The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.
–Russell Baker
I’ve been “a writer” since the 5th grade, when the combination of praise I received for a plagiarized homework assignment and fear of getting caught, pushed me to start writing my own stories, and I quickly discovered that I both liked it and was pretty good at it. Over the years, I’ve published poetry and articles in school papers, magazines, journals, and anthologies; performed my poetry in slams, and featured at various bars, coffee shops and the occasional college gig across the country; finished the prerequisite, semi-auto-biographical screenplay (that I even tried to film myself at one point!); and even cranked out 15,000 words of a “novel” during NaNoWriMo in 2004.
Besides my own attempts at zines and chapbooks, it was my first real introduction to the world of publishing, and it left a permanent mark that partly explains my cynical passion and/or pragmatic idealism for the publishing industry.
NOTE: The blank pages on 141-142 in the book are probably my fault.
I kept notebooks as a little girl, and I always knew I had books in me – books other people would want to publish and read. I still have one of my handmade books, bound with purple yarn, the lavender construction paper cover sealed in clear shelf paper. The title in purple marker reads “Differences”. It’s the earliest collection of my poems that I still have.
Since then, I’ve published poems, essays, and articles in noted journals and anthologies in the U.S. and other countries; written for magazines about hip hop and literature; and blogged about whatever mattered to me. I toured across the country and trekked to London and Cuba where I led and took workshops and performed my work. I shared poems on Chicago radio stations that I listened to as a high school student in Kankakee, IL, and eventually appeared on television doing the thing I loved most—sharing my poems.
These were all things that no one expected from people where I grew up. Kankakee is a small town, just south of Chicago, predominantly Black and hit very hard when the last factory downsized and eventually closed while I was still in high school. At one point, our town was voted the worst place to live in America, and the economy still has never really recovered. Before that, my friends and I talked about writing, making music, starting businesses, and going to college as our escape into adulthood and away from Kankakee. We talked about all these big dreams.
The thing is, no one ever told you how to get past the dreaming and get to the doing.
Eleven years ago next month, in Austin, TX, I took one of the most life-changing thrill rides ever when I attended my first National Poetry Slam, as a member of the 1998 team representing the Nuyorican Poets Café that would go on to become their first (and still only) team to win the Championship. The victory itself was amazing, but what really struck me and lasted much, much longer was the diverse community of poets in attendance, and their passion for the event that brought them together every Summer.
The competition was fierce, and there were some who took it way too seriously (myself included!), but late at night, after all of the bouts were done and people gathered in groups of old and new friends to talk, drink and trade poems, the true spirit of the slam always shone through: “It’s not about the points, it’s about the poetry.”
I came back from that first NPS inspired and on a mission, and in September of 1998 added a regular slam series to my fledgling reading series, a little bit louder, and the rest is history.
“I have just read the immortal poems of the ages and come away dull. I don’t know who’s at fault; maybe it’s the weather, but I sense a lot of pretense and poesy footwork: I am writing a poem, they seem to say, look at me! Poetry must be forgotten; we must get down to raw paint, splatter.”
Confession: I loathe most formal poetry. Sestinas, sonnets, terza rimas, oh my!
While I appreciate the exercise of writing in a particular form, the end result is usually a self-indulgent bit of forgettable wordplay rarely worth reading, never mind hearing read out loud, because so few poets are able to bury the template and let the poem itself come to the fore.
Give me a good bit of free verse narrative any day, spoken out loud, where the rhythm and meter are almost invisible and the metaphor lingers at the back of my mind days, even years, later.
The same thinking applies to marketing where, as Bukowski notes above, too often the focus is on the form/medium (or worse, the poet/messenger), and not enough on the poem/message.
