This Is Me: A Personal History of Spoken Word in Singapore
Standing on a stage at 21,
Bright lights, my first time¹
In every sense of the word.
And it is the word that must rise
From the runway of the stage:
Spoken² not sung, not token, not sprung
From the spur of a moment,
It is the word that must be wrought
Into narratives with punch
Lines that leave you floored.
Now get up again, come back for more.
I’m on the cusp of adulthood,
Performing for a crowd, undressing myself
One image at a time. Now hold up!
It sounds like a rite of passage,
To ride that stallion of stage
And not be a cliché of poet voice
To make the obvious choice
In rhyming strife with life.
Is it ever as easy or as complex as that?
Spoken word is relationship;
That dreaded nod to commitment,
But when I first started, innocent of implications,³
I didn’t realise this was for the long haul,
Full of grace notes and dropped balls,
That defines you even as you shape the world
Of your stage from your words on a page.
No longer innocent,
This is me.⁴
I write about myself, the world, not often family.
There’s always something about God⁵ or belief clouding my lines
Like an invisible, omniscient image,
Never foregrounded,
A touch of faith, a small slippage.
I am nowhere near confessional I confess,
I draw humour from what might not impress.
Everyday situations are my thing:
A garden gnome rapper making
Wishes and goldfishes that fail,
A troupe of gangster monkeys
Squishing unfortunate snails.
And there’s the haiku and the photographs,
Music that sits beneath, half and half.
And sometimes I make art with others
Because two’s company and one’s
A single point of view, when all
I want to do is construe.
What it comes down to is that
Mic in your hand, standing on a stage with
Just your voice, and the choices you make:
Perform, conform or confabulate.⁶
Whatever happens, silence or applause,
Leave them cognisant of your cause.⁷
For poetry is not like life where we fizzle out
Or leap the cliff with intent, exit left with a shout.
Maybe we don’t offer the answers people are searching for,
But we open windows and sometimes show you the door.
But the world billows beyond And the poet never goes quietly,
Constantly searching for the next irony.⁸
For now, I have a house⁹ of my own, spoken
Into existence, a shelter; prism where light
Refracts the text into your feature for the night.
So let me sit¹⁰ here with you and listen to the rain,
As we fall asleep, dream, and wake again.
/ Article by Marc Nair.
¹ First-time slam poets are known as ‘virgin virgins’ according to Marc Smith, the founder of Poetry Slam. He even has a section in his book Take the Mic on virgin poet testimonies. He writes, “It only happens once, that day when you finally open your mouth in front of strangers and hear your words, your creations crack the silence” (Smith, 78). When Smith came to Singapore to host the slam in 2003, he used that phrase to describe first-time slam poets, and it became a phrase that would be used in subsequent slams, although, as a male performer, I do recognise the problematic use of the phrase.
² One day, I picked up a flyer in the Arts Canteen at the National University of Singapore. It was for a poetry slam organised as part of the 2003 Singapore Writers Festival. I was intrigued. What was this? I gathered it was competitive and that it was a kind of performance, not quite the sedate, quiet, self-absorbed poetry readings I was used to attending. I thought I had a couple of poems that could pass muster, one of which was about a dog who loved a cat. It was slightly cheeky and it rhymed. I thought the humour would be well received. The poem is lost to history now, but the opening lines went something like this:
He had no home / His name was Spot
He had no shame / Slept around a lot
Literally, doggerel! But it seemed to go down well with the crowd, and I was placed near the top at the end of the first round. I was enthused and, being Singaporean, that competitive spirit to succeed was kicking in. I had a chance to win this, I thought!
³ I didn’t know anyone else there that day, but some of the people present would go on to be my fellow performers, competitors, editors and friends in the years to come. All I saw were the judges, and wondered what would tick their boxes. That particular edition of poetry slam was a special one. Only a few months old, Chris Mooney-Singh had brought it wholesale over to Singapore from Chicago. He was an Australian poet who had recently migrated to Singapore. Also in attendance that day was Marc Smith, the founder of Poetry Slam in Chicago’s Green Room Cafe back in 1986.
⁴ My history of spoken word is also a history of collaboration within and across genres and of fighting to constantly push the boundaries of what is expected and delivered by practitioners of spoken word. Various permutations of spoken word shows I have created work around a given theme, incorporate musical elements and explore the dynamics of group performances. This is helped by the fact that spoken word remains a rather fluid genre, one, which Rhiann Williams suggests, is impossible to consider a stable genre “as it implies such a rich and diverse range of practices,” (Williams, online). This is something Charles Bernstein has implied as well, “to speak of the poem in performance is, then, to overthrow the idea of the poem as a fixed, stable, finite linguistic object” (Bernstein, 9). The spoken word performance offers a destabilising experience through its temporal nature. When paired with multi-media elements, it opens up possibilities for a far richer palette of experience. Having come from the world of poetry slam, I wanted to move beyond what I felt was a singular and sometimes restrictive way of envisaging the performative potential of spoken word.
⁵ Faith has always been lurking in the background of many of my poems. Not just the tenets of my belief system but the mode of delivery; i.e. the Evangelical sermon, Pentecostal modes of practicing faith and the raucous forms of worship. When I was younger, I felt that I was called to become a preacher or a missionary, spurred on as I was by enthusiastically delivered prophecy proclaiming my future as a servant of God. Over the years, as I have grown increasingly sceptical of the crucible in which my early religious experiences were forged, I have also become more aware and intentional of co-opting these forms in order to subvert them for creative expression.
⁶ The line is thin between truth and fiction in spoken word. The assumption from the audience is that the spoken word performer is speaking from experience; either lived or relating a story they had heard. Confabulation is never addressed and is assumed to be a literary explication, e.g. using hyperbole or metaphor to dress up the experience or to draw forth a deeper truth. But again, there’s no rule that keeps spoken word artists from inventing narratives, although that draws implicitly too upon what is or isn’t ‘permitted’ in the general conception of what spoken word is. Thus far, most spoken word poets seem to find that subject matter drawn from real experiences to be what separates spoken word from storytelling.
⁷ I’ve been thinking about labels and how spoken word poets often have unvoiced labels, e.g. “I’m a queer spoken word poet” or “I’m a political spoken word artist” and how it is part of the performance identity of the spoken word poet. Perhaps it is akin to the idea of genre in music, or maybe it is a kind of implicit self-marketing strategy. This is, naturally, connected to permissions, to what is allowed by society but also how and why the individual allows the self to be constructed. Skin is content; but I do believe we have a degree of control over how it is labelled.
⁸ The work of art is ongoing; it is never complete. This thought is a precursor to Paul Valery’s saying, “A work of art is never completed... but abandoned.” I don’t believe that a poem, or any other work of art is completed when it is published or performed. Even if it is never re-printed or read out again, it still exists as one form in print or on stage and while it can be abandoned, it can also be revisited, resurrected, reordered for a different stage or given voice again.
⁹ This is a comment on my own practice, which has very physical outcomes, e.g. books. These are tangible, like bricks, although it can be said that spoken word too can be captured and proliferated through a medium like video.
¹⁰ There is an unspoken compact of permission between the performer and audience. The vulnerability of a spoken word poem is only possible because the audience permits that personal expression of narrative or confession to speak into their lives.