Samples from Spoken Word Revolution
Introduction to Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means. —Billy Collins Song This is a song for the speechless, the dumb, the mute and the motley, the unmourned! This is a song for every pig that was too thin to be slaughtered last night, but was slaughtered anyway, every worm that was hooked on a hook that it didn’t expect, every chair in no arms or legs, and can’t speak English, every sofa that has ever been torn apart by the children or the dog and earmarked for the dump, every sheet that was lost in the laundry, every car that has been stripped down and abandoned, too poor to be towed away, too weak and humble to protest. Listen, this song is for you even if you can’t listen to it, or join in; even if you don’t have lungs, even if you don’t know what a song is, or want to know. This song is for everyone who is not listening tonight and refuses to sing. Not singing is also an act of devotion; those who have no voices have one tongue. —Edward Hirsch
To Dorothy You are not beautiful, exactly. You are beautiful, inexactly. You let a weed grow by the mulberry and a mulberry grow by the house. So close, in the person quiet of a windy night, it brushes the wall and sweeps away the day till we sleep. A child said it, and it seemed true: “Things that are lost are all equal.” But it isn’t true. If I lost you, the air wouldn’t move, nor the tree grow. Someone would pull the week, my flower. The quiet wouldn’t be yours. If I lost you, I’d have to ask the grass to let me sleep. —Marvin Bell Weekends company, you’re drunk for days. Overburdened moss-rotted branches heave slowly with the weak night breeze, like a failing night, and graze the stone wall. The nurse in me won’t let me leave. Homemade illness hardens into sugar and batters your speech, draping your dry white tongue over your teeth. Red pinholes for eyes, and your mouth is a smudge. Do I have to watch tomorrow afternoon while you keep your face warm with the television and the maple drips on the lawn chairs that flake and rust on the flooded terrace? When you start snoring, I’ll take the tray from your lap and tip you over so I can look for the rest of your lunch under the green sofa cushions and probably find those pills you’ve been hiding. By the time the clouds dim and I start seeing us in the windows, I’ll be drunk myself and ready to wake you for dinner.
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