any more.
Glenn talked about moving from what she sees as “me” dominated poetry to one dominated by “us.” To enact this, she turned her performance time over to her students, and had them get up on stage to read poems, chant refrains, and make sandwiches for the audience as videos they recently shot were projected behind them. In between clusters of poems, Glenn freestyled a couple times: “I want to be toothless and in love.” Me, too. (I’m guessing she freestyled, though the history of freestyling is filled with examples of people who turned out to have memorized their so-called “off-the-dome” rhymes ahead of time. I once saw a DJ Spooky performance in which he declared he was going to freestyle, and then after flubbing his verse, started over and repeated the exact same lines again. Hmmm.)
In the q&a that followed, Glenn talked about the responsibilities a poet has to community, and the different “career” trajectories a young spoken word performer might persue. (Patricia Smith, one of my favorite Harriet bloggers, wrote incisively about the history and reception of spoken word poetry.) In terms of personal style, Glenn didn’t drop any clichés about following one’s dreams or the long struggle it takes to achieve recognition as a poet, but instead encouraged students to “switch it up.” With her variety of interests and activities, I’m never quite sure which Celena Glenn is going to show, and last night was no exception. You can check her out on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/celenaglenn.