Blog #13

A: So um how did you like transition just from writing poetry to the performance pieces that you do?

S: um I heard um Phillip Dacey D-A-C-E-Y um read his poetry by heart at the Passaic County Community College poetry center and I was so enamored of that and so um in 2007 I decided that I really need to um have more of my poetry published and um I would like to start readings.  I mean I wrote a lot of poetry and I wasn't really out there

A: Um so I know that you were saying that all your poems are print poems first do you think it makes like a bigger impact on an audience to see it performed as opposed to reading it in print?

S: It makes a different impact

A: okay

S: um when we're reading something on the page um we are at our discretion as to how long you will read it we can go back to it uh we can leave it in the bathroom you know so you know all those things affect a reading where you read it uh how often you read it what time of day you read it you know if you read it with somebody else so uh reading silently gives a whole different experience um if you read something aloud that's uh in it's you know it's the medium

A: right

S: if you know it's a different discourse in a sense

A: right

S: um uh cause it's not oral when you're just reading it on the page and so forth um one of my purposes is to involve the audience there's some call and response um to bring in people to appreciating poetry who wouldn't otherwise because poetry people are made to feel afraid of poetry

A: mhm

S: because I'm afraid there's a lot of bad teaching going on about what poetry is

A: yeah

S: and how to appreciate it and so by embodying these and doing multimedia I'm hopinng to bring people to say oh poetry's about me to go listen to people who read poetry to other poets who read looking down and then ultimately to go to the page itself

A: okay

S: So um cause we live in such a multimedia world with so many different kinds of literacy you know I'm trying to pull on people from different literacies to be willing to look at the page

A: No yes you answered it (laughing) Can you tell me about a specific time that maybe a certain audience member told you that your poetry made an impact on their life?

S: Yes um I had a woman come up to me and um in Television Daddy there's a number of poems of difficult relationship with father and I always catch it in terms of some television thing but that's a way to sometimes if you have something else to look at you can bring out difficult stuff on the side

A: Okay

S: So and she you know uh one of them is about abuse by a father and she said that she was able to get in touch with abuses with her mother and to think about it and to start writing about it

A: mhm

S: So there are any number of experiences like that that I've had that's one specific person I know who spoke of it um and I have three different shows a fourth one now that's going to be opening in May and um they're all very different from each other it also helps to stretch me creatively to think about my audiences that I'm building that they need to have some surprises so um one of my shows is Ashes, Ashes a Poet Response to the Holocaust a very profound and consistent response from the audience which is um I've read about the holocaust I've researched the holocaust but I never got it until I saw your performance because you got me on the emotional body level

A: oh wow

S: and that's what poetry does it makes us experience something not just rhetorically but as a full body emotional experience so um those you know that's important and and I and in my performances I often talk about the power of poetry in the Ashes, Ashes performance I talk about why it's important to you to experience the poetry of the holocaust because it's too easy to get lost in numbers in fact there is a poem about numbers um the new show is actually a musical I'm writing songs