Altruizine wrote:
Who are your five favourite poets? And what are your five favourite poems?
Poets:
This one is hard for me- I'm more about art than artists. I like romantics, so I'd say Whitman and Wordsworth make the list, but epic poets get me too, and I feel like you can't really talk about poetry without acknowledging them- I preferred Paradise Lost to Inferno, but it was close... But as inspired as those poems were, neither Milton nor Dante would make my top five list of poets.
It's almost cliche to say Shakespeare, but his sonnets absolutely slay- sonnet 73 is one I love so much I thought about it as a tattoo; it's the poem that rings in my head every time I realize how much harder it is to paint now than when I was 20. At the same time, I don't think you can look at the works of any sonneteer without looking at the progression of the form- Shakespeare really knocked it out of the park, but without Thomas Wyatt the Elder and Edmund Spencer running as the go-betweens from Petrarch's style to Shakespeare's, he may never have hit the pinnacle he did with sonnets. And I do wish he had tried the Petrarchan style- he was the master of carrying an extended metaphor over three quatrains, but I bet he could have changed his world with a Volta... Of course, had he done so, they'd likely have had him executed.
I'm also a fan of the imagist movement, though the poems and poets that it consists of had less of an impact on me than the movement itself- because it was the imagists who brought the Japanese aesthetic to North American audiences. Basho is more prolific and better known in the world of Haiku, but Chiyojo really rocked me with Dragonfly Hunter... But like most haiku it's the context that brings it home. But haiku lead me to Noh... Particularly the Shura Noh- the Warrior Ghost plays. And while they are plays, like Shakespeare, there's poetry in it. The dialogue is lyrical.
Truth be told though, little poetry has had an impact upon me so much as Spoken Word/ Slam poetry. It doesn't have the gravitas of "Literature" or the copious volume of Academia to attest to it's merit, but nothing rocks me like a night at the slam. In 2011 I was fortunate enough to compete in the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Our team got our asses handed to us, but I'll never forget our first match- we were competing against a team from Quebec, and my team-mate
ID Matthews lead with a fairly conventional piece that really played on hip hop rhythms. But what the the Quebecois didn't know was that
ID was from Haiti, and French was actually his first language, so when he went bilingual in his second piece it damn near brought the house down.
Charles Hamilton... Damn. Saskatoon a Love Letter makes me cry every single time I hear it. That poem taught me what it means to be haunted, and what a city spirit is. I've tried to capture my own city the way he captured his... But Charles didn't so much capture Saskatoon as much as she captured him, which is the point of the whole poem anyway. Like Tom in the Glass Menagerie, you just can't quite walk away.
I was at the underground slam from midnight to 3am- I think there were almost 20 poets competing, and they had to Slam in the round. It's an incredible dynamic when there's no stage and you're surrounded on four sides with a packed crowd who are no more than a wingspan from you and you have to pick your turns to keep the whole house with you for three minutes. In the end,
RC Weslowski took it.
The Haiku deathmatch was hysterical... As the night goes on the poems get dirtier and dirtier.
RC put the hammer down again, but Charlie Petch gave him a run.
The youth poets hammered us though- they taught us a few lessons about assumptions; their mini slam happened in the afternoon rather than being the headline event that it's become in the years since. I don't know what everyone else was expecting, but I figured I'd see some kids who had potential but who still had some time before they grew into their voices. NOPE. Nada. Because when you're dealing with a medium specifically designed to manipulate
raw emotions, there is nothing like the drama of highschool that these kids live in every day of their lives- and they aren't afraid to stand at a mic and show you just how visceral that world is. CauseMo and Switch- you were the future, and I hope you have become what we all saw in you.
And if you're dealing with slam legends, I guess you can't avoid Ian Keteku; Brighton and I never got to perform our team piece because our team got knocked out after two matches, but we performed for Ian as an audience of one, and it was another one of those memories that last a lifetime. Not only does Ian know how to pull magic out of himself, he knows how to pull it out of other people too. And then
CR Avery, punctuating his poetry by doing his own beat box through a harmonica. Arrogant as they come, but he has kinda earned that swagger, so you turn a blind eye when he steps to the mic.
It isn't fair to compare spoken word to page poetry of course- they are different languages and they use different tools. You read poetry off the page and it hits your mind and you sort of filter and analyze it, but when you hear it from the poet's lips and you see how they move and are moved by it, it hits you in the gut before the grey matter has a chance to pin it down for further study.
I've dropped a fair number of names, and since slam lives on Youtube, I was going to hit you with link after link. In they end I decided to just pick one- you can find the others if you search, but this is Shane Koyczan. He wasn't at CSFW in 2011, but I've met him a few times; we've never shared a stage, but I think we went in on a pitcher after a show. This is probably Shane's most well known work, and certainly the highest production value you're going to see from a spoken word poet. Make sure you listen further than the opening salvo; listen for the interactions between tempo and internal rhyme on the emotional pivots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltun92DfnPY
To take it back to Tchaikovsky... the poetry in Day of Ascension comes from Davien as she tries to grow into her destiny. I can't really say more without spoiling... But she certainly learns how to inspire those around her, even against insurmountable odds. People tend to find a way to speak beyond their station when they have nothing left to lose.
. Not sure of anyone else?
