Jack Foley, Slam (Part II)

Jack Foley

A friend whispered to me that there was nothing very "literary" about this work. If she meant that there were few allusions in the manner of, say, Ezra Pound, she was quite correct. But the formof these presentations was entirely literary. No matter how ignorant of the history of poetry any individual poet may have been, no matter how few actual poems he or she may have read, that poet functioned within a working definition of what constituted a poem, and it was a fairly conventional definition. The poem was short, frequently narrative, it issued out of the often-asserted "I," etc. There was not a single poem which placed such poetry--or poetry itself--in question, no single moment which genuinely astonished and forced us to review our conception of what might constitute the art. There was, in short, nothing stunningly original. On the other hand, there was nothing really bad, either. The worst acts had something endearing about them, just as those high-school assemblies often did, and the four hours passed quickly.

While staying at my home, Seattle coach Paula L. Friedrich gave me a copy of her chapbook, Exotic Plants (direct inquiries to seaslam@rocketmail.com or call 206-366-2280). Friedrich is a graduate of the Creative Writing/Poetry program at Oberlin and has represented Seattle on three National Poetry Slam teams. She is also Board President of the Seattle Poetry Slam and performs with the ensemble, A Slip of the Tongue. Though I didn't hear her read, I was aware that she has been extremely involved in slam, and I was curious about her book. Questions like "Is it really poetry?" "Does it communicate on the page?" seem to me, frankly, of little consequence, but here was a book by someone deeply involved in slam. What was it like?

Exotic Plants is divided into three sections, "Confessions I Would not Make to a God," "Medusa's Diner," and "Taking Apart Tinkerbell." It is roughly chronological, beginning with a poem dealing with the author's childhood and ending with a poem about the adult poet living in Seattle. Exotic Plants may betray its slam roots by the frequent appearance of the pronoun "I," which appears perhaps more than any other word in the book. Like the work I heard at the slam, Friedrich's book has nothing in it that can be called "experimental."

The word "Confessions" suggests the focus of the first section, "Confessions I Would not Make to a God". These poems are indeed "confessional," with echoes of Plath and others:

I am up the cherry tree
with my new, blue dress on.

Grandma Omi will make Kirschentorte,
and say meine Susse, my sweetie,
like she always does.

Daddy bought wooden paddles with a rubber ball
to bang around outside the apartment
until my brother and I rang the bell and said
ich mocte ins Haus gehen bitte,
door buzzed through the speakerja, ja.

Apart from the odd placement of the comma after "new"--perhaps a typo--this is competent, carefully-written verse, but it is little more than that. It is also a kind of poem we have seen and heard very, very often. A sub-text of this kind of writing is always, "See, I am writing a poem: this is like other poems you've read--so you can recognize it--but it is also different because it has my particular subject matter, my life." Unfortunately, the particularities of the life are not sufficiently present to lift the poem into something really memorable. For the most part it is--a poem, not bad, but one of many. The concluding lines--particularly "Little hearts that drop from my hands"--move towards something more genuinely touching:

I wanted the cherries
from the tree in Germany.
Little hearts that drop from my hands
to my dress, which
Omi [the poet's grandmother] will wash today.

Friedrich's poems--like successful slam poetry in general?--often have a "twist" at the end which makes you reconsider everything. This is also true of Beau Sia's work. If your poem is going to be judged, you will want to have a strong ending--something which will ring in the judges' ears as you close.

Friedrich's confessional section explores childhood experience, the Family Romance ("the young girls who like their fathers so much, you know, / they never get married..."), ethnicity ("Mark of the Mongol"), religion and sex, youthful friendship; it concludes in Seattle, where the poet now lives. The themes are familiar--which is fine if you've never experienced them--but they are hardly examples of Pound's directive to "make it new." As I suggested earlier, these poems are competently written but not spectacular; they have the feeling of apprenticeship--as if Friedrich were learning her trade through them.

The poems in the concluding two sections include several references to myths--which is not something I heard in the slam--and the poet at times takes on various personae, though the assertion of the "I" remains a theme:

I am Eurydice teasing you into hell.

Your slumber mutters from the mattress.

I baptize the precipice,you slide....

There are also comic poems ("Lego Woman") and fanciful ones ("If M.C. Esher Were My Lover, / We'd Never Have Time for Pizza"). For me, by far the finest poem in the book was the concluding one, "Persephone." Friedrich's placement of the poem suggests that she understands its strength: a slam poet is aware of the need for a good ending.

In the light, my nails are bloody from too many
pomegranate
seeds.
I guzzle milk like moonbeams; turn blinds for the amaryllis,
swing children onto my hips, squeeze snot from their nostrils,
watch them grow.

Mother, I transplanted my roots to a water-drenched city.
You would rip them if you could face
some rapacious, stinking god
with a spear.

But when the sun is done with the exposition of all dark
corners,
I screw my face into question marks,
exclamation points,our fingers dragons or whales
we darken sidewalks,tides;

sleep until two becomes one.

Feel free to fly here,
after three.

Everything in this breakthrough poem seems magical and enigmatic. For the first time in the book we come face to face with mystery. The I is of course present, but it seems to open itself into a darkness which we find nowhere else in Exotic Plants. Here, autobiographical and mythic elements touch: the "water-drenched city" is obviously Seattle, but the moon and blood suggest archetypal feminine experience. Persephone of course lives half of the year in hell, underground--and she has been "raped." The poem is not exactly "accessible," but it stays with us for a long time, nudging us into an awareness which is never specific but constantly alive. What do the concluding lines mean? Are they an assertion of freedom ("Feel free to fly here") followed by the assertion of a limitation: "after three"? The poem is like--in Keats' terms--a sudden influx of Negative Capability after a book full of the Egotistical Sublime, and it brings us perhaps to another insight about slam. Slam is a wonderful way to experience the rituals and observances of poetry and to see oneself as participating in those rituals. But poetry needs to transcend its rituals. It is possible that every feeling of individual freedom eventually transforms itself into a burden from which, once again, we need to be freed. Slam gave the teenagers who visited me something they will always remember--and which I will always remember; but perhaps it is finally something they need to leave behind. Poetry is frequently represented as winged. "Feel free to fly here," writes Friedrich: Freedom. "After three": Limitation. Friedrich's concluding poem transcends not only the limitations of her book but probably of slam poetry as well. It will be interesting to see what becomes of her, and it.

S.A.Y. Poetry, a CD of the Seattle Slam Finalists is available for purchase. Contact

It Plays in Peoria Productions
14 S. Division
Auburn, WA 98001-5318
www.splab.org
888-735-MEAT
www.inpeoria.org
253-735-6328

In addition, David Yanofsky has made a documentary film about slam. It's called Poetic License. You can get information about it at www.poeticlicense.org.

Jack Foley