tbtn memories & my favorite slam poet

Imagination is the bridge between the things we know for sure and the things we need to believe when our world becomes unbearable.

I want to go down in history / in a chapter marked miscellaneous / because the writers could find / no other way to categorize me // In this world where classification is key / I want to erase the straight lines / So I can be me

- staceyann chin

i met staceyann chin in 2000, as one of the organizers of the take back the night march in champaign-urbana that year. staceyann came to be the keynote speaker at our rally; she was just beginning to get recognized as one of the most preeminent slam poets in the country, and her focus on feminist and queer issues, as part of the interrogation of identity and politics that shapes her work, made her particularly suited for take back the night. she gave a performance/talk at the campus ymca, which i was also involved with, and she blew everyone away - with her stories, her passionate, amazing rhyming. i also took a poetry workshop that she taught for the women's studies department - it was so fun and yet rigorous, so hard for someone like me who had any poetic streak removed a long time ago, but good too because i still love poetry and especially telling a story, crafting it, giving it the ideal form. from staceyann, i learned that poetry, slam poetry particularly, is about finding the most concise and striking way of expressing an idea, getting maximum precision from using the perfect word or phrase, introducing an element of surprise so the audience knows what's being said, but has never heard it put quite that way before. i don't apply that to my own writing - i go all over the place, and i'm definitely not concise - but i know that if i ever had to write a poem, i'd try to stick to that advice; those characteristics are exactly what sets (good) poetry apart from simple prose!

the take back the night rally that year was one of the most energizing ones i've attended - which is saying a lot! - and that was due in no small part to staceyann.

i have two of her chapbooks, "wildcat woman" and "stories surrounding my coming," they are both great - if anyone wants to borrow them let me know, or you can get the latter, and one newer one, on her site.

some stuff that's been said about staceyann, her background and her work:

pen american center

Staceyann Chin was born in Jamaica in 1973.

Chin is an award-winning poetry slammer. She co-wrote and performed in Russell Simmons's Tony-winning Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. She has read her poems at numerous universities, including NYU, Harvard, Cornell, University of California at San Diego, and Boston University. Her work has also appeared in publications such as Curve, Venus, The New York Foundation for the Arts' FYI, and Jane, as well as the New York Newsday, and The Village Voice. ...

new york times

"A part-black, part-Chinese lesbian immigrant from Jamaica, Staceyann Chin finds poetry in belonging everywhere and no place in particular.

"I was born with an otherness attached to me," said Ms. Chin, a thin 32-year-old with a fat cloud of dark, kinky hair. She sat on an overstuffed sofa in her Crown Heights apartment on a day off from her new Off Broadway show, "Border/Clash: A Litany of Desires," an autobiographical, one-woman play. "I never belong to any one space, but I have a place in all the others' spaces," she added in her pronounced Jamaican lilt. "The gay-lesbian community is so white here. I am in the black community, but I am queer. I have a foot in the Asian community."

As her fans from Broadway, where she stood out in "Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam," or devotees from her early days at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe probably know by now, Ms. Chin was born into poverty and abandoned by her parents. Growing up an outsider, a smart, light-skinned girl who loved girls, floating in a sea of dark bodies that embraced convention and questioned her choices, she imagined New York as a kind of refuge. And in 1997, she came to claim her place in it.

Her ascent has been fast, with her theatrical appearances, a CNN interview, an essay on the joys of immigration in The New York Times.

Now, with "Border/Clash," which is playing at the Greenwich Village theater the Culture Project, she is using her spoken-word poetry to explore and play with the false distinctions, the contradictions, the fault lines that arise around complicated identities like hers.

She is part of a generation of black and biracial writers between the ages of 25 to 40 who have not done enough to tell their stories, Ms. Chin said. And what stories they could tell, she said: living in the shadow of 9/11 and AIDS; born after abortion was legal and segregation was illegal, and when being biracial was no longer tragic."...

curve

For anyone who doubts that a diminutive, 110-pound pixie of an individual can carry a one-woman show, you obviously haven’t seen Staceyann Chin’s solo performance Border/Clash: A Litany of Desires. Or, more importantly, heard her slamming poetry lines with such artillery fire rapidity and precision, you’d think the special effects team was doing a stage trick with her mic.

No stranger to the spotlight, the 30-year-old Broadway veteran has a lengthy resume that includes countless national slam poetry titles and stage performances, largely thanks to being fed a steady diet of crisis and curiosity since she was a child in Jamaica.

“[My past] very clearly and very brutally affects who I am. In a very good way,” Chin says matter-of-factly. “It’s made me ask myself very hard questions, and it’s made me be comfortable with who I am on a level that maybe people aren’t.”...

outmedia.org

Staceyann Chin is a working artist. A resident of New York City and a Jamaican National, she has been a practicing poet since 1998. From the rousing cheers of the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe to one-woman shows Off- Broadway to poetry workshops in Denmark and London, to her critically acclaimed, Tony-Award winning performance in the groundbreaking Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Chin credits the long list of "things she has done" to her grandmother's hard-working history and the pain of her mother's absence.

NYU, Pace, Willamette, Holy Cross, Harvard, Cornell, University of Illinois, University of New Hampshire, University of Miami, University of California at San Diego, Boston University, Grinnell College, these are only few of the "institutes of higher education" at which she has shared the stories surrounding her coming. Chin was the winner of the 1999 Chicago People of Color Slam; first runner- up in the 1999 Outright Poetry Slam; winner of the 1998 Lambda Poetry Slam; a finalist in the 1999 Nuyorican Grand Slam; winner of the 1998 and 2000 Slam This!; and winner of WORD: The First Slam for Television.

She has also been featured by cable access programs in Brooklyn and Manhattan as well as many local radio stations including, WHCR and WBAI. The Joseph Pap Public Theatre has featured this young poet on more than one occasion, and Staceyann has enjoyed great success internationally, with much lauded performances in London, Denmark, Germany, and New York's own Central Park- Summer Stage. In 1999, Staceyann took the American Amazon Slam title in Aarhus, Denmark. Denmark so loved the young writer on her American Amazon Tour that her personal history, photo and work graced the cover of the national Newspaper The Politiken as well as the controversial, and spicy, Ekstra Bladet. Since then, many more Danish Newspapers have voiced their opinion of the poet from Montego Bay, Jamaica: The Information, Retorik Magasinet, and Berlingske. Various American publications, including the magazines A, Everybody, Mosaic, Curve, Venus, The New York Foundation for the Arts' (NYFA's) FYI, and Jane, as well as the newspapers, the New York Newsday, The Village Voice, and Drum Voices have featured Staceyann.

The myriad of journals and newsletters in which her work has appeared also include, The Shades Newsletter, GMAD magazine, the New York Blade, The Monsoon, and the Black women's magazine, Personal Personals. Her individual performances warranted her work being published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Pittsburgh Daily. Her work was also featured on 60 Minutes, and in February '05 on Showtime at the Apollo. Her poems can be found in her first chapbook, Wildcat Woman, as well as in the one she now carries on her back, Stories Surrounding My Coming, as well the anthologies, Skyscrapers, Taxis and Tampons (out-of-print), Poetry Slam, and most recently, Role Call:Hands Afire, Staceyann's first one-woman show ran for ten weeks at the 45 Bleecker Theater in the Summer of 2000.

The same Off-Broadway theater welcomed the 2nd Show, UNSPEAKABLE THINGS in the summer of 2001 before she took it to Copenhagen for a week long run. Next year, London, Helsinki, and Norway are in the pipelines for the show. Chin has also been the subject of on-screen ventures. The film Staceyann Chin was released in theaters in Denmark in 2001. It was also aired on the Danish National Television station. Between the Lines, a documentary that explores the notion of being Asian and woman and writer, is the latest to feature Staceyann. In 2002, Staceyann was nominated for the Rolex Mentor and Protege Art Initiative where she is being considered as a possible protege for Toni Morrison. In 2003, she completed a whirlwind tour of South Africa, including Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, and Soweto.

i couldn't find any video (i have one from take back the night but it's on tape, i'll try to convert it into digital format and upload it, though), but you can listen to the audio of three of her poems,

and here's the text to my all-time favorite:

my grandmother tongue

She gets shorter every year
her ninetieth birthday bending her into a new century

Now she has the time to wonder
how the seeds of her womb
have come to such silence

Hearing is hard for her
the twilight taxes the organs of the poor
great-grandmother
she wonders if the children born in exile
look anything like her

American residents
they visits spaced like the teeth of the elderly
infrequent and few
they bring too many sweets anyway
old people should not partake of such pleasures
dying flesh cannot withstand it

I don't know the names
of the grandchildren in Europe
the countries are unpronounceable there
the languages spoken with odd pauses
and awkward lilts

I have buried the umbilical cords
that connect me to their future
the past lies trapped beneath my tongue
my children have taken their children
out of my house and I can no longer hear them.

This is what I imagine she would say
if she had the painted words
prodigal that I am
the daughter of a different land
America has opened its hand
and I am no longer drawn to the place
that birthed me

Wood floors have hardened
to concrete structures stretching
high above my mothers, mothers aspirations

My grandmother has become a ritual of memory
and I am hard pressed to translate

Her dialect communicates necessity
Another woman warms my bed

My mother speaks French phrases in Cologne
her German-Canadian child has never heard Jamaicans
sliding their fiery tongues over the blunt patois
she only dreams of America home of the faded-blue jeans
pale skin and long fingers like mine
oxtails and boiled bananas are foreign to her

Grandma can hardly see
the night falls more quickly for her
familiar words in her mouth sweetens her
she mutters the old names over and over and over again
it is impossible to learn the new ones
trust in the Lord and be of Good courage
she knows all the words of her salvation
the foreign names are unnecessary
and how would she say Larah Frederica Hayle Mills-Moller
Diamonique and Sherrel are out of reach
Lisa might have been possible
but Munich is a lifetime away
and her tenure is close to being over