The Word is Spoken

By Shamrock McShane

As Marvin the Marxist was wont to propound: It's hard to convince black people that they are not black; it's hard to convince gay people that they are not gay; and it's hard to convince women that they are not women.

But they're not. And until we start thinking like a species, instead of special interest groups, forget it.

Johnny Rocket, a self–styled "swamp rat tranny", is convinced.

"I would like it if you used, as a pronoun, s/he, since it's pretty gender–neutral," Johnny Rocket says, before taking the stage at Bar One for The Word is Spoken, the Friday Night poetry jam hosted by David Maas. "That kind of covers all ground as far as all the communities I wander."

Johnny Rocket has been launching poetry from the Civic Media Center's legendary jams for more than a decade, along with such local poets as Jimmy Nil Fishhawk, Tom Miller, Phil Godwin, and Maas — who has succeeded in making spoken word at Bar One on Friday night part of the downtown nightlife scene.

When Aristotle was putting together his lecture notes for writing the perfect play, Poetics was probably just the working title. The book that resulted is hard as hell to read. Your efforts, however, will be rewarded with an understanding that all works of art are a form of poetry.

A generic equivalent won't cut it with poetic purists, and it needn't. Not in this college town, which is home to some of the finest poets in America, all found in the Creative Writing suite at the University of Florida, including William Logan, Sidney Wade, and Debrora Greger.

It is under Aristotle's general rubric that spoken word performers as diverse as the Prophet of What, the Nude Bandit, Third Eye Spoken, and myself, all call ourselves poets. Our showmanship can supercede scansion.

Johnny Rocket's free verse, however, approaches meter, and proceeds like an incantation. Here s/he alludes to Pablo Neruda in "Lament of the Poet and the Nightingale":

Did you hear the dying note
Of his final tune?
Did you hear him
Sing his own eulogy?
Is that why you cried
As you slipped into heat and sleep?
Did you find his hands?

As Johnny Rocket reads, the packed poetry crowd swallows its drinks and smokes its cigarettes. The looks on faces range from serene to intense, as the word pictures form in their minds. The other poets listen while hunched over their verses, scribbling notes.

"I've lived in Gainesville most of my life," Johnny Rocket reports, "arriving shortly after having been born to rebellious Latin hippies in California. My favorite poets are Pablo Neruda, by far, T.S. Eliot, Octavio Paz, and of course local poets like Fishhawk and Lacey Nagy. I was really shaped as a poet by growing up around the CMC jam in my formative writing years. I've been going there since I was about 16."

Impresario and poet David Mass has established The Word is Spoken at Bar One on Friday nights as part of the downtown scene. He credits the efforts of the poets who participate.

As well he should. The regulars invariably present sharp–edged, no–hold–barred, thought provoking, mind–warping matter. The stage brims with ideas, sometimes raw, sometimes polished, always impassioned or ironic.

Friday night, downtown, at the corner of Main Street and University, in the very heart of town, in a bar, the scene — like something out of Greenwich Village — is, somehow, poetry.

"Poetry plus alcohol equals great poetry," David Maas likes to say before starting things off with some Ferlinghetti, some Bukowski maybe. Tonight it is Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird".

What follows is a free–wheeling mix of metaphor, simile, political commentary, and satire. Tonight Heather Brandon regales the crowd with some found piquant prose detailing the evening when Dan Rather was assaulted by fists, but more menacingly by the perplexing query: ³What¹s the frequency, Kenneth?²

The crowd chortles in response.

The marquee most nights reads like an all–star team of local writers, including Jimmy Nil, Tom Miller, Heather Bruneau, Jake Seymour, Kal Rosenberg, Sami J, Eldon Turner, and ThirdEyeSpoken, which celebrated its second year anniversary last month with a show at Kanapaha Botanical Gardens.

Lacey Nagy is often the lead voice for Third Eye Spoken, a group of spoken word artists, with a feminist perspective, that includes Flash Silvermoon and Woody Blue. They lend their voices to the jam, as do members of the University of Florida poetry team, if you can imagine such a thing here in title town. They "compete" in national poetry jams.

Undoubtedly, the word is spoken.