Poetry’s True and False Art of Speaking

Before we worried about the
effect of the digital word on the printed word, we worried about the effect of
writing on speech. This debate, as old as Plato’s Phaedrus, is kept alive by Page Meets Stage, a New York arts event where two poets from the two
traditions square off against each other. Since its launch in 2005, the event
has hosted such “page” notables as Billy Collins, Dana Gioia, and Philip
Levine, as well as a tier-one lineup of stage poets that includes Bob Holman,
Sarah Kay, and Andrea Gibson. If you are
concerned with the future of literary traditions, it’s an event worth checking
out.

The most recent session featured
Saul Williams (stage) and Carolyn Forché (page). Williams—an actor, alternative
rapper, and award-winning slam poet—came armed with a Shakespearian presence
acquired during his theater training and all the swagger of his beloved hip-hop.
But Forché, an acclaimed poet and translator (and winner of the 2013 Academy of
American Poets Fellowship), was no slouch either.

Williams’s first piece scored no
points for slam poetry. Bringing an “old journal” to the stage, Williams said he
intended to read a few poems he’d written over the years. The choice was
disastrous—he read hesitantly, stumbled, and restarted halfway through. “Got to
learn to read my handwriting,” he joked, adding that, as the stage poet, his
job was to lower the bar.

Forché did not need that bar
lowered. Overcoming her visible anxiety, she recited one of her most famous
poems, “The Colonel.”
Based on her experience doing human rights work in El Salvador during the
1970s, the poem begins with a nod to the hearsay of oral tradition:

What you have heard is true. I was
in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son
went
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. . . .
The colonel returned with a sack
used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this.

This is Forché’s famed “poetry of
witness.” Since her political awakening in the 1970s, her work has focused
largely on her experience in war-torn countries. Her poetry is profoundly
political, though she is quick to clarify what she means by the term: “In the
US, the ‘political’ means oppositional and resistant. I’m accused of being a
political poet because I said something I wasn’t supposed to say.”

Forché’s poetry is personal, not
because it is emotional, but because her subjective testimony is the medium
through which she relates the horrors she has seen. With an almost religious
understanding of witness—most likely from her Catholic upbringing—she shares
the news of what she has seen, heard, and touched with her hands.

A poem about severed ears might
seem to rely too much on shock value, but Forché mitigates the emotional effect
of her story as much as she can. The poem apologizes—“there is no other way to
say this”—but that apology brings a certainty that only the printed word can
carry. These words and no others are the truth; they must be preserved just
this way for posterity.

Fortunately for the stage,
Williams came into his own with his third poem. He recited “Children of the Night,”
a poem inspired by the birth of his daughter seventeen years ago. His Shakespearean
training finally on display, he performed at his famously high speed:

And now I’m a fish called father
with gills type dizzy,
blowing blood and liquid lullabies through the spine of time to tranquilize the

nervous system’s defeat.

Forché spoke for the crowd when
she burst out, “How does he do that?”

From then on, the distinction
between Williams and Forché seemed less one of medium and more one of maturity
and raw energy. Forché, in her sixties, has been honing her craft for longer
than Williams has been alive. While his energy far surpasses hers, his lack of
seasoning shows in his over-reliance upon anger.

More so than Williams, Forché has
seen atrocities that should stir righteous indignation. Her poetry does not
shrink back from pointing out injustice, but rage doesn’t seem to be part of
her palate. Even in “The Garden
Shukkei-en,” a poem written in the voice of a woman she met who survived
Hiroshima, her anger is restrained, letting the account speak for itself.

I
don’t like this particular red flower because
it reminds me of a woman’s brain
crushed under a roof

Perhaps my language is too
precise, and therefore difficult to understand?

Williams’ poetry is at no risk of
over-precision. He rails against white hegemony, the patriarchy, and all the
usual suspects, making full use of the harsher four-letter words and driving
them home with repetition and rhyme. A closer listen, however, reveals a masterful
skill behind some of the shouted lines. Take this selection from an excerpt of The Dead Emcee Scrollsperformed by Williams near the end of
the evening:

Caught in the crossfire. The KKK
had you caught in the crossfire.
Prayed every day, you were caught
in the crossfire. In Jesus name, you
were caught in the crossfire. The
cross fire.

Here “crossfire” is used to refer
to: a battle of words, the flaming symbol of white supremacists, burning
religious fervor, Christ’s crucifix, and the actual path of bullets. When
delivered in a staccato mimicking machine-gun fire, the poem stood up to
Forche’s best work.

Williams’ references to Christ are
not an anomaly. A preacher’s kid, he credits his Baptist father with his
fearlessness in performance. Though today he is far from orthodox Christianity,
he fills his poems with religious imagery.
He “licks at forbidden fruit,” has “psalms etched in his palms,” is a
“survivor of the flood,” and drops religious metaphors to the point that
fundamentalist Christians sometimes mistake him
for one of their own.

Forché’s religious influences are
also strong. Trained by “very mean Catholic nuns,” today she describes herself
as a “junkheap Catholic” attracted to the Church’s teachings on social justice.
To use Flannery O’Connor’s term, Forché’s poetry is more Christ-haunted than
Christian, the atrocities she has seen pointing her toward an absence she
mourns.

In Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture, published ten
years ago, Dana Gioia wrote that “as long as humanity faces mortality and uses
language to describe its existence, poetry will remain one of its essential
spiritual resources. . . . Even if there are fewer readers, people will be
listening.” If Forché and Williams keep up their work, and if Page Meets Stage
has anything to say about it, Gioia’s prediction will hold true.

Both spoken and written poetry
are here to stay. Plato would be pleased, even if the conversation is being had
by poets and not philosophers.

Bria Sandford is an
assistant editor at the Portfolio, Sentinel, and Current imprints of Penguin
Random House.

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