The New Face of Arts Leadership in the West - westaf - The Western ...

mainstream. I want them to destroy the mainstream
and create something new: a new form
of representation, a new form of democracy.
I also have that MFA in Creative Writing, which
means I have studied the history of poetry, its
forms, its trends, its styles, and I have read the
so-called masters of the Western canon. I am
thankful for this training because it gave me time
to experiment until I found my own poetic voice,
which I realized was decidedly nonacademic,
non-institutional. I don’t want to be like Mark
Strand or T.S. Eliot. I want my work to move as
far away from theirs as possible. I write for a
different purpose and a different audience. It
is necessary to read Strand’s and Elliot’s poetry
on the page in order to understand it because
some of the abstractions are meant to be
deciphered through close reading. I, on the
other hand, seek continuity with oral tradition.
A pure, transparent, rhythmic storytelling—and
always with a narrative structure—is the kind
of poetry I write and perform. Immediate
reaction and connection to a live audience,
as in much of early hip hop, is always the goal.
I want action. I want group dialogue. I want
call and response. I want community. I want a
massive artistic movement for our generation.
It sounds utopian, but it just might happen. I
was recently in Miami on a residency teaching
spoken word to young people in East Little
Havana. Most of them were either Latino
immigrants or the children of immigrants. They
suffered multiple issues of racial and cultural
identity confusion: Were they Black or Latino?
Hispanic or American? Victims or criminals? We
attempted to clarify some of their problems by
writing poems about ancestry, home, social
status, and assimilation. Committing to an
identity by these means—or perhaps at all—was
still too complicated for some. But more than
anything else, they all responded to hip hop.
They understood the language of hip hop. They
knew what fresh meant, crunk, ice, and shorty.
They could expound on the merits of Tupac,
Biggie, and Eminem. In short, they knew exactly
where they stood in relation to this medium of
expression. Many of them were not fluent in
English, but they could recognize the rhythmic
patterns of rap like it was their mother’s gallo
pinto and carne asada. I encouraged them
to use hip hop and Spanglish in their writing
so that they could feel like the poetry they
wrote was indeed theirs and not the tradition
of dead White men. I told them spoken word
was done with the language they already had
on their tongue—it was the voice in their head,
natural, organic, and true to their experience.
You don’t know me/You think I am a hoochie
because of
what I wear/You think I always lose/ but at
least I intend
to try/You think I will have a lot of children/
because my
great-grandmother had ten/You think I am
worthless/but
I am worth more than what you wear/
I don’t care what you think/I know I can
dance until my
feet fall off/I know I can play good soccer
and score three
goals/I know how to make spicy food that
will make you
lick your fingers/and I know I will raise my
children perfectly well.
—“Untitled” by Juana, Fourteen, Miami, FL 5
The workshop took off after that, and before
long, I had a roomful of teenage Spanglish
rappers and spoken word artists ready to bust
about why country music was so “square”
and reggaeton was hot. How dreams were
nothing until you actualized them, how the
police harassed them for no reason other than
being brown in numbers, and whether getting
rich was the answer to all of their problems.
Spoken word is the voice of this generation. It is
how we connect to the oral/aural messengers of
the past: the griots, the storytellers, the shamans,
the folksingers, the MCs, and rappers. But it
is also the only way we are going to ensure
active literacy in our future. I would like to reach
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