Jo'burg, SA: Day 3, continued...

3:00pm - The Market Theatre

The topic for the panel discussion is poetry's role in society at the present and in the future, a nice, wide topic. Each of the us distinguished panelists is to give a 5 minute presentation about our take on this topic. After that, we would open the discussion up to the audience. Ishle has something printed out to read. Vonani we ka Bila has a speaking agenda prepared. Sticks Mdidimba, an elder has books out, ready to recite from. I find myself unprepared, not sure of what to say. The plan was to feed off the other panelists organically. Now I'm a bit nervous, feeling like I recieved the wrong idea of the program.

To be honest, I'm not really that fond of panels. People can be really pretentious on them. I tend to feel like the *real* conversations happen after the panel, or after the poetry reading after the panel, around a round table over some stiff drinks. That's where I feel real life takes place, discussions peppered with organically grown jokes. There's also something about the panelists sitting in a straight line that seems unnatural to me. In other words, though they are important to have, I find panel discussions contrived, though I like how informal Teba (who was moderating) makes it. He introduces us briefly and from the heart and we journey into our discussion. And a good one it is.

Vonani talks about the need for poetry to have some level of social awareness-- patriotism was the word he used. Patriotism is a word that is generally like nails on a blackboard to my ears because I fear that blindness that often comes along with patriotism. But, i think what he means is simply caring about the country you live in and having a poetic that is bent towards that caring. I dig what he is saying. Concern for a place and the people in it greatly enriches poetry.

Ishle talks about reclaiming the Korean culture that she was ashamed of as a child. She's gone from a shunner to a preserver of her culture. She has learned a handful of Korean songs and she sings them in her sets. She read a beautiful essay about this. Very moving.

I discuss poetry's responsibility to be available/acessible to the world and by accessible I mean physically and mentally. At the end of the day, poetry can't change the world if its not in the world. And it can't enrich people if they cannot understand it. My major point is: we have a responsibility to get poems out there in the world, to monitor the pulse of poetry in our society and do everything to keep that pulse going strong. I also urge poets to be diligent about the craft of poetry, to chase excellence, and to write what's inside you and not other people's impositions on your aesthetic.

I realize as the discussion continues, more and more people are filing in. I love that so many people have come out to the panel discussion. I am delighted by the amount of young people present as well, there on their own accord, asking poignant questions that stimulate me head and toe (but nowhere in between, promise).

I am enjoying the intellectual and spiritual energy of the people in the audience, in the room. We really have a nice vibe going and I'm thinking: wow, aside from the panel I was on with Walter Dean Myers years back, in Chicago, this is about the dopest panel I've been on. Of course, there's always that someone in the room who tries to stir things up. A man in the audience proclaims that there are no leaders in the poetry community and poets should be teaching math and economics with poetry, using poetry to uplift the community and until poets start doing pragmatic things with their work, he will bow to no poet. It seems he's a bit mad at us. The room grows tense with a silent and sensible resentment, but nothing erupts. A couple of the panelists address his anger gently and indirectly and we move on.

7:00pm
Speak the Mind Poetry Session, evening 2.

The usual backstage camraderie: sharing makeup and food, taking pictures, doing strange warm up exercises, cracking jokes and laughing a bit too loud, leaking into the audience to enjoy each other's work. I love finding people that I can be silly with. Julius, the host of the evening and a well known radio personality is my kind of silly. We make silly noises all evening. He has a 10 month old daughter named Azania, "Black People's Land." She has a mohawk, just like his!

I also vibe really well with a brotha named Thandeka Vabaza, affectionately known as Nkqo, or "knock knock." He's a hot, a well-known local poet, and the first poet to open up and bless the evening, poems in his traditional language, Xhosa. So, I couldn't understand what he was saying, but I loved watching his flourishings. I told him this later. And his rare energy coupled with mine (and not to mention his freckles, those pesky puddles of melanin!) is an exciting combination. Langa hushes us backstage a few times because we're laughing so much. Nkqo doesn't know it, but I consider him my muffin. Linda Gabriel, a poet from Zimbabwe, has the most mesmerizing speaking voice i've ever heard, after James Earl Jones. Her voice is a room filled with incense smoke, a sweet smelling heaviness. We connected really well the first night and decide to collaborate on stage this evening. She plays the mbira, a thumb piano. Backstage I practice my poem "Friendship, Magic, and Revolution" with her playing alongside. Music to both our ears.

There's Lesego, a South African theatre and soap opera actress. We were together on Noeleen's show yesterday but didn't get to vibe until now. Turns out she's quite the celebrity, but I don't know that. I just know her as Lesego, a poet. She's a beautiful woman. I leak into the audience to watch her perform her pieces and she is a goddess. She performs like an absolute pro....well, becuase she is. Actor and poet is a potent combination. She has her performance down to a science: it's nuanced, well-timed, and polished. I learn so much from 10 minutes of just watching her, mesmerized.

And there's wonderful Langa, who brought me here to South Africa, the organizer of Speak the Mind Poetry, his private energy, his quiet warmth, his sensible anger, his steady, uncanny leadership. I didn't really get to spend time with him until day 4 because he was so busy with the festival. It was great to build with him after things wound down. He and Teba are best friends. They've known each other since Capetown, since they were young boys.

9:00pm

It is about time for me to go on. Because the program is running behind, Langa tells us that we each have 10 minutes on stage. Used to doing anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour, a 10 minute feature is always a crisp surprise but it's also maddening when its a particular evening when you have so much to say and it seems so many poems in your repertoire say them just right. I have about 40 poems in my immediate repertoire, 75% of those memorized. 10 minutes means a lot of decision-making.

I love crafting a set. I never do it until I get to the venue and sort out own vibrations. I sit in the dressing room, poems, just pushing through the pores of my skin, and I pick the ones that speak to me most at the moment.

I'm feeling nervous, much more so than last night.To release the nervous energy I dance to myself, drop down into awkward stretches, cock my backside in the air and wag it. Really strange stuff, but it works like a cough drop on a raw throat: temporarily.

I'm nervous because I'm wrestling with the idea of doing "Crying Over Spilled Milk." I actually hadn't planned on doing that poem on this trip: i hadn't factored it into my rehersals. Standing backstage with my hands around my ankles and my ass in the air, my name about to be called, I'm find myself now examining why I hadn't intended on doing Spilled Milk--basically i'm performing therapy on myself before i hit the stage.

Have I outgrown the poem? Has it outgrown me? Maybe I'm afraid of putting myself out there like that in a forgein place. What is South Africa's position on abortion? Will I be shunned and rejected? Am I afraid of bringing the dark and not the light?

Two things inform my decision:

1. The night before, after my feature I was whisked upstairs to interview with this hip hop talk show, Black Rage. A very nice brotha interviewed me, raw and personable with dimples, forgot his name. In the midst of the interview he compared me to the other poets of the evening by saying that my work seemed much more lighthearted. He meant this in a complimentary way. However, his observation left me stunned, and I began to crawl into my head to brood on it. I wasn't offended by him or the observation, but it's often shocking when you find out something new about how you are percieved. And I've found that African folk can be very open about their perceptions of you. I dig that.

I think of all the times I wrote lines of poems and entire poems that ended up being really funny to audiences, the shock i've felt on stage several times. I found Africans laughed at some lines that have never gotten laughs before in America. This must mean that somethng is and/or isn't translating but I don't worry about it; it's just a bit perplexing at times. Come to think of it, that night, my pieces, even if the subject matters weren't light, were funny to people. I think every piece I performed had some element of laugher in it, even if humor wasn't originally intended. I answer him this: that my work isn't all lighthearted and last night's set perhaps didn't well represent the various tones in my work. I was determined the change that the next night.

I learned something about myself: that i don't want audiences to come away thinking that my work lacks intensity and that all my poems are funny. That's a very important, but one-dimensional aspect of my personality, but it is not all of who I am. I walked away from the interview determined to bring the dark next time, along with the light. To have light and dark exist in the same place, side by side, as they do in all of us. I think of Lucille Clifton's quote (Lucille means light, and light she is!): "my poetry strives to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable."

I only had 10 minutes to accomplish this. Bet.

2. Also, ever since Azania played Spilled Milk on Metro FM the day before, I'd gotten emails and messages on my website, expessing how moving it was. It re-instilled in me the power of that poem, and reminded me of what a universal experience abortion is. There will always be people who are ready to have sex and not ready to have babies. There will always be women who aren't ready to give birth to the 7 pound result of a rape. Though I don't write poems in "Spilled Milk's" sytle any more, and the style in which its written is no longer relevant to me as a writer, I was reminded of Spilled Milk's relevance to the world.

So I decide to do it. By the time Julius announces my name and I walk onto stage, I know it will be the second poem of my set. And it is. And all I could do is shake my head, smiling inside, when an audience member laughs at its emotional climax. Another part not meant to be funny, but is to certain people. I decide to take refuge in the fact that other people's laughter in my case may be a difficult thing to escape. And I guess that's not the worst thing one cannot escape.