drewvigal:

I know I was there because I am still thinking about it.

So well said.

… a genocide on creativity.

Such powerful words. If this performance doesn’t touch you, check your pulse.

storymidwife:

I immensely enjoyed last Friday Poetry 2012: Expression in the Right Direction at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Sitting in a dark room full of people just listening to beautiful spoken words, crying and laughing together, reminded me of how, as much as we study new “user engagement strategies” and speculate about how many minutes we have to tell a story online before our audience click away, it’s really all about the storyteller’s soul.

How easy is to sit for a hour and half while your mind and heart go on an intrepid journey following the poet’s lead. How different and relieving is, as audience, to relinquish the power to control the experience and trust the poet. No clicking. No twittering, commenting, “foursquaring”. I know I was there because I am still thinking about it.

The roster of performers was incredible and I will look up each of them, but one who really touched me is  Joshua Bennett, a young slam poet of Yonkers, New York, who performed at the White House in 2009 and received a standing ovation from President Obama, Michelle Obama, and their guests. Here a few lines from his piece about his brother Levi:

“Please, stop calling my little brother diseased. He’s not sick; his mind is just an unmapped archipelago where every idea is a former slave gone free”

“They keep telling him to think like an assembly line,
But his mind is like the most extravagant circus,
all trapeze,
and lion teeth, drumbeat,
and riotous laughter that could shake the moon out of it’s skin,
every sentence a staccato hymn,
sung in the midst of a world that has forgotten how to value of silence …
When did the brain become an appliance?“

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“Don’t dare be an enigma, there is no space for your kind of ‘beautiful’ here.”

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“We have seen what happens when a mind goes unchained
We have built entire industries around keeping our modern day Michelangelo’s in check.
How many Children?
How many masterfully written lives must we have dashed into the ground before we call this a genocide on creativity?”

This gave me goosebumps.