Looking to get yourself in a literary mood for next week’s Boston Book Fest? Spend Columbus Day weekend in Gloucester, celebrating the birth of Charles Olson, one of Massachusetts’s great modernist poets.

At the time of his death in 1970, Olson was still penning “The Maximus Poems.” The work—inspired by Ezra Pound’s “Cantos”—is told in the voice of Maximus (a combination between the Greek philosopher and Olson himself) and is both an exploration of American history and focused on Massachusetts and Gloucester specifically. The Los Angeles Times said it was “probably the most ambitious poem ever written by an American.”

The Charles Olson Society and other groups, including the Cape Ann Museum, have put together a series of events to commemorate the centennial of Olson’s birth.

Head to downtown Gloucester between Friday, October 8 and Sunday, October 10 to join in on the celebration. Some of the major events include a showing of “Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place” (10/9, 3 PM), narrated by John Malkovich and called “the best film about an American poet ever made” by the Boston Phoenix; a reading by San Francisco’s Poet Laureate, Diane di Prima (10/9, 7 PM); and a Maximus Walk with readings by Kevin Gallagher, David Rich, Henry Ferrini, and Peter Anastas (10/10, 11 AM). There will also be other readings and town meeting-type discussions. Events are free and open to the public, but donations of $5 are encouraged for certain events.

For a complete list of events and locations, check out http://olson100.blogspot.com/.

Filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman are best known for their award-winning documentaries, “The Life and Times of Harvey Milk” and  “Celluloid Closet.” On this reputation, the estate of celebrated Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, approached them about creating a film exploring “Howl” the groundbreaking poem that helped define a counterculture and gave rise to a landmark obscenity trial.

That film opened in Boston last weekend. Starring James Franco as Ginsberg, it uses both live action and animation from Ginsberg-collaborator, James Drooker, to dramatize the poem’s inception, original performance, controversial reception and aftermath. Blast spoke with the writer/directors about the concept of the film, working with James Franco, and the legacy of “Howl.”

BLAST: I went into this film pretty cold. I know it was about “Howl,” and so I thought, “maybe it’s a biopic about Ginsberg, or maybe it focuses on the obscenity trial,” and it turned out to be what I took to be a biography of the poem.

JEFF FRIEDMAN: Yeah, we call it a “poem pic.” That’s our new categorization.

BLAST: Have you seen this done before? Did you have a role model for this?

ROB EPSTEIN: We had different role models for different reasons. “American Splendor,” was a role model””a film that incorporated documentary reality, fictionalization of that documenting of reality, and admitting how one influenced the other, and animation. And just elementally we found inspiration from different films.

For the interview, we thought of and looked at a film called “Portrait of Jason,” a 1967 documentary by Shirley Clark, who was a beat filmmaker herself. The film is an interview with a black hustler/queen/drunk; A great character study, completely mesmerizing, and all it takes place in this one room, an interview in the course of a day. We saw that as a film that could really hold you because your really interested in what this character has to say and represent. For animation we looked at Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.”

BLAST: On the idea of being upfront about what was real and what was fictionalized, I read that the trial scene was completely culled from transcripts of the original trial?

JF: The trial scene and the interview were all taken from documentary texts””things people really said. They’re edited and rearranged and made more dramatic by juxtaposition, but that trial is verbatim. And that’s what drew us to it. It was so crazy that people were having this trial where they were discussing what an “angel-headed hipster” was.

BLAST: The interview scenes as well, that was culled from real interviews?

RE: Multiple interviews throughout his lifetime. The inspiration for that was that we had read that when the trail was going on, Allen Ginsberg was out of the country. He didn’t really give a shit about the trail. He was in Tangiers.

JF: Except he didn’t want Lawrence (Ferlengetti) to go to jail.

RE: Yeah, right. I guess he did give a shit about the trial. But Time Magazine flew him from Tangiers to Rome and did this interview in a hotel room, but this was never published and there was no record of the interview. So, we were intrigued by this idea and thought, “We’ll, recreate it.”

BLAST: So did (James) Franco study other video footage of Ginsberg?

RE: A lot of audio. There was a radio show with Studs Terkel. You get a lot of Allen’s character from this interview, so James listened to that a lot. There’s very little footage of Allen from that period but there’s later footage of Allen, so he could get a sense of him physically””

JF: “”“Pull My Daisy,” which is just a little bit after that period, a Robert Frank film with Ginsberg and Kerouac just kind of clowning around and being normal.  You can get a sense of them.

RE: Most of the rehearsal time that we did with James was about the content””about what was going on emotionally and psychologically for Allen for each of the lines of dialogue he had.

BLAST: With Franco””and this is probably not the first time you’ve heard this””I was pretty surprised he was going to be playing Ginsberg, mostly because I think of him as kind of a heartthrob and Ginsberg, not so much, and I wondered, having Franco as your Ginsberg””how did that end up shaping the material you wound up using?

RE: You know the most important thing for us was that we have an actor who was smart and really understood, certainly the text””which is so complex””of the poem, but also really understood Allen’s story, that he understood the heart and soul of what was going on, because that has to come through in his recounting, because he’s not performing it, he’s recounting it. We knew that James is a great actor, because we knew his work, especially in the “James Dean Story,” so we knew that he would get it.

JF: You know looking at young pictures of Allen it was at least plausible. I mean, Ginsberg was not gorgeous that way that James is gorgeous, but you know, he was a good looking guy when he was 30, and you know, James was able to bring that kind of youthful energy that was really so essential to the poem. It really is about youthful rebellious creativity.

RE: He was able to act the New York, Jewish, nebbishy part of Allen too.

BLAST: Thinking again about the structure and the idea of a “poem pic,” did you think of the poem as a character? Did you try to give it the same journey or arc?

RE: Yeah, that’s a very good description, and I don’t think we ever articulated it that way, but yeah, very much so. Each of the ways the poem lives in the film has its own arc and narrative.

BLAST: There’s a moment in the trial that particularly stood out to me and stayed with me; it was when a literary critic is testifying about what he thinks the poem means and he says, “You can’t translate a poem into prose.” You guys were translators of sorts and I wondered if that was a quote you thought about in terms of the kinds of translating you were doing.

RE: Yeah, I think that would be a great tag line for the poster.

JF: We didn’t think of it as a translation, we thought of it as an adaptation, the way you would adapt a novel. And that’s just one part of it, the animation. The poem lives in several different ways in the film. It lives as performance art, because it was the first spoken word performance art, as the first poetry slam, and it exists as evidence in the court room when people are trying to understand it. So we felt that we were presenting it in enough different ways that the audience would be able to understand it in the way that was most comfortable for them.

RE: And the animation seemed liked an opportunity to bring to life some of the ideas and themes in the film that you could do in cinema that you couldn’t do in any other form. It was a way to create cinema out of the idea of Moloch and what Moloch represents, for example.

JF: And because Eric [Drooker] has collaborated with Allen on this book of illuminated poems, including “Howl,” we felt like the process had begun with Allen. Allen had chosen Eric to illustrate his work and we just animated it.

BLAST: One of the things that I loved about the way the animation popped up is that you see him sitting at a typewriter, starting to hammer away at the poem and you think to yourself “they’re not really going to dramatize the typing of Howl”¦

(Laughter)

And then it explodes into hallucination.

RE: We were struggling one night with how do you make the literally transition from how you go from the live action to the animation, and we had never really solved that riddle. It was late one night in the editing room when we realized we could have those typewritten words transform into imagery. It seems obvious now, but it was a light bulb moment.

BLAST: Getting back to the idea of what’s based on reality in the film and what’s speculation””another moment I really enjoyed was a moment of Ginsberg on a park bench with Kerouac, where he reads the famous line about “I was eating a meaty sandwich and discovered that I had bitten into a dirty man’s asshole,” to see if he can get Kerouac to laugh, to break up, and when he doesn’t, he’s slightly mortified, like, “man, I’ve really got to work at this…”

(Laughter)

Did that come from any account or was that imagined?

RE: That was totally improvised. We just gave the actors their agenda and directed them as to what was going on between them at that moment””I mean Jack’s motivation at that moment is to show that he really isn’t impressed, that that just isn’t good enough, and Allen’s motivation in that moment is to please Jack. That’s what was driving him initially until he got to the pivotal moment where he was just writing to please himself.

JF: James said, “You’re not going to use any of the dialogue from this, right?”

(Laughter)

BLAST: So let me ask you guys about the poem. What shocks you about “Howl?”

JF: I was surprised at how radical it is in every way. I was surprised at how queer it is. It’s not something I remembered””I think I sort of blocked it out when I was in high school. I mean it’s about a lot of things: it’s about corporate mind control and consumerism and millitantism and all kinds of sexual liberation, but there is a really strong queer thread that runs through it. And it still has the power to shock, I think. Some of the language and imagery still has the power to shock, which is kind of amazing.

BLAST: So you guys have obviously thought of the way that mores have changed since the 50′s, what about the way poetry is received? How has that changed from the 50′s to the world of your viewers for this film?

RE: Well, we thought of this as a spoken word performance and a precursor to rap, so we thought just putting it out in the world to contextualize current art forms in terms of their antecedents was an interesting thing in-and-of-itself.

JF: Poetry really did start becoming a performance art that night in San Francisco when Allen read “Howl.” We really did feel that that was a moment of shift in the culture we could capture. These poets were sexy, and this moment really was about youthful, rebellious, exuberance.

The Lizard Lounge hometown team

ST. PAUL, Minn. — When you hear the phrase "poetry reading," does your mind’s eye envision a dusty room in a library; three rows of folding chairs, less than half of which are occupied; and a gray-bearded man reading Whitman knockoffs in a monotone voice? Stop nodding off, buy yourself a drink, and welcome to Saint Paul, Minnesota, host city of the 2010 National Poetry Slam.

Each year, over four hundred of the world’s best performance poets converge on a city to compete in the National Poetry Slam. Eighty teams of four to five poets each bring their best pieces and dramatically deliver them in bars, theaters, and auditoriums filled with cheering—and sometimes buzzed—crowds.

This year, Saint Paul won the honor of hosting the National Poetry Slam through an Olympics-style bidding process. Matthew Rucker, host city coordinator and slam master of the reigning national champion Saint Paul Soap Boxing team, explains that his vision for the event was to have "a huge and happy audience. The poets come to share. Without an audience, poets might as well have stayed home and read poetry to an empty room." Rucker raised enough money to have a public relations budget larger than the entire cost of last year’s event. He also explains that he chose the venues based on proximity; all of them are conveniently within six blocks of each other.

In the final night of preliminaries, 14 bouts are taking place at these venues. At the History Theatre, the Lizard Lounge slam team from Cambridge, anxiously waits for their bout to begin. Having garnered a first-place ranking in their initial preliminary bout against three other teams, another win tonight will guarantee them a spot in the semifinals, as well as the prestigious distinction of being ranked one of the top twenty slam teams in the nation. However, as one of the first-place teams with the lowest total number of points, anything less than first place tonight will likely cause them to be eliminated.

Thick black curtains are draped behind History Theatre’s stage, which is empty except for five microphones, standing in military formation like a challenge to the poets. Who will make us sing, make us scream, use us to enrapture and enmesh the audience? They seem to be asking. Though the onlookers seated in the stadium seats chatter amongst themselves as they wait, all is quiet on the stage.

The emcee breaks the silence by announcing that the bout will soon begin. She reads the standard emcee spiel. "The slam was started in the 1980s by a construction worker named Marc Smith—" "So what!" interject the audience members who know that one of the grand traditions of slam poetry is dismissing the importance of its founder, illustrating that there are no celebrities or superstars here. As Rucker says, "slam is grassroots" and the poets are "just regular folks, not movers and shakers." Poems are judged by randomly selected audience members who are not necessarily by poetry experts. When asked to describe what qualifies them to judge, the answers range from "having two dogs with two nostrils" to "being an elitist snob and an English major" to "living in Michigan."

In order to help these amateur judges get used to the judging process, a calibrating or "sacrificial" poet delivers a poem which is judged as though it were actually in the slam. Tonight’s sacrificial poet is Jeff, who performs a standard-length piece of three minutes or less. The five judges flip through the large, laminated numbers on their score paddles until they select the score between 0 and 10 they feel is appropriate. The high and low scores are dropped, giving the poet a total score out of 30. Jeff receives a respectable 23.9 for his poem. Excitement and anticipation fill the theater; it is time for the slam to begin.

Round One: Cole Rodriguez

After the teams from Del Ray Beach and Oklahoma City have each delivered a poem, the emcee calls out, "Lizard Lounge, who are you sending up?" The four poets on the team yell back in unison, "Cole!" Nicole "Cole" Rodriguez is a legend at the Lizard Lounge as the only woman ever to win the lounge’s individual all-star King/Queen tournament. The microphone her scepter and the stage her throne, the Lizard Queen speaks but two words before the audience becomes her subjects.

"So I find myself / Per usual / Admonishing my daughter / Bellowing from the hot kitchen / That she needs to stop / Wasting water," she begins with a deceptively simple story that most audience members can relate to. The poem escalates, telling stories the audience knows but would like to ignore. "Czechoslovakia, Egypt and Ethiopia are all / Engaged in warfare / They are feeling the scarcity of water / And are trying to hoard their own share / And here in the States, / Those of us with ghetto passes / Won’t be considered / Part of the privileged masses / They’ll be drinking lovely / While we are denied access." As her words and performance intensify like the heat waves of recent decades, she asks, "How thirsty do you have to get / Before you show a little passion?" The audience certainly responds with passionate applause and gives the poem the highest score of the round: 25.6.

Cole says that she originally planned to perform one of her signature pieces—"old faithfuls," as her teammate Arthur Collins calls them—and save the water poem for semifinals. However, a quick glance around the History Theatre, one of the few National Poetry Slam venues that is not 18+, reveals quite a few children under the age of ten in the audience. The poem she’d intended to do is a somewhat graphic extended metaphor about a woman asking a man if he can make love to her mind. She asks him "To penetrate my thought patterns / Invoke sly suggestions / Permeate my lower intestines / With your mental erections." Deciding that the water poem was more appropriate for this particular audience, Cole changed poems last-minute.

Slam is a dynamic art form, so it’s not unusual for a poet to alter the plan as the event progresses. Like all good writers and stage performers, slam poets must be continually attuned to the audience; the scores reveal whether or not their intuitive assessment of the room was accurate. Cole explains, "A key to my strategy is my flexibility. I’ve watched people bomb on the basis that they’ve gone in with a plan and they stick only to their plan and they’re not flexible enough to notice stuff like the makeup of the judges…or the audience’s receiving of a different piece of a similar nature." Similarly, her teammate Marlon Carey says that poets shouldn’t be constrained to doing a specific poem in a particular round. "I’m an artist; I want to feel the room!" he says. "If the room doesn’t feel this way to me, but I was told to do this poem, I’m going to deliver it poorly."

Round Two: Marlon Carey

After the Los Angeles team presents its piece, it’s time for Round Two. "Lizard Lounge, who are you sending up?" the emcee asks again. "Inphynit!" the four poets respond, yelling Marlon’s stage name. He says he began calling himself Inphynit after a particular open mic night at the Lizard Lounge when he was 22. The Lizard’s open mic sessions used to last for hours and sometimes included freestyling, a type of performance where poets and rappers improvise verses on stage. Marlon explains, "I couldn’t stop freestyling one night; I was just loving the mic and loving the freestyle vibe, probably drunk. And when I stepped outside, this girl was like, ‘Yo! You never quit; you’re infinite!’"

This conversation inspired Marlon to change his name from Kid M.C. to Inphynit, but the name grew to have a deeper meaning. He’s not just a poet and rapper; he’s an actor, a singer, a published author, a radio show host. "Inphynit becomes this character that can’t be categorized," he says. "That’s what I try to live up to, a mission."

Not only can Inphynit’s artistry not be categorized, his poetry is not restricted to stereotypical styles and topics. Marlon explains that a lot of other African American male poets do poems about "the revolution and the ghetto," so he stands out by having a broad range of poems, including an extensive repertoire of love poems.

The poem he breaks out for Round Two is a beautiful blend of the sensual and tender sides of lovemaking that maintains a lighthearted tone throughout. "When I love you next," he begins, "it won’t be just sex."

Another way Marlon stands out from other slammers is that he enjoys impressing the audience with his poetic acumen, incorporating a lot of internal rhyme, alliteration and double entendre. He focuses on helping people "to enjoy the auditory experience" of listening to a poem. In contrast, he says that a lot of slam poetry is "very narrative, a three-minute comedy sketch, or everyday stuff that you write in your journal." Writing a poem in everyday language causes it to lose "the essence of what makes a poem a poem; the magic."

In fact, Marlon sees slam as a new art form altogether. He explains, "I have long since stopped thinking about it as being a poetry slam; it’s slam." Slam diverges from traditional poetry, coming alive for people who might not resonate with poems that are printed on a page. In a world where fewer and fewer people read for pleasure, Marlon believes that poetry is changing fundamentally. Through sharing poetry out loud, "we’re going back to the griots and the bards," he explains, conjuring up the ancient days when entire communities gathered around a bonfire to hear poets tell their history, invoke scenarios of their future, and inspire a deeper understanding of their present.

However, some poets and poetry aficionados are not enthusiastic about slam poetry. "There’s great question about if the integrity of the art form and the use of language and verse is upheld in competition," Cole explains. "Competition puts a whole new spin on things, and the fact that it’s a competition that’s specifically intended to be judged by people who are not experienced poetry listeners puts another spin on things."

"I think there are many poets who are turned off by slam poetry because they think it’s only about the numbers," Art agrees. "But it’s a good venue, particularly for people who are not used to regular poetry events…It’s an interesting, new way to appreciate the art."

Lizard Lounge team member Jamele Adams—known almost exclusively on the slam circuit as Harlym 1two5, a name he chose to celebrate 125th Street, which he calls "the vein of culture" in Harlem—looks the literati squarely in the face. "Don’t criticize it ‘cause you don’t dig it," he asserts. He goes on to note that slam poetry has been a positive force in the lives of many people he knows as an outlet for creative expression and a way to make sense of life. Because slam is a literary movement of true cultural value, Matthew Rucker believes that "the world would be a better place if poetry slam were as popular as sports or stand-up comedy."

As the applause swells for Marlon’s poem, it seems that the audience agrees.

Round Three: Arthur Collins

In Round Three, both Art and Marlon take the stage to perform a group poem. Making hand motions that suggest rifles, they shout in unison, "Pull it back and squeeze!" Pictures of urban violence illustrate American capitalism’s lack of conscience. Art delivers his line: "Years ago we were moving targets / Now we’re the urban market." Marlon joins in, the euphony of their combined voices adding emphasis to the final words of the stanza: "Targeted in different ways."

1two5 emphasizes that group pieces have to be generated organically for them to be effective. One way this happens, says Marlon, is when a team member realizes that he or she has a snippet of poetry that matches a snippet another teammate has written. Blending them begins to form a distinctive group piece.

But great group pieces also arise, Marlon says, simply from close friendships between the poets. As the poem’s rapid-fire back-and-forth continues, it’s clear that the hours Marlon and Art spent together have resulted in perfect timing and the ability to play off each other.

Art: But the truth is self-evident.

Marlon: The inhabitants of this country

Both: Still go hungry.

Art: For the proof isn’t in the pudding;

Marlon: It’s in the putting of your faith

In these small green rectangles.

Art: When the wool is over your eyes

Both: You can’t see all the angles

Art: They wash your thinking cap

And now your brain is star-spangled.

The camaraderie evident in this powerful group piece unifies this year’s Lizard Lounge team. Art explains, "Over the years, I had always said to myself, if there could be a team of myself, 1two5, Marlon, and Cole, we’d bring a different dynamic…We’ve all known each other for a couple years. I’ve seen Marlon grow up; I’ve seen Cole come from just reading poetry to actually performing it to winning the slams and doing very well with it. So I think we bring a good history and a good experience and a good chemistry." Cole agrees, "The excitement around wanting to work together was palpable."

Cole also notes that each of them brings a different skill set and attitude to team meetings. She and 1two5 are strong advocates for meeting agendas and planning ahead. Marlon, on the other hand, complained at one point, "The bureaucracy is killing me!" Cole laughed in response, "You’re such a poet!"

Cole says that Art’s personality is "to figure out what’s not being done and do it…If the room is really loud and boisterous, Art is the one that’s quiet. If no one’s saying much, Art is the loudest voice. He’s really good at reading what’s needed in the moment."

While the other three have been on the Lizard Lounge team in the past, this is Art’s first year as an official member. He has performed slam poetry for 14 years, but this year he worked especially hard to get on the team by competing in the Lizard Lounge’s weekly qualifying slams every Sunday from September until April. "Unless the Patriots were playing," he adds seriously.

Art was an alternate on the 2008 team, and Marlon notes that his poetry and performance grew and changed a lot through that experience. "He was able to see what Nationals was all about, see what he was trying to get to." He adds that he aspires to learn from Art’s theatrical talent and ability to get in character for a poem. "This year," Marlon says, "I’ve been focusing a lot on breaking the fourth wall, on resonating, on going where Art’s going."

Round Four: Harlym 1two5

According to 1two5, being able to break that fourth wall is the essential ingredient in making a powerful slam experience. Bringing poems from "page to stage," he says, is "heavy on performance…The poet immerses human structure into the delivery of that poem…and commits every ounce of their human existence to those three minutes."

And that’s just what he’s about to do.

Going into the fourth and final round, the Lizard Lounge is in the lead but less than a point ahead of Los Angeles. Luckily, 1two5 is prepared with a killer piece that celebrates black heritage and culture. "I’m the porch monkey that became President / Right after that reform Nazi became Pope," he begins. "The architect of Rock-n-Roll… / The trim of the sunset / And the highlight of midnight / Deep chocolate and Hennessey on fire / Wade in the water / Beautiful / And say it loud! (I’m Black and I’m Proud)."

As the poem goes on, it progresses from music and hairstyles to slavery and racism. "Slavery couldn’t break me / And even though the colonists / And the masters and the Spaniards / Raped me / Separated my children from me / Mutilated me / Hung me / Sold me as property / And betrayed me / I still have my black family / I taught Betsy Ross how to sew / I’m the bloodstain on the right hand of the pledge of allegiance / I’m the missing two-fifths / From your definition of three-fifths."

The repeated motif, "I’m black," casts a wider net near the end of the poem. "There was nothing before black / Before black there was more black / And just when you think you’re not black / You are black." We’re all interconnected and we’re all black—and proud of it.

The judges respond enthusiastically, bestowing on the poem a 28.4, the highest score of the entire slam. Their decision is mirrored in the audience’s resounding applause. The Lizard Lounge is officially in the semifinals, having edged out their closest competitor by a wide margin of almost five points. The team cheers excitedly and hugs in celebration.

Despite the Lizard Lounge’s stellar performance tonight, perhaps their greatest contribution is yet to come. Tomorrow night is the National Underground Poetry Individual Competition (NUPIC), an unofficial event hosted and organized by 1two5 and the rest of the Lizard Lounge team. In the spirit of slam’s oral tradition, NUPIC is not advertised in bulletins, brochures, or flyers; the time and location can only be discovered through word-of-mouth. 1two5 calls or texts the 16 individual competitors on the day of the event, and the news spreads like wildfire. "The entire poetic family ends up there," he says.

NUPIC, affectionately known amongst poets as the "underground indies," was initiated last year by 1two5. He came up with the concept because Poetry Slam, Inc., the official organization that runs the National Poetry Slam, stopped holding an individual competition at Nationals. Though poets can compete in the much smaller Individual World Poetry Slam, many missed being able to exhibit their work for the massive slam community that shows up at Nationals.

To get to this year’s NUPIC, poets wander through the deserted St. Paul skyway at 1:00 a.m. until they get to a fuchsia-colored room in the Hilton, the host hotel for Nationals. Soon the room is packed with poets sitting on the floor or in stackable chairs, and 1two5 welcomes everyone and explains how the competition works. Pairs of poets each deliver a poem and are judged, not by numbers and scorecards, but by applause alone. Whichever poet gets the louder cheer from their poetic peers moves on to the next round; the process continues until all but two poets are eliminated.

1two5 and Cole trade off facilitating rounds until, a little after 4:00 a.m., Eboni Hogan of New York City wins the crown over Oz Okoawo of the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the final round. She will get to perform on the prestigious finals stage at Nationals, and she also earns the purse money, which comes from the $125 entry fee paid by each of the competitors. The amount $125 was chosen, of course, because of 1two5′s name. He explains that he requires an entry fee because "I like for us to demonstrate the ability to invest in each other."

This supportive spirit is the core of Nationals. Though the official stages are fraught with intense, heart-pounding competition, the driving force behind the event is a shared passion for poetry. "It’s not a point of whether we win or whether we lose," says Art. "It’s more about the experience of sharing and meeting with different poets."

The Final Stage

Every poet wants to get to the finals stage. This does not conflict with the oft-quoted remark that slam is all about the poetry, not about the numbers. "On finals stage," says Marlon, "in this auditorium, it is dead silent. Dead silent; you could hear a pin drop. And the mics—you could hear yourself breathe! I want to get on the finals stage! My goal is just to get there for the good mic."

But only four teams will make it there, and they must win a semifinals bout against other top teams in the nation. The Lizard Lounge’s bout is held in the Artists’ Quarter, a dimly lit jazz bar with an ambiance not so unlike the team’s home venue in Cambridge. An hour before the bout is scheduled to begin, the line of people waiting to be let inside sprawls down a hallway and up a long staircase. By the time the bout begins, the bar is packed beyond its capacity.

It’s an outstanding night of poetry featuring two teams from New York City, the louderARTS and the Nuyorican Cafe teams; Loser Slam from New Jersey; the Berkeley Poetry Slam; and the Lizard Lounge. Unfortunately, despite wonderful performances by all the poets, only one team will go on to the finals. The legendary Nuyorican team wins, heralding the end of the Lizard’s competitive journey at Nationals.

On the finals stage the following night, the Nuyorican takes second place, just behind the Saint Paul Soapboxing team. It’s a special moment for St. Paul to reclaim the national champion title on their home turf.

But win or lose, it’s been a special week for all involved. Looking around at the cheering poets and poetry lovers filling St. Paul’s massive Roy Wilkins Auditorium, Matthew Rucker must have smiled to himself. The huge and happy audience and the extended family of slam poets are under one giant roof, celebrating the power of words, the solidarity of community, and one heck of a show.

NEW YORK — "And now this child with rusty knees / and mismatched shoes sees poetry as her scream / and asks me for the words to build her mother again."

Patricia Smith’s voice reverberates through the narrow, dimly lit room in the basement of the Cornelia Street Cafe, a charming French restaurant in Greenwich Village that tonight is transformed into a hub of poetry. The evening begins with an open mic reading in which a series of poets deliver works varying in caliber and style. Whispers and the clanking of silverware can occasionally be heard throughout the room. But when Smith takes the stage, the audience is captivated, sucked into the vortex of her poetry, drawn in by the power of her words and performance. "Can you teach me to write a poem about my mother? / I mean, you write about your daddy and he dead, / can you teach me to remember my mama? / A teacher tells me this is the first time Nicole / has admitted that her mother is gone."

Smith begins every reading with these verses about how poetry helped 6th grader Nicole process her mother’s death. Tonight is no exception, even though she considered devoting her brief 20-minute reading exclusively to newer pieces. She doesn’t feel grounded if she opens with another work because this poem is her manifesto; it is a bold declaration of what poetry can do for others and, of course, what it has done for her.

As the winner of the most prestigious awards in the spoken and written word, Smith has also done a lot for poetry. In her early career, she was crowned the National Poetry Slam champion four times, and her spoken word roots continue to be evident in her heartfelt poetry readings. Later, she garnered the coveted Pushcart Prize for the best literature published by small publishing houses, the very first Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the poetry category, a National Poetry Series award, and a National Book Award nomination.

But for Smith, poetry is not an esoteric pastime to be used as a backstage pass into elite inner circles. She believes in the profound power of language, and she shares her poems because she knows there are people like Nicole who are waiting to hear them, who need to find a way to come to terms with something intensely personal. "You will always find at least one person in every audience who is there for a reason," Smith says. "And it might be a line that’s inconsequential in a poem of yours that will get them to sit up and go, ‘You know, I’ve felt that way; I just didn’t know there was a way to express it.’" In this moment of connection between speaker and listener, these audience members realize "they have a second throat that they’re not using," Smith says. "Poetry is a responsibility and not just an art…You are responsible for how your words are going to reach other people…You need to know that they will have an effect."

This audience connection is so important to Smith that she makes a point to present her new poems to live audiences as soon as possible. The audience’s response and emotional tenor guide her revision process. For example, audiences often have very strong reactions to selections from Blood Dazzler, her book of poems about Hurricane Katrina. She explains, "If I see somebody who’s a little jumpy when I’m doing the [Blood Dazzler] poems, I think, ‘That might be someone from New Orleans; that might be somebody with something to teach me.’ So you can never put a period at the end of the last line of a poem and think, ‘That’s it; I’ve got it; I’ve done it.’ It’s got to be a conversation." The interchange between audience and poet doesn’t even need to include words. "You can actually feel whether or not a poem is working," Smith says.

Smith’s dynamic relationship with her audiences is one of the reasons her poetry appeals to such a wide array of people. She has shared her work everywhere from hole-in-the-wall Chicago bars and a train platform in Berlin to Carnegie Hall and Rotterdam’s Poetry International Festival. People from every walk of life—age, race, class, sexual orientation, educational background—gather together to hear her and possibly discover the words they’ve been waiting for.

The Birth of Slam Poetry

The first audience Smith captivated with her poetry was a community of spoken word poets from her hometown of Chicago. Their brand of poetry was imbued with the sound and the fury of language, and they loved the feel of well-crafted, rhythmic words in their mouths. The excitement of their performances escalated when they instituted poetic duels known as poetry slams. In these competitions, a handful of poets deliver poems of three minutes or less. Audience members are selected to judge the poems and eliminate about half the poets each round. After three rounds, the last poet standing is the winner. The amateur judging process means that audience connection is the lifeblood of slam poetry.

As a journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times in the 1980s, Smith discovered slam poetry when she reported on the city’s first Turf Poetry Festival, little knowing that she was destined to become a defining figure of the movement. She gave her first performance during an open mic night at the Green Mill, the cocktail lounge that hosts the famous Uptown Poetry Slam. Her thrilling performances and moving narrative poems quickly won her the respect and admiration of Chicago’s slam community.

In the beginning days of slam, Smith says, "we had no idea, really, what was going on. It just felt really good and a social circle was building up around it. We were all very nurturing and supportive." The poets thought carefully about each others’ work and offered suggestions for perfecting a phrase or rearranging lines for maximum impact. But, says Smith, "it wasn’t just poetry that connected us…We know each other on a deeper level than just, ‘Hi, what’s your sign?’ If there’s something bugging me, I’m more likely to turn to a member of that community than I am to my own family, just because they know more about me in a deeper way. I’ve said things in poems that I haven’t said to a lot of people."

One member of this close-knit artistic group, Michael Brown, eventually became her husband. The pair of sizzling slammers moved to Boston in 1990 and brought the spoken word revolution with them. Initially, Boston was wary of the unpredictability and competitiveness of slam. "Chicago was pretty much ready to try anything," remembers Smith. "When I came to Boston, it was like backtracking…We just had to change our expectations and get people excited about things we were already doing."

Smith and Brown initially introduced slam at the Stone Soup poetry reading, which was then meeting at T. T. the Bear’s Place in Central Square. However, "the staunch Stone Soup readers…didn’t trust where the performance was going," says Smith. They had spent a long time gathering an audience of traditional poetry readers and weren’t prepared for what Smith calls the "crapshoot" of slam performances. She acknowledges that some slam performers "continue to be clowns year after year because they think that they’ve learned what poetry is and how to push buttons." For these performers, the slam is all about finagling laughter, groans, and applause during their three minutes in the limelight. Many of the highly educated Stone Soup crowd were appalled by these types of poets and consequently believed that slam poetry had very little of the linguistic value found in conventional, printed poems.

However, plenty of slam poets—including Smith—were just as entranced by the written word as any Stone Soup writer. Their performances were so thrilling precisely because they had spent hours laboring over their poems, granting life to their beautiful creations through the birth pangs of thoughtful writing, editing, and preparation. One of Smith’s greatest contributions to slam poetry was that her well-crafted verse legitimized the movement in the minds of the literati who were open enough to listen. Her words cut through the "page versus stage" debate and demonstrated that good poetry can succeed in both arenas.

Though the Stone Soup readers rejected slam poetry, Smith knew she could find some Bostonians who would share her passion for it. And she was right: Boston eventually became one of the first cities to adopt slam outside of its Chicago birthplace. When she and Brown moved the slam to a bookstore called the BookCellar, large crowds began to flock to the competitions. In fact, there were so many people crowded on the stairs inside and trying to listen from outside that, for the first time in Boston, poetry became a safety hazard. Slam soon found a permanent home at the Cantab Lounge and, a few years later, spread to the Lizard Lounge as well. "The slam—if you give it air—will work exactly the way it’s supposed to work," Smith says. Fanned into flame by the frigid air of Boston, slam soon became a national phenomenon.

At the forefront of this exploding movement, Smith was quite a rising star herself. She won the individual title at the very first National Poetry Slam championship in 1990, and she went on to reclaim her crown three more times in 1991, 1993 and 1995. One of the pieces she performed in the 1996 championship, "Undertaker," was turned into a five-minute independent film that won awards at the Sundance and San Francisco Film Festivals. She also appeared in the documentary Slamnation, which chronicled the 1996 championship. In this film, many competing poets spoke of Smith with a mixture of reverence and fear, all agreeing that she could be the downfall of their respective slam teams. She was not just the most successful slammer to date; she had become a legend.

Burning the Landscape

While Smith’s career as a slam poet was taking off, her day job was writing columns for the Boston Globe. She had almost as many fans of her journalism as of her poetry. No matter which genre she employed, Smith painted the full humanity of her subjects, and her readers were touched by these authentic portraits.

In 1998, Smith’s incisive stories earned her a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize. And that’s when the ugly truth came out: Smith had fabricated sources and quotes in some of her columns for the Globe, violating the first rule of journalism ethics. One of the most notorious made-up sources was a cancer patient whom Smith claimed went by her middle name, Claire. The centerpiece of a column about a new cancer treatment, Claire is portrayed as a formerly optimistic person turned somewhat morbid and gruff by what she calls "the ogre" of cancer. In Smith’s farewell column, she said that she had fabricated characters like Claire "to create the desired impact or slam home a salient point."

But while her journalist’s voice and eye often enriched her poems, her poet’s imagination never should have entered the fact-filled world of reporting.

To her credit, Smith admits that her actions cannot be justified by her lack of time, by her drive to succeed or by her desire to produce a shining column every week. She wrote that these hollow excuses "point to the cursed fallibility of human beings, our tendency to spit in the face of common sense." Some of Smith’s colleagues and readers relished the downfall of a heroine while others felt betrayed, disillusioned and disappointed. But many recognized that despite her ability to stir readers’ thoughts and emotions, Smith was only a human being, just like those she wrote about so poignantly.

Smith’s life quickly spiraled downhill. She lost her job at the Globe, as well as her American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award and Pulitzer nomination. At the same time, both her health and her marriage fell apart.

But like an arsonist phoenix rising from the ashes of her own making, Smith refused to let these events defeat her. Not knowing where else to go, Smith returned to Chicago and to her last remaining source of strength—slam poetry. She gave what many consider the most memorable performance of her life at the Chicago Cultural Center in front of the community she had always been real with, the one group that would not turn aside because of her professional sin and her personal despair. To thunderous applause and a standing ovation, Smith laid bare her soul.

Almost a dozen years later, Smith says people still remark on that reading. The audience had initially gathered out of curiosity, wondering what Smith would say after suffering through public demonization and private hell. As her words washed over them, they were deeply moved by the gritty emotion, heartache and triumph. These were words they had been waiting for, words that suggested hope and redemption against all odds.

While Smith says that "it was very important for me to be in that place at that time," it wasn’t until the National Poetry Slam, which took place a few months later in Austin, Texas, that she fully recognized how this group of people could be her saving grace. "That’s when I realized that the poetry community is a really unwavering community," she says. "They had kind of pulled me out [of my depression] because I wasn’t talking to anybody. They really just closed ranks, and that was very, very helpful for me."

The poetry community was the lone encouraging voice in the cacophony of opinions about what the Globe incident would mean for Smith and for her career. Smith recalls people asking her what she would do with her life now that she could no longer write. "The world [was] telling me who I was supposed to be," she recalls. "It’s like, nudge nudge, hint hint hint. And you don’t take the hint, so the easiest thing to do is to burn the whole landscape clean and start over."

Fortunately, when Smith burned the landscape of the journalism career she had built for over two decades, she was not bereft of all avenues for writing. In fact, these events allowed her to focus all her energy on writing and sharing poetry, which she says is "exactly what I should have been doing all along. I’m finding great rewards in it. It’s giving me some personal movement; it’s giving me a way to translate my own life without looking to outside people to legitimize me." While the loyalty of the slam community was immensely helpful for Smith, it was pure, unadulterated poetry that enabled her to find strength in herself. She says, "It was a real revelation to realize that I could find solace in poetry when I needed it, that not only was there a community that I could turn to, but that whenever I’m searching for answers, I feel like I have the power to find them myself and that’s in the writing." It’s not always an audience member who needs to hear a poem; sometimes a poem contains the words the author herself needs most.

Smith’s missteps at the Globe actually helped her to stumble onto the path toward becoming the writer she is today. She says, "I’m not thrilled with how I got there, but to tell you the truth, I probably wouldn’t change anything."

Reluctant Hosannas

The many naysayers who thought Smith’s writing career had screeched to a permanent halt clearly did not have their fingers on the pulse of poetry. Before the events at the Globe, she had already published three books of poems, and her work had appeared in literary journals such as The Paris Review and TriQuarterly. But the applause from critics grew increasingly louder as she continued to pour her heart into her poetry. Teahouse of the Almighty, the first book of poetry she published in over a decade, became a 2005 National Poetry Series winner, and Blood Dazzler was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.

But regardless of the censure or praise her work receives, Smith will always find in poetry a source of personal strength. It’s not about concrete achievements—putting a period at the end of a line, winning a slam or racking up poetry awards. Rather, it is an important exploration, a process, a journey. As Smith says, "It’s not reaching a goal that matters; it’s [the process of] getting to the goal…When you reach what you think is the goal, you look up and say, ‘Well, damned if there’s not more road there.’" This is a road a poet must walk for herself. According to Smith, "Poetry becomes the way you move your own life forward."

Nevertheless, poetry is also about others. In her poetic manifesto dedicated to 6th grader Nicole, Smith proclaims the weighty responsibility poets have: "Angry, jubilant, weeping poets— / we are all / saviors, reluctant hosannas in the limelight." While finding her own answers through writing, Smith’s words also help people process emotions they thought were too deep and complex to express. Her poems lend a voice to those who are often overlooked or forgotten and plumb the varied human experiences that tragic news headlines cannot fully communicate.

In the low lights of the Cornelia Street Cafe, dozens of people listen closely to the forgotten voices buried beneath the torrents of Hurricane Katrina’s flood. Smith introduces "34," the first poem she wrote for Blood Dazzler: "The story [about Katrina] that pushed at me the most was the story of the 34 nursing home residents who were left behind to die. So what I tried to do is turn the clock back just a few seconds and give each one of those 34 people just a minute of their voice back."

After the reading, Jackie Sheeler, webmaster of poetz.com and one of the hosts of the Cornelia Street reading, stops by Smith’s table to tell her privately how much she loves the book: "I normally don’t just sit and read a book of poems that isn’t an anthology because it’s too much of just one voice. But I couldn’t put Blood Dazzler down because it’s filled with voices." The book is replete with the nuanced voices of victims and villains alike, tracing the common thread of humanity that binds us all together despite our differences.

In the midst of her literary success, Smith’s goal remains the same as when she first started out as a slam poet: she writes so that both she and her audience can heal and connect, remember and understand. Words have the power to change lives; in different ways, they saved both Smith and Nicole. Fully convinced of poetry’s profound purpose, Smith concludes her poetic manifesto with an exhortation to her fellow writers: "So poets, / as we pick up our pens, / as we flirt and sin and rejoice behind microphones— / remember Nicole. / She knows that we are here now, / and she is an empty vessel waiting to be filled. / And she is waiting. / And she / is / waiting. / And she waits."

This is one in an occasional series of articles in cooperation with The Good Men Project.

Nick Flynn is a poet and the author of “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City“, a memoir about his relationship with his estranged, alcoholic and homeless father. His latest book, “The Ticking is the Bomb,” is a memoir that interweaves reflections on his childhood, his relationship with his father, his mother’s suicide, the impending birth of his daughter, and his outrage and obsession with the torture depicted in the photos from Abu Ghraib.

Good Men Project co-founder Tom Matlack spoke with Flynn last week about “The Ticking is the Bomb” and about fatherhood. Matlack also invited Flynn to take The Good Men Project’s Manhood Quiz.

TOM MATLACK: One of the things I really love “The Ticking is the Bomb” is the way you write about the way we all get lost. I think many of us men are at a crossroads. You realize this the morning you get up and look in the mirror and don’t recognize who you are.

Nick Flynn: I think it’s hard to tell when you are actually lost. It’s hard to remember that it’s actually a common experience—and maybe just a human experience, and almost a necessary experience—to get lost, and not to assume that one’s life’s going to go in some sort of clear trajectory where everything’s recognizable. I just don’t think that’s realistic.

But it also can be very dark and very troubling. Some people don’t get out of it either. For some people that’s the end of the road. I’ve had a few of these experiences in my life. It’s the nature of life. There’s some element of suffering in life. It comes to all of us. And it’s almost impossible to know how to navigate it until you’re in it.

It does feel a lot like the things I did in Boy Scouts. They drop you in the woods, and you have to survive for the weekend, with a knife and a match and a tarp or something.   There’s a reason that the Boy Scouts do that. It’s a metaphor for what’s going to happen at other points in your life—how are you going to figure your way out of this thing? And hopefully you figure out somewhat healthy ways out of these things. The thing that led you into there might not have been that healthy. Or it might just have been necessary. It could just be circumstantial. Certainly life blindsides you.

TM: You write about the impact of realizing that you were going to be a father. How do you view fatherhood as potentially transformational?

NF: It wasn’t that I suddenly realized I was going to be a father. It was a choice. It was actually a very active choice. But the choice was something that had to be navigated. I had to step up to make that choice. The pregnancy was no surprise. And yet even within this sort of conscious decision, there was a lot of uncertainty. There was a lot of wondering if I was actually up for this moment, that I would be able to show up for it, that I’d be able to be a father. That was really abstract.

My wife (actress Lili Taylor) didn’t put any pressure on me any way. She was very clear. She was like, "This is what I want to do, this is the time for me to do it, and I’d like to do it with you. If you’re not ready to do, we’ll move on." And it became very clear that it was really my choice. It was remarkably clear and simple that whatever I have to struggle with is what I have to struggle with. And it was not about making her happy or saving her. It was really very clear that she would prefer that we did it together.

I realized I hadn’t really approached our relationship in that way before. It always felt like there was some sort of burden of responsibility on me to take care of women or to save them, that there could be some crisis if I wasn’t there, some very serious consequences. And this didn’t seem that way at all. It seemed clear that I just had to wrestle with whatever was inside me and it gave it room to be dragged out into the open.

TM: So in terms of your impending fatherhood and your relationship with your own father and then your awareness of torture, how did all of that get stirred up in your mind?

NF: The book started as a meditation on the Abu Ghraib photographs. I sort of had done all the research and written a draft of a book. But I sensed that I hadn’t quite followed it deep enough. Since this isn’t journalism, it’s not just about what happened; it’s really about why this thing that happened is affecting me. That’s what a memoir is: an individual’s interpretation of events, rather than just what happened.

When I started looking into why these images snagged so deeply in my subconscious, I followed those threads back, and they led back to stuff I had touched on in the first memoir—my father’s time in prison, my mother’s suicide—but they went more deeply into them. In my father’s case, he had been tortured in federal prison; he’d been experimented on. And he would tell this story quite often. He was sleep-deprived, had been put in isolation and sexually humiliated. And as I was writing the book, I started realizing that these were the things that also were talked about at Abu Ghraib.

One of the books I read was by the historian Alfred McCoy. It details the CIA’s involvement in developing the torture techniques we saw at Abu Ghraib. They had a 50-year program to develop those techniques. McCoy talks about how the federal prisons had been the site of early experimentation of these torture techniques. And some of those prisons were prisons that my father was in. So his stories suddenly took on this other resonance.

TM: If it’s OK with you, I’d like to ask you 10 questions that we call the Manhood Quiz. The first question is who taught you about manhood?

NF: It would be a series of my mother’s boyfriends when I was growing up. There were about 10 different boyfriends, and each sort of taught me a little piece of it. So it’s very much a mosaic of 10 different guys—and I actually feel fondly about nearly all of them.  They all have contributed some piece to the puzzle.

TM: The second question is how has romantic love shaped you as a man?

NF: I think that whole idea of romantic love was probably almost too strong an influence early on—getting caught up in the lyrics of pop songs or something and trying to figure out what that meant. I think that can separate one from having actual genuine interactions. And that also brought some sort of a competition with other men over women, which seems very unhealthy in retrospect.

TM: What two words would you use to describe your dad?

NF: Vodka and charm.

TM: How are you most unlike your father?

NF: Well, he’s pure id. And he doesn’t have any sort of container for that. I’m probably the exact same. I’m no different from him. It’s just that I’ve figured out how to keep it in a container a little bit more.

TM: From which of your mistakes did you learn the most?

NF: I think attempting to maintain more than one relationship at a time. The energy it takes is really not worth it. And the energy and the attention it takes away from any one relationship.

TM: This is a two-part question. What word would the women in your life use to describe you, and do you believe it’s accurate?

NF: I’m always reluctant to put words in anyone else’s mouth, but it’s something I really do often ask, like what people feel about how they’ve been portrayed in my book.

TM: How about your wife? What does your wife say about you?

NF: Oh, she’s very supportive. I get good feedback from her. We’re doing well. So whatever the word would be—I hate to give her a word—but it’d be on the positive end of the spectrum.

TM: My wife’s word is narcissistic, and it’s accurate.

NF: There are darker moments when I feel like I’m not quite living up to my potential, but for the most part I do take in what she says, so I’ll say it’s accurate.

TM: What dad in your life do you really admire for his parenting skills?

NF: For years before I became a father I would try to spend as much time as I could with my friends who were parents and their kids. And I was really impressed. They all sort of managed to do it, and do it gracefully. I felt like there was something about this generation, that they had learned something from the previous generation about showing up and being really present as fathers. And it also made me imagine that I could maybe do it. And it felt like it was really just about showing up and being present for it. I don’t mean to disparage my father in any sense, but those were things that he was not able to do.

TM: I have three kids. My experience is that showing up is 90 percent of the battle.

NF: So far that’s working. That simple formula seems to be working.

TM: How old is your daughter now?

NF: She’s 2.

TM: The next question is have you been more successful in public or in your private life?

NF: I feel comfortable with both at the moment. I have a book out right now, so suddenly I’m in public life, or back into public life. That’s the thing about a book: You’re in the public life for a little bit, and then you sort of go away for a little while—several years in my case—and then you come out again, hopefully. It went well. The public thing went well this time, so I feel comfortable with both.

TM: When was the last time you cried?

NF: I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art. I get pretty emotional around the time of my mother’s death, so I probably cried around then, just a month or so ago. (Flynn’s mother committed suicide when he was 22; he’s now 49.)

TM: In December, right?

NF: Yeah, so there was a cry around that.

TM: How long has it been since your mom passed away?

NF: It’s a long time—over 20 years.

TM: The next question is what advice would you give teenage boys who are trying to figure out what it means to be a good man?

NF: There’s this sort of male energy that we have that can seem very destructive. But it doesn’t have to be. It actually can be a very positive force. A lot of the ways the male energy’s channeled in the society is in very negative ways: the violence or pornography, there’s all sorts of sexism, and there are all sorts of ways that energy is manipulated. But it’s actually a very beautiful thing, and to honor it for what it is and to try to use it in some positive way is the best we can do.

TM: And last but not least, what’s your most cherished guy ritual?

NF: Well, it’s really about the baby right now. In the last two years I’ve seen basically every sunrise, which has been sort of amazing. At a certain point you’re not sure how many more sunrises you’re going to see. And then I’ve seen every one since she’s been born. We get up together, and we have this sort of meditation thing in the morning for two or three hours—until her mom gets up—where we’re just together, just in this really quiet time that I really cherish.

Looking for something inspirational and a bit international? Check out Iyeoka Okoawo. This woman is an artist of an up and coming genre, known only as “poetry slam.”

It’s a genre where poetry is read in a rhythmic conduct along with a soulful motif. It can be very inspiring, and it touches the soul. Iyeoka Okoawo is a poetry slammer of Nigerian decent who plans to make a difference with her words.

In 2006, Okoawo won a New England Urban Music Award for the Best Female Spoken Word Poet, and in 2007 she received a Massachusetts Industry Committee Hip-Hop Award for Spoken Word Artist of the year.

Iyeoka is also known world-wide. She was sought out by the president of Rwanda to perform a poem for a dinner he was hosting. Her art is like a rap song with more soul and more relevance to a larger audience. Though her medium is unusual where she does not sing her rhythmic words, they are piercing with poignancy.

She was recently at Boston University, where Blast had the chance to see her in action. She will be performing three more times in Massachusetts — Wednesday in Wellesley College at 7 p.m.; at Harper’s Ferry Friday in Allston; and March 13 at Alchemist Lounge in Jamaica Plain.

Do not miss out. Check out her website at http://www.iyeoka.com.

The Phoenix and the Turtle is an allegorical poem about the death of ideal love. It is widely considered to be one of William Shakespeare’s most obscure works.

The Phoenix and the Turtle

Let the bird of loudest lay,
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
But thou shrieking harbinger,
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever’s end,
To this troop come thou not near.
From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feather’d king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.
Let the priest in surplice-white
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.
And thou treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender makest
With the breath thou givest and takest,
‘Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead:
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they loved, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
‘Twixt the turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix’ sight;
Either was the other’s mine.
Property was thus appall’d,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was call’d.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded,
That it cried, ‘How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none,
If what parts can so remain.’
Whereupon it made this throne
To the phoenix and the dove,
Co-supremes and stars of love,
As chorus to their tragic scene.