Feeling Is First

Until recently, when I looked for Spoken Word on Spotify, I got a lot of Levi The Poet, Shane Koyczan, and Neil Hilborn. Now these poets are great, and I appreciate a lot of their content. But they are also all white dudes. The human experience - the American experience - is so much more broad than any white man can express.  But then I found out that Sarah Kay was part of a compilation called 27: The Most Perfect Album. Then I found out that Andrea Gibson has a bunch of content on Spotify, and most of it is set to pretty music! Then I found out that Button Poetry started making Best Of albums and putting them on Spotify! Huzzah!  Sure, I could figure out how to make playlists on youtube of all my favorite Button videos, buuuuuuut I'm not gonna. I'm on Spotify more often than I'm on youtube, and Spotify doesn't have ads. So, if you're like me, and you love Spotify and Spoken Word and the opportunity to understand perspectives that are different from your own, pl...

In my  previous post , I discussed the first of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. The first letter is mostly about poetry, but the rest of the letters are about life and love more generally. His favorite topic seems to be solitude. Rilke sees solitude as a beautiful and necessary part of existence. He sees solitude as deserving of our reverence.  In his seventh letter, Rilke lauds solitude as the antidote for unhealthy enmeshment in relationships. He writes, "But those who have already joined forces and no longer distinguish and differentiate between each other, those who no longer possess anything that is truly their own: how should they find a way out of themselves, out of the abyss where their solitude is buried?"  Isn't that relate-able? Haven't we all, at some point, lost ourselves in a relationship? Rilke goes on to describe what love could be like if we saw each other as equals, "the love of two solitudes that protect, delimit, honor, a...

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian poet who wrote in German and French. Some of his work is really beautiful, including an entire series of poems about Mary, the mother of Jesus. Even though he was a white dude writing a hundred years ago, he demonstrates immense respect, reverence, and empathy for women and mothers. His best known work, however, is not any of his poems or poetry collections; it is his correspondence with Franz Xaver Kappus. Kappus was a fan of Rilke, and a student at the same military academy that Rilke had attended. The young Kappus sent a few original poems to Rilke and asked, "Should I be a poet?" Rilke wrote back, and the two maintained a correspondence for a few years. Rilke's ten letters to Kappus were later collected and published with the fitting title Letters to a Young Poet. Two different people gifted me two different editions of Rilke's work, (and they each very sweetly annotated them for me - so romantic!) and I too...

I saw The Play That Goes Wrong at the Altria Theater in Richmond, Virginia on October 27th, 2019. Afterward, I wrote this:  I go see a play and watch a group of men violate the body of an unconscious woman as part of the plot, you know, for the LOLZ, and boy do they get 'Em. Thousands of people in the audience around me are in stitches. The whole place is an uproar of laughter. And in this moment it feels like all of them are laughing at me.  Triggered is when your heart sinks into your stomach and every cell in your body is quivering and you HAVE to leave the situation. As I get up to leave, I am astounded to see that I am the only one in the hallway, seemingly the only one upset enough to walk out. How is that possible?  So now I'm doing math in my head. There are 3500 people in that audience. Maybe 1750 of them are women. About a fourth of them have probably been victims of sexual assault. That's over 400 women. How am I the only one who couldn't take it...

No celebrity death, no crisis, no tragedy, no political issue (not even the 2016 election!) has gotten so many of the people in my social media feeds talking about the same thing the way that the death of Mary Oliver has my friends talking. My incredibly varied friends. Conservative Christians, Progressive Christians, Pagans, Polyamorous, Monogamous, Straight, Queer, Cis, Male, Female, Nonbinary, Black, White, Latina, Middle-aged, Millennial, Parents, Nonparents, Poets, Artists, Writers, Teachers, Small Business Leaders, Nurses, still-haven't-figured-out-what-I-want-to-do-with-my-life-ers, you get the point. They're all mourning for Mary Oliver. Because Mary Oliver wrote about the human condition. She wrote about the universal experience of life as simultaneously sorrowful and wonderful. She could reach a vast and varied audience, because she was writing about things that are true for everyone. Oh and what a good thing it was that she did reach such a vast audience. Some...

Instagram has changed the game. Has poetry ever been this accessible before? Have poets ever been able to share their work with such ease? Instagram is not the right platform for every piece. It's for minimalist poems or lines from a larger poem. There will always be a need for print and for Spoken Word, for literary magazines and for live audiences. I will continue to pursue traditional means of publishing my work. However, insta-poetry appeals to my philosophical belief that art should be freely given. I want to be like Liz Gilbert and stop asking my creativity to make money for me. I want to be like Amanda Palmer  and let people support my work if they already love it. How will they know that they love my work if they don't have access to it? Plus the purpose of art is connection. How can art connect us to each other if we keep it to ourselves or confine it to obscurity? Art should be freely given. Instagram allows that. This is the poetry movement of my generation. S...

I'm late to the party, but I just discovered Guante . His poem  "Ten Responses to the Phrase Man Up"  has been viewed over half a million times and will be published in the Button Poetry anthology  "Viral" . I heard that poem first, and it got me hooked, but his poem "Action" truly moved me. "Rape Culture is silence." I don't think I've ever heard a more perfect definition of Rape Culture the one he gives in this poem. It is silence. It's us not having the conversations we should be having with our friends and our siblings and our kids. We should be telling our girlfriends to stop slut-shaming and our guy friends to stop using violent terms for sex. We should be telling our kids about  enthusiastic consent . ("Consent is not the absence of a no. It's the presence of a yes.") Rape Culture is perpetuated by our silence, by our fear of the potential social isolation that comes from standing up for what's right...