We’re a new age of abolitionists
Protesting oppression in all its viciousness.
- Jonathan B. Tucker, from his original poem “John Tucker Must Live”
Technology can be a cultural connector and a tool for performance and community. But it also creates a dependency that frustrates us when a machine breaks down. That’s when the human spirit comes in to save the day.
When Poetry in the Morning met at the beginning of a very gray Monday, Gowri K. lifted everyone’s enthusiasm level in advance of our Skype meeting with two international poetry clubs: Poetry Across Borders in Bangalore, India, and another group in Berlin, Germany.
“Is that all the energy you have for me at 7:45 on a Monday morning when it’s raining out?” she said cheerfully into the microphone, and we did our best to respond in kind. Her enthusiasm was the the extra jolt we needed to get us ready for some poetry.
One of our V.I.P.s that day was Claudia Rojas, a sophmore at Bell Multicultural High School. Claudia writes and performs her own poetry and creates digital artwork to accompany her pieces. Though she has previously shared her work with the Bell poetry club, this was the first morning that Claudia read her work to a group of supporters in India.
Once the Skype meeting was set up, we could see more than ten participants watching from an open, unfinished room in Bangalore, where bright sunshine streamed in through the windows.
The BloomBars crowd went first since Claudia had to get to school.
“Deliver me free of your hold, oh dearest time. I will not condemn you,” read Claudia from her most recent piece “Deliver Me Free.”
“It is really awesome to have a high school student this early in the morning,” said co-host Jonathan B. Tucker with a laugh.
And when it was time for the Bangalore and Berlin groups to take their turns, unfortunate technical difficulties prevented them from ‘taking the stage.’
So we adapted. Jonathan and Gowri took turns performing for the Poetry Across Borders group, who responded with clapping that we could see but not hear.
Jonathan, who is working on the second edition of his chapbook, read several poems of his own. His work draws on history and popular culture, weaving together unlikely combinations of allusions — he hops from a Rolling Stones lyric to a Lewis Carroll book – all layered on a rhythm inspired by the slam poetry contests he works in.
“A lot of my poems are very slammy and so I’m going to do some of those for you,” he told the group in India, prompting a series of silent but cheerful thumbs up gestures from the crowd on our projector screen. He then launched into a very moving poem about the civil rights bridge protest in Selma, Alabama, and another about his Jewish-American background.
“David, you’ve become a constellation we no longer strain to see,” he said, reading his poetry as the windows in the room in Bangalore began to darken.
Gowri read a few poems of her own, but she also read several from Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, which was published this year. She selected “The Difference” by Bushra Rehman and “Miss Indo-America Dreams” by Minal Hajratwala.
At the end of the session, she led the Bangalore group in a chant that we often hear at our open mics at BloomBars.
“When I say poetry, you say Rocks! Poetry!”
“Rocks!”
“Poetry!”
“Rocks!”
Of course we couldn’t hear them say “rocks,” but we could see them throwing their fists into the air in a coordinated motion.
“I love the fist pumping,” Gowri said. When you get a group of poets halfway around the world to overcome the silence and do a fist pump, you know that human ingenuity has overcome any roadblock that technology can throw in our path.
