Edinburgh Pt II and a Brief Discourse on Intertextuality
Last week, I went back to Edinburgh–twice. The first time was on Thursday for the VoxBox Slam Championship. The vibe was very different from what I’ve seen in Glasgow. About 14 poets competed, including some I knew from Rio: Chris, Robin, Anne. This was my first time seeing Jenny and the Chemical Poets perform. There was also Stephen, who read hilariously witty 50 word stories, all closing with a humorous punchline or twist. The caliber of the work was high, with intense performances and clever word play. I had a great time. The Chemical Poets, who have performed in the Nuyorican Cafe in NY, reminded me of performance poetry on the east coast. Very strong hip-hop rhythm, great imagery, and fast-paced. Check them out. We need to get them back to the US.
I performed two newer poems, the first about fathers and sons, the second about my love for British men and their accents, which I present as comedy, but it’s 100% true. I was a bit apprehensive about performing the poem I used in the final round. It’s called “Black in America” and I wrote it a few months ago and have performed it once before at an event for prospective Dartmouth students from the inner cities. I’m never sure how slam poems look on the page (I used punctuation and line breaks to mark breathing patterns, not for sentence clarification), but I’m too lazy to record it now. Here it is:
Black in America
I’ve never known what it feels like to be 3/5th of a person
I was never promised 40 acres and mule,
never chased down by hounds, wading through the Mississippi under the moonlight,
never saw the symbol of sacrifice burned to send a message of hatred,
never feared for the loss of my brothers, my uncles, my fathers, my sons
their bodies contorted, strange fruit hanging from old branches
those trees know our story,
those trees harbored the wood for construction
of ships for the abduction, the generational journey, an auction block
where they were asked to show teeth as if there was something worth a smile,
the shackles, the chains, the same chains now demarcating where to Keep Off The Grass,
the structures we pass as we walk along cracked cement, looking for blossoms in the spaces between,
hoping we won’t hit our heads on the glass ceiling. Sweet chariot, swing low.
Grandmother, tell me the story of your sadness, your pain,
infectious as the men of Tuskeegee, our government
finding new ways to keep violence virulent,
to keep poor boys off the streets by putting them in jail,
to say that the president is black and prejudice is over when our women are still taken as bait,
our cities brimming with opiates, and they say we need to calm down.
They’ve never known what it’s like to be dangerous, to be criminal,
based solely on having brown skin. They see the world as bright
simply because they call us colored. They don’t see the black and white,
the wrong against right, a binary of zeroes and ones:
We learned how to survive by learning when to fight and when to run,
our skin contracting and condensing like raisins in the sun.
Tell me, how many dreams must be deferred until these voices are heard?
What in the world do we do when mammies and jezebels are
now seen as video girls? what do we do when actors with blackface are replaced
by stock characters with broken grammar from broken homes?
Someone recycles a story, meant to be a circus, meant to make us laugh, meant to shame.
This is my skin’s history
sketched in the laugh lines of old men’s faces.
They remember.
This is my skin’s history,
drawn between the lines of precocious women’s palms,
fingers folded into a fist
head high. swing low.
*****
On Saturday, we went as a Dartmouth group to see “Confessions of a Justified Sinner”, a novel-turned-play. The book, written by Scottish author James Hogg, deals with Calvinism and religious fanaticism, the latter being a salient topic, especially in today’s discussions on terrorism. The play, because it was based on a book, was very heavy on the monologues, which had a soporific effect on our group. In the middle of Act I, I turned to look at my row…and everyone was reclining, fast asleep. The play could have been better, sure, but the language (a mixture of Scots and English) was interesting as well as the set. To show the passage of time or movement from one scene to the next, there was a revolving piece in the middle of the stage. With lighting and fog effects, the stage crew could create the atmosphere of the mountains or the inside of a local bar. I was really impressed (as I’ve been with most of the plays we’ve seen) with the work that went into the set. Below, you’ll find pictures of our hearty British meals. Next to the burger is a small piece of haggis, which Natasha bravely consumed. I had my first order of fish and chips (and my arteries are all the more sorry for it). The food was delicious, though. Traditional and tasty. The new face in the picture is Claudia, Sydney’s friend from Georgia, who joined us for the weekend. She’s studying in France and Germany this year.
***
And now, a brief discourse on intertextuality, a.k.a my excuse for procrastinating
Last night, I was in the library until the wee hours, trying to write an essay for my Renaissance literature class. I’m looking at the relationship of parents and children in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and Seneca’s Thyestes. In these plays, fathers kill children–and in two of the plays, the children are baked into a dish and fed to their parents. Gross, I know. Anyway, the trouble with re-visiting Shakespeare after taking a few Classics courses is that it feels like a completely different story. I don’t know how I was able to read Shakespeare before knowing the works of Homer, Ovid and Seneca. And, because I now understand many of the references, I find myself getting lost in the subtext, looking into the significance of each reference. Which is why it is taking me twice as long to read the plays (and even longer to write this darn essay).
And, while I’m posting poetry, here’s a Keats poem which captures exactly how I feel (with measured lines and a very subtle rhyming pattern) about the enhancement of work through allusions to the classics:
On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer
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Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
***
Side note: The funny thing is that Cortez did not discover Darien; it was discovered by Balboa. So, to end on a lighter note, a contemporary poem by Scottish poet Norman MacCaig:
Reality isn’t what it used to be,
I mutter gloomily
when I feel like Cortez on his peak in Darien
and then remember it wasn’t Cortez at all
and feel more like him than ever.
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in the gallery: photos from my trip to Edinburgh, including a bearing-on-brash Australian street performer
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