no blogging of late, life is extremely full. if I owe you a phone call or email, I will try to make amends this weekend.

so I did finish and submit an application to the Creative Capital Foundation (under spoken word) for the show that Lynne and Rachel and I are working on whenever we can rope off an hour or two. the questions they ask are actually quite interesting. here are highlights of my responses:

Spoken word is becoming pop music: predictable, entertaining, non-essential. To thwart this trend, Damage transcends the individual poem/individual voice, pushing spoken word into previously unimagined places with complex ideas, space for abstraction alongside narrative, use of visuals and sound, deep synthesis of word and experience such that the poets disappear and a tapestry of authentic voices and moments emerges. At once ancient and very Now, spoken word needs its artists to refuse the easy forms, to collaborate to carry poetry, spoken, to a place none of us can yet see.

***

… isn’t every uterus a prophet though / and every screamer a target …

We know where the silence lives, and how it festers. How its mouth feels under the duct tape, the plastic, the hand. How the hand changes his to hers to your own. We bite down. We spit back. We unlock jaws, and this is what comes out: broken IS whole, and no whole woman has not mended.

We women are handed false options: virgin/slut, doormat/bitch, waif/amazon. Damage refutes these acid nametags, defies that brokennesss necessarily begets frailty or bitterness. In poems, we voice women dead, unborn, mythical, fictional and present, dragging scars out of sleeves and calling them proof of life.

More than a show that strings together characters telling their various stories, Damage uses multi-voice poetry to address the porous nature of the self, the dichotomous truth that all experience is at once absolutely unique and infinitely repeated. The voices of Damage overlap and interweave, defying linear definitions of time and constrained notions of identity. Each woman who populates Damage is simultaneously a fragmented aspect of the overarching female Self, and a being unto herself, complete.

Damage is a text-based theatrical experience that will incorporate live original music and film composition in service of the spoken poetry. Debut performance is scheduled for July 2006. The women who populate Damage live in our bones and our books and sit next to us on the subway. It’s at their noisy insistence that we speak.

***

by the way, 900 characters is NOTHING to a verbose typist like me. answering the questions wasn't even the hard part. cutting the answers down to fit the character limitations left blood all over my new desk.