I’m baackkk
Well, after months of starting my PhD (in Philosophy, yes), and months of not gigging (two to be exact), this year is opening with a roar… And due to that, I have promised myself to post a poem a day (OK, week) up on the good ol’ blog I’ve been ignoring.
There were two really good gigs that occurred this past week- both Valentined themed (sort of)- one at the Birdcage Cabaret hosted by Lora Stimson of Scissor Paper Stones featuring the likes of Alex Carson, Andy Bennett, Lucy Day, Chris Farnell, The Ferries, and of course, me. I demoed a short version of a longer show I’d like to finish for Edinburgh 2010 which is me being the stereotypical American (so dressed as a cheerleader, horray!) and discussing important issues about the differences in British and American culture. This particular set had me comparing the letter ‘Zee’ with British ‘Zed’. It was lovely. Done in Ode form (so the Brits could understand it, you see, having written so many lovely odes in the past), this is my favorite/favourite (see what I did there) verse of the seven minute poem…
…Oh wild letter zee, how you taunt and tease!
You just tease and you taunt
and you flaunt mad angles with ease!
I want so much to say ‘zed’ but it won’t come out of my head
so instead I lay in my bed and promote what I just said:
it’s hard for me to live here and play scrabble or a crossword:
like story of a building is spelled with an ‘e’ is something I just learned.
It’s not just pronunciation that gives my homeland away,
it’s little things that slip out in word form from day to day.
Like ‘cell phone’, ‘mail’, and ‘trash’, and ‘dollars’ when I refer to cash.
I just hope accent discrimination isn’t something that will last.
while my fav verse, probably not the best verse, so perhaps more on that another time. In any case, to separate it out from the banality of consistent rhyme scheme and meter (sort of anyway), I decided to interject down-to-earth and honest poems about me being a stereotypical American teenage cheerleader with a couple poems about being a slut, living at home with mom and dad, and the torture of a pop quiz. Which I think went over well. The general Ode was funny in nature anyway, and I think the self-deprecation of the Americanness of being a cheerleader brought my banter to a fair level with the discrimination I occasionally receive from having an American accent.
That said, I opted on Monday Night (at the Open Mic at UEA) to just dive head first into a Valentine’s Rant… opening with poem “Andrew T Lamar” into “Mediocre Mess” and then “Discovery of the Orgasm” (two of the 3 are on myspace.com/stephanielealpoet ). This went over brilliantly in a crowded pub where 3 hours of poets can be quite a daunting task for an audience, for a compere, and for the poets. Keeping the audience attention at points seemed impossible (such is the nature of a pub though, is it not?), but comedy seems to be gripping for those with beer in hand. Andy Bennett, the compere for the evening (good stand up poet, google him, worth it) was good at keeping the spirits of the crowd up for the lengthy open mic- especially those of the randoms who came into the bar unaware that it was an open mic night. Open-mics are notoriously hard to control and definitely hard to gauge talent-wise. But I think it was a good show from those who were on and a well-run event that people should look into attending next month!
Anyway, the point of that second gig update was that it made me realize the importance of finding a way to get from poem to poem. When I started doing performance it was because I wanted poetry to be really accessible to people who said “I hate poetry” or “I don’t understand poetry”. The cheerleader gig is accessible in an obvious way (I’m dressed as a cheerleader for goodness sake! If the poetry fails the boys still want to do me and the girls still want to be me!… I mean that in a completely un-narcissistic way of course), but the UEA gig was different, and it brought me back to the accessibility issues of my past. I started doing performance poetry with poems that a) didn’t SOUND like poems and b) didn’t LOOK like poems… very importantly to me was the idea of coming into and out of a poem without the audience seeing the transition… Much like most of my intros to ‘Mediocre Mess’ where it reads something along the lines of… “… and then I slept with him. I couldn’t believe that he was actually thinking I’d cook him breakfast. And I guess
it was a mediocre request
that messed
the rest of my day.
I should have guessed
but I thought the pot
sat hot
and the kettle on,
oh no… “
So the audience goes ‘shit, we’re in a poem! keep paying attention!’ and this tactic worked brilliantly in the bar on Monday night. So did personalizing it (oops, I slept with him and he was still there, yesterday morning! (insert display of embarrassment here)). I just need to figure out the inbetweens for the Ode to Z and the other bits to create something more dramatic.
Phew, anyway, now that I’m back into the blog, more of this to come, though hopefully not so long, I know I know.
Also, if you’re reading this- check out Andy Spragg’s Poetry Choir- I think good stuff to come of them.
Sxx
