May 12, 2015 - 14:16
For my final project, I decided to make my first attempt at doing spoken word poetry. I am somewhat obsessed with spoken word and have always wanted to try doing it myself, but have always been intimidated by the idea and never built up the courage to actually give in and try. So I decided to push my comfort zone and artistic limits a bit with this project and try something new! What I loved about the idea of doing spoken word for this project is that I was able to tie together all of the “sections” of this course: (1) Spoken word is usually very personal and in this case, doing environmental spoken word it fits with the theme of looking at self and identity in the environment and I tried to reflect some of that in the poem; (2) my original idea for expanding this poem to include more people and have it be more collaborative was to have some of you be in the recording of it saying lines together or something, but that proved far too hard to coordinate with when I could film and the fact that I was leaving campus super early, so instead, I settled for using lots of your serendip postings as inspiration. As I was crafting the poem, I tried to read many postings and reflect a lot on specific things we had discussed in class together, and I tried to include those in the poem so that it is not just my voice (even though I was the writer and performer), but the ideas are collaborative. (3) Obviously, spoken word has a LOT to do with language and communication, and I think it’s a pretty wild form of poetry. There is no set meter or “formula” for writing or performing spoken word, and it’s the kind of writing and performance that allows for so much creativity and wildness. (4) Spoken word often strikes me as an activist-type art. It is usually very powerful poetry, particularly due to the performance aspect of it, and it can just inject an audience with passion and fire, and that can easily take the form of activism. I actually watched a few environmental activism spoken word poems for inspiration as I started going about this project.
So anyway, this felt like a really appropriate last project for this class, and a great way to sort of end with a bang and a challenge for me to take a risk (not going to lie, I am slightly terrified to be putting this video up!!!). I also put a lot of thought into how I was going to film it and incorporate visuals. I thought it was important for at least a lot of the video to include seeing me read/perform it (sorry I didn’t memorize it) because it adds an extra layer of seeing the passion and seeing the body movements as I read. But I also tried to expand and get a little artsy at times (I’m not much of a filmmaker so I didn’t get crazy, but I tried to get a little creative). Also, I decided it would be very appropriate for me to film the performance at my site sit for the semester. When I was writing the poem, I wasn’t actually thinking about my site sit and hadn’t planned to make the poem center around “water,” but as I went it sort of just fell into place and that’s what happened and then I connected it with my site and thought it would be perfect to record there. One thing I ended up loving about recording everything at my site sit and close to the water is that throughout the poem, you can hear the water trickling in the background and sometimes you can hear birds, and it just seems to add to the poem by not ignoring the sounds around me and making them apart of the art.
As for the poem itself, I liked the idea of incorporating some singing into the spoken word, because I’ve seen some of my favorite poets do that in some of their poetry, and it just is always so beautiful and powerful and adds an extra punch to the poem. I chose to use bits of the song “The Water” by Johnny Flynn scattered throughout my poem. That’s sort of how I came upon the idea of making this poem about water, because I had written down many ideas, some of them having to do with water, and then I was listening to music one day during finals and this song popped on and it felt kind of perfect so I went with that. As I said already, I also took a lot of inspiration for the words and ideas from your posts and from discussions we’ve had in class and things we’ve talked about. I really tried to incorporate those ideas in the poem. I also took a lot of inspiration from Freya Mathews “On Desiring Nature” in connection with Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” which Rosa and I read in our Multicultural Education class – I posted last week about how to these two papers overlap and enhance each other, and I was thinking a lot about those ideas when I wrote this, so a lot of the ideas about desire, damage, and being broken come from thinking about the connection between these two papers.
Overall, it was difficult and exciting to write the poem, and I’m nervous/excited to hear what you folks think of my first attempt! I definitely felt like this was an awesome and powerful way to end the semester and end this course. And maybe now that I’ve given spoken word (particularly environmental spoken word) a try, I’ll have the courage to keep trying and improving and getting more and more wild!
Anyway, here is the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh-MUaDB_10
Thanks all for an awesome semester!!! You’re a fabulous bunch and I’ve learned so much from all of you and I hope this poem can reflect even just a little bit of what we’ve learned together and from each other.
I am also including the written words to the poem below, if you need/want to look at them to have a better understanding or to read at your own pace…
“Water Love”
All that I have is a river
The river is always my home
Lord, take me away
For I just cannot stay
Or I’ll sink in my skin and my bones
I dreamt the other night of a hot, naked Earth
Burning under the fire of a sun that pierced through a weakened shield of ozone
Drying up all the water
I dreamt of trees falling prey to the blades of lusting men
Leaving a field of brown corpses shriveled to a crisp
I dreamt of birds flying hopelessly with no place to land
Until they were swallowed up by a mushroom cloud of hatred
The ocean, once vast and blue and home
Now drained of its water and filled with floating bodies
And thick black liquid death
As I stood amidst the rubble of the Earth that was once my home
I collected tears in a mason jar – the only water for me to drink
I was thirsty, I was so thirsty
The water sustains me without even trying
The water won’t drown me I’m done
With my dying
I awake, frantic, and remember that it was only a dream
But dreams are crafted from the morsels of our subconscious
I am conscious of a future that is looking bleak
And the voice of apathy whispers in my ear that our fight is futile
“Extinction,” it breathes
We are living in a mass extinction and every moment of apathy
Is another death for our sibilings of the Earth
I remember as a child seeing coral reefs – magical colorful dream palaces
Filled with life and hope and wonder
I’ve seen those same palaces turn to dusty gray quiet ghost towns of the ocean
The life drained and barely surviving, thirsting for love
We are all thirsting for love
We have separated ourselves from each other and the earth
We build roads and floors to separate us from the ground
We wear shoes to keep our feet clean and free of dirt
But when was the last time you felt the earth with your sole
Letting your feet sink into the dirt, no boundary between bodies
Exchanging microbes in a contact zone
Your very being shouting, “We are connected”
We build walls around our hearts and minds
How many times have you shut out emotion or love
To preserve a public face you put on
While in your depths you long for connection and contact
Between strangers who were invisible parts in your ecosystem
We preach for independence but in an ecosystem we are all dependent on each other
We depend on the earth but the earth too depends on us
And we have broken that trust
It is not our land, it is the land to which we belong
And right now we are drying up that land with our greed and apathy
And it is thirsting for so much more than we have sparsely given
Now the land that I knew is a dream
And the line on the distance grows faint
So wide is my river
The horizon a sliver
The artist has run out of paint
Yet we are not broken.
Despite all the signs that scream apocalypse in our face
This damage in our communities and on our earth,
It is not an end
And rather than fall apart into apathy
We must join together in harmony and strength
We must desire change, we must desire the Earth
Our deepest desires should replenish the Earth
Should replenish our connection to each other in this world of separation
It is not enough to turn off lights at night and to tolerate difference
We must start at the roots of ourselves and our connection
And pour fresh water into our hearts to grow new life
To grow new desires so that our lives may be fulfilled
Not with money or success or what we see on the surface of the mirror
But with love and connection between our hands and the earth
My partner and I speak of our love as water
We say that I am a cactus – I can survive on trust alone
And need fewer physical manifestations of love
And she – she is an orchid – she needs reassurance and water to feel loved and to grow
But both of us are living plants that both give and receive water and life
The earth too is an orchid in a rainforest
And instead of chopping down that rainforest let’s give it water love
We treat the earth as a bottomless spring
That only gives us the water WE need to survive and to grow
But the earth is not a spring, it too embodies life
Life that gives water and life that needs water to survive
We need to give the earth more water love
We need to nourish the Earth with our desires
And think of ourselves as members of this beautiful ecosystem
We are not broken.
We are life and water and we can make change
And by sharing our water and desire and connection
We can build a new home on this Earth and in each other.
Where the blue of the sea meets the sky
And the big yellow sun leads me home
I’m everywhere now
The way is a vow
To the wind of each breath by and by
The water sustains me without even trying
The water can’t drown me, I’m done
With my dying.