Transcript

Power of the Spoken Word | Rose Drew | TEDxPocklingtonED

[Music] Don't you love that? I'm going to start with a poem and this is about um how I answer people who tell me that feminism is obsolete. I normally do it in a tiny little short skirt as you can imagine. You talk to me about equality and how we're now all basically free. You say you don't need that feminist crap. Ugly man hating women stuck in the past. That's opinion, but it's not fact cuz it's a rape culture world and men run the racket. What was she wearing? Was she out on a date with him? Not reliable, sober. Maybe she's just whining about him. So, it's all equal. The fights are done. Feminism's obsolete. The battles are won. So then tell me why. Statistically speaking, a woman will be killed. Just while I'm reading, so-called female jobs are valuable. Just try to find a nurse or an admin or a teacher, though the pay can be twothirds what a man gets for work about the same skill. Why is he more valued? Does he really pay more bills? Is a builder really better than the one who takes your temperature and messes? If you figure that a nurse always female and the builder never is. Come on. What kind of world could it be? What could life be like if the women were freed? Now ladies, not talking about shaming, though sometimes just put on a coat. I don't see men with peckers out and see-through shorts and casual sex. That's how some of us roll. But he will be a player and we just a bunch of hoes. This next part's for the boys cuz it isn't for the girls. Cuz rape is not about high heels and sexy little skirt. It's for power and control. You're missing from your life. You take it out on someone else to boost you up inside. You want to stop a rape? Is this not down to the booze? Let's teach our sons not to do it. Easier to do. Because no means no. No matter what you perceive. Some hugging and some drinking ain't the gateway to your dreams. And rape culture. What is that? We had roofies in the 70s, but now they're haunting in packs and the little bastards film it. Then they post it on the web and the victim's raped again. It's messing with her head next thing. She kills herself now. Your victim's dead. Look, women and men partners. No worse, no better than you. And we don't need a pedestal or doors held open to open doors to jobs, opportunity, equal pay, equal work, equally achieve. And then we'll all put on our sexy kit. Go dance until the night is dawn. this game of king. I'm sick of it. Planet needs all our skills to hope and save what's left of it. So, we're all equal now. The fights are done. Feminism's obsolete. The battles are won. So, then tell me why. Statistically speaking, in this world, a woman has been killed in these minutes I've been reading. Come on. What kind of world could it be? What kind of people are we? What could life be like if the women were freed? Thank you. I am Rose Drew and an anthropologist and a poet has been has been said. So I've locked the two most lucrative pos uh positions in the world. Wealthy beyond my dreams. I'm I'm a performance poet and that was a performance poem and in fact that was a slam poem and so I'm here to talk to you today about my my butt's loud. Um I'm here to talk today about um performance and slam and poetry and poets and and how does this all come together and what does it all mean? And hopefully at the end of a few minutes you might have a better idea of slam and performance. My husband Allan and I have been running a poetry open mic in the city of York for 9 and a half years. Month in month out since January 2006. We bring poets together or short story writers or people who just are there to listen. And and open mic means open microphone and it means what it sounds like. You show up, sign up, stand up and read and you get your five minutes and they belong just to you. performance. What does that mean to perform? Performance. It means what it sounds like. It's tiny democratic theater accessible to all. A communication between the poet and the audience. What do I perform? All right. I write and read about skeletons and death and sex and love and motherhood and politics. like you probably figured out by now. And mythology, which is all really politics, isn't it? Everything Everything is politics. The decision to not get involved is political. What do you think of when you hear the word poet? If you have never heard of a performance poet or thought of slam and what does slam mean, and I will get to that. What do you think of? Do you think of the old white guys? Do you think of a a Culis? Do you think of Shakespeare? Do you think of Dante? Do you think of the beaten poets, you know, the Allen Ginsburggs, or do you think of the guy sitting there writing his little tiny words, probably in a Garrett, you know, and he's going to type them out on his manual typewriter? True. But Shakespeare tapped into the human condition. He knew us and all of our our faults and our joys and our strengths, our tragedies. We're still performing his pros poems 400 years later. and Dante, everyone in this room is on some version of his circle of hell. The the the strivvers. Yeah, we maybe not any murderers. Don't tell me. I don't want to know. But um you know, we're were the the the workaholics, the lovers, the liars, the cheats were all he knew us almost 800 years ago. And Alan Ginsburg and those beat poets, they wanted social change. They wanted cultural change. And those little poets writing a little tiny words down. Sometimes poets become prime ministers. How do you enjoy poetry? The idea makes you think you probably read a book like Mrs. Humphrey here. And um and that was the idea. John Keats who was not a performance poet because there are 30 pages his poems. You had to know you had to know history and the classics and mythology. bit bit elitist, possibly a bit intellectual. So, yeah, when when books became mass- prodduced and the middle class often could afford them, then yeah, you know, and Keith's tried his whole tiny life to get books slid into those gloved hands. And so, reading poetry, it's a solitary act, isn't it? Reading, it's it's quiet. You do it yourself. It's it's something that is perhaps elitist and perhaps aside from other people. But the open mic is different because that's you reading to other people. And this woman, by the way, maybe just recites. This is Rodie, but uh she she reads with such power and and she captivates really. But reading is not necessarily performing. And a performance poem isn't necessarily slam, but a slam poem is always a performance poem. Performance is something a little different. Performance is this. We were busking at York's busking festival. It was dreary. They would pass us on the way into town and pass us on the way back up. We were busking. Performance is this. This guy was singing opera as well as doing poetry at the um at the French Open mic up in Edinburgh. Performance is this. This is Miriam and she's probably doing a feminist poem. And performance is this guy. This is David. He's like the epitome of the modern medieval poet, minstrel griote, traveling town to town to village to village, spreading politics, words, what need to change, what shouldn't change, what's wrong, what's right, not always knowing where he's going to put his head down at night. the modern minstrel. We are storytellers as poets, but you know, humans are born storytelling audiences and storytellers. We started this around the campfires where we would sit around and discuss where to go for fresh water, where to find the best tubers, where to hide when the bad guys come, what to do, how to live your life, the epic poems, the battles, the oral histories. We discuss our cautionary tales, the Iliad, the Odyssey. We discuss religious ideas, medieval plays, all of that, which by the way, religions are all alike in that they're about how to live a good life, do unto others. The ultimate, the pulpit, we uh in the synagogue, in the temple, where we give out our words with a cadence and a rhythm. And in fact, the books of the Bible, just to look at one, um, these are all long pros poems and it all leads back to the same thing. We have a campfire here tonight. We're sitting around a campfire. I just happen to be the one who's up and sharing right now. That's a griot. It's an African tradition. And this is how performance poetry and storyteller poets can change lives and save lives. This is an old tradition. It's about 2,000 years old. that continues on some level to this day. Greyotes tended to be from West Africa. People from West Africa tended to be kidnapped. They ended up across the ocean in the Americas where they toiled so that other people's children didn't work themselves to death and that the people in the Americas might become richer. And the Griot were like my friend David. They traveled from town to town to Hamlet to Tamlet. They they they spread the news, the words. They encouraged you. They spread the morals, the oral history traditions. And this tradition continued on in the Americans. And they could be there working away, but also calling and encouraging and spreading morals and telling you what's going to happen. And by the way, what does moss mean on the side of the tree? And by the way, what does the star mean and the moon and which way is north? And how do you cross the river? How do you get out of here? So that when that movement came and you might be able to drop that bundle and flee, you know how to do it because you had been hearing these stories your whole life. In 1984, a bunch of stuff happened. But in 1984, TED talks were originated with the with the concept to promote ideas worth sharing. And also in 1984, toward the end of the year, Mark Kelly Smith in Chicago decided he had enough of the elitist aspect of poetry and he wanted to bring performance poetry to us, to everyone else. I digress. I went to Yale for my master's degree. I liked Yale. It was like going to school in a castle. And for an American, a 300-y old school is really old. And so, um, yeah, you come here and it's like really that's that's 300. Really? My house is 300. Anyway, so so Yale uh 300-year-old tradition and they had the Yale Poetry Society and Allan and I would go to the Yale Poetry Society meetings and they would sit down. It was they really had leather chairs. Swear to God. They'd sit there on a level, Charles, and they would discuss and discuss things in the original Italian. I don't speak it. It doesn't matter. They didn't like my poems. Bit too common, bit too popular. One night I didn't go. And Allan comes home. He goes, "Baby, they really don't like your poems." They liked this line about snow. Um, apparently that was the last line of a poem. Do you know? So that was the elitist academic way of looking at and it has its place. John Keats his poetry is brilliant. It's deep and meaningful and needs to be understood and looked at. I progress. Mark Kelly Smith decides that this way of poetry whereas it may have its uses in its place is not the only way to celebrate poetry and poetry belongs to us. We all sit around that campfire. We need to all share in this. So he started this performance night. I don't know how often it meant, once a month, whatever, but it was every, you know, a regular basis. And you could come and read, but you had to perform your poem. You had to bring your poem out and give it to people. And after a few years, Smith saw that people could slam a poem down or raise the poet up. And he thought, hey, slam. And he started the idea of a slam. Now slam is totally performance theater. It is it is democratic theater accessible to everyone because the audience is part of it too. I mean the poet is up and she or he is judged on how well they perform and the message and what's out there. It's often political. Yay me. But um the five judges are picked from the audience. They might not even be poets. And they give a po each poem a score from 1 to 10. And the rest of the audience is also very much involved because they go, "Yay!" or they might go, "Boo! I don't like a score that the judges have given." And so the audience is very much involved. And in fact, I was at a slam one time. I didn't win. It was okay. Um, you often go up in groups of five. If there's 25 or 30 poets, you can't all go up. So you go up in groups of four or five. And if the other four are really good, you have a hard time with it. And if the other four are maybe not so good, you might get to the last round. It's like boxing or or golf or anything else. end up depth with the last few and my friend AJ had failed in an earlier round. She went on a little too long. Whatever. She was up against a bunch of really we selected AJ, the full audience to go into the final round. They needed one more person to make it an even number. I get up toward the final round. AJ won it all and she continues to this day to wow people and that was the audience that put her back into the slam. So that is a slam. It's a give and take and there's a communication between the audience and the poet. And the final image up there is after a while in 1992 we got to HBO and poets were on television with the deaf poetry slam um hosted by Moss Deaf and brought to you by Russell Simmons. That's my quiet friend Zorg. And then you get to do this. So now you can watch poetry on TV, but if that's not active enough, you can go to poetry open mics and stand there and read. Or you can go to performance open mics where you really have to give it your all. Or you can go to the slam and risk being slammed or raised up. So we can all do this. It is democratic theater available to all. And it is a two-way street. But how do you start? Where does it even begin? Back here. That's ES Michaels. They sent me an image just for this for you to see. It starts with you. The props are minimal. They are your thoughts, your ideas, your hopes, your dreams, what annoys you, what you like, whatever it is. And you write it down. And you write your thoughts down. And you get them down on paper. Then you have that little bit of paper. And what do you do with that little bit of paper? You take it to the open mics and you perform it. Performance poetry events since lands but performance poetry events are growing. They are everywhere. They are in a village that you live in. They are in the next village. If you live in a big city, they are somewhere around you. They are everywhere. And so um you too can go to an open mind. You can write down your thoughts on that little bit of paper and you can go off and you can sign up, show up, stand up and read. It empowers everyone. Performance poetry and slam empowers the old, the young, the damaged, the boringly normal. It empowers the audience. It empowers the poet. So you too can go find one. Go there. They are everywhere. You can go sign up. show up. Read your v your voice will be heard. Your poems will be accepted and your words will be freed. Now get out there and read. [Applause]