Genre: Poetry

In March, P&W-supported poet Terrance Hayes read with Red Hen Press at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center in Pasadena, California. P&W staff member Cheryl Klein writes about the evening.

Given that many reading series struggle to draw audiences, it’s somewhat astonishing to consider that Red Hen Press maintains five series—one in New York and four in the Los Angeles area, where the eighteen-year-old press is based. And judging by a mid-March reading by poet Terrance Hayes and several Red Hen authors, sagging attendance is not an issue.

With the sun setting pinkly, poetry fans filed into the Boston Court Performing Arts Center, a large brick theater with a digital marquee, tucked in a leafy residential street in Pasadena, California. A Boston Court representative cheerily informed the audience that, behind the thick black curtain, sets were being built for the center’s next production, about America’s first serial killers. On that note, he turned the mic over to Red Hen Managing Editor Kate Gale.

Gale introduced each of the night’s four poets by reading a few of her favorite lines from their work. Katharine Coles read first, from The Earth is Not Flat, a Red Hen collection comprised of poems she wrote while traveling in Antarctica. The poems reflected her longtime fascination with the intersection of science and literature.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the travel poems of Alaska’s Peggy Shumaker, who read from her book Toucan Nest later that evening, reveal an obsession with warmer territory. Specifically, she recounted in lyrical form a trip she’d taken to Costa Rica with fellow Red Hen author and new L.A. poet laureate Eloise Klein Healy, whose partner leads eco-tours to tropical environments. Shumaker’s poem about baby howler monkeys reveled in the kind of parent-child push-and-pull that can be found in all climates.

Dan Vera, inaugural winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, read striking and funny poems about growing up Cuban in Arizona. In Cuban Spanish, he told the audience, “menudo” is slang for change, the kind you receive from a cashier. In Mexican Spanish, it refers to tripe soup. You can imagine how things unfolded when his father demanded that the owner of a Mexican restaurant put five dollars worth of menudo in his cupped hand.

The evening’s featured reader was Terrance Hayes, who appeared on stage in a gray sweater and a watch on each wrist—apparently he wasn’t going to be one of those features to prattle on. And in fact, he only read two poems—though they were both somewhat epic in nature, folding in flashes of American history, riffing about race, and punning slyly.

The first, “Self Portrait as the Mind of a Camera,” was based on the photographs of Charles Harris, who documented life in the African-American neighborhoods of his native Pittsburgh. Hayes contemplated the various meanings of “black and white” as they pertain to photography and race: “To be black and white is to behold the existential and believe that the colors are conspiring against you.”

His second poem, “Wigphrastic,” was a critique of Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” which played with the idea of the “wigger” (a word Hayes said he dislikes, though he’s up for combining “white” and “black” to get “wack”) by naming the many uses for wigs. Protection, façade—“Isis wigs, Cleopatra wigs, Big Booty Judy wigs.” The idea of playing with artifice was clearly as fascinating to Hayes as any icy or tropical landscape.

From left: Terrance Hayes, Monica Copeland, Kate Gale, and Eloise Klein Healy. Credit: Gabriela Morales.

Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by the James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

P&W-funded Regie Cabico is the coeditor, with poet and novelist Brittany Fonte, of the recently published anthology of queer poetry and spoken word, Flicker and Spark (Lowbrow Press). His own work has appeared in over thirty anthologies, including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution, and Chorus & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He received the 2006 Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers for his work teaching at-risk youth at Bellevue Hospital in New York. He is a former Artist in Residence at NYU's Asian Pacific American Studies Program and has served as faculty at Banff's Spoken Word Program. He resides in Washington, D.C.

For the last three years, I have been working with the D.C. Commission for the Arts on Poetry Out Loud, A National Poetry Recitation Competition. This year, I have worked primarily with McKinley Technological High School and Latin Public Charter School. My job is to help students find their unique interpretations of poetry selected by Poetry Out Loud. The competition goes from local high school, to the state level, and then to the national competition.

I am amazed by the students’ choices of poems: What lures a teen poet to John Keats or Anne Bradstreet? Students in the state and national competitions must memorize three poems and one of the poems has to be from the nineteenth century. For a long time, I resisted Poetry Out Loud as a contest that was removed from the poetry slam. I thought that the required poems were antiquated and out of touch with the students' racial and/or economic backgrounds.

For decades, I taught at-risk teens at Bellevue hospital with Tina Jacobson. I know that young people can write and perform poetry that is closer to their experience and also ends up giving voice to unrepresented and marginalized youth. I am inspired by the librarian Sarah Elwell, who is a magnet for students. Ms. Elwell tirelessly brings speakers and artists to the library to inspire them. Lisa Pegram is a teacher with whom I have worked as D.C. youth slam coach. Ms. Pegram aka Lady Pcoq is a musician, poet, and playwright who gets to engage her students in artistic explorations through the Poetry Out Loud program.

Ms. Pegram and I have students record themselves on their iPhones, create broadsides of their poems, and categorize each word of their poems by noun and verb so that they are able to understand every word they're memorizing. With Ms. Elwell, I have turned the library into a literary and performance playground. The goal is to get students to live the poem and dive into the world of the images they are reciting. I have to get them to engage in the musicality of the text and also create a story for them to fall into.

On March 5, 2013, I prepped students at McKinley High School. The Daughters of the American Revolution, the D.C. Public Library, and the Washington Teachers Union were represented as judges. Fifteen students competed, and the poems moved quickly because poems were short, unlike a slam where there is a three minute limit.

Then, it moved from fifteen to six poets. I had worked with all of the six poets but one. Students got up and forgot lines, but the student body was supportive. In the end, Tshala Pajibo, an eleventh grader, won. She was not the most polished performer, but Ms. Pajibo exhibited focus and made a physical stomp and her vocal strength, as well as her dynamic performance choices, made the audience jump. She performed Maya Angelou's poem, "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings." When I worked with Ms. Pajibo, I asked her to "visualize" the bird and tell the story of the bird.

Ultimately, there is a value to taking something that you did not write and interpreting and finding a story in it. There is value in memorizing Emily Dickinson or William Blake in order to move through history and time. It brings a lineage to a slam poet's performance. It encourages them to write outside of the box, and it provides another set of diction for the artists to use. One of the categories in the individual poetry slam competition is the “One Minute Poem.” Poetry Out Loud is full of poems twenty-five lines and under. I hope poets who are working on their one-minute poems will take a look at these poems for inspiration. As a former musical theater major, I had to find songs that I could perform well for auditions. I have as much joy finding poems that suit me. I would love to perform the work of Robert Creeley, Stuart Dybek, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Who knew? I am grateful to Carlyn Madden at the D.C. Commission for the Arts who brings so much care to arts in education in Washington D.C.

Photo: Regie Cabico. Credit: Carlos Rodriguez.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Washington, D.C., is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.