Most of my best poems
have been created in movement. My friends scold me for how I drive doggedly,
one hand on the steering wheel, the other on my screen breaking lines. My
favorite poems of mine have been written on my iPhone, using either the notes
app or google drive, wildly screaming bars to myself in gut the silence of my
car. I walk back and forth to the Starbucks on a thirty minute break hollering
and mimicking my slam routine, thinking of how Jahmil Hill turned himself from
a tree into a cross. Wondering what I will craft my body into on stage only to
break the illusion when I walk off just a boy.
I often think back to
my first time meeting Danez Smith and their way of melding voice with
literature. Smith sat at Carla Harryman’s house for a homecoming for Jonah and
performed “No chicken jokes in this movie. No bullets in the heroes. & no
one kills the black boy. & no one kills the black boy. & no one kills
the black boy.” A Jumbotron forming in their palms, telling a Black Movie and I am in awe. The
demonstration of word and voice splashed together into a tidal wave. Later, I
read Smith’s my president, a poem in
which they create a new nation on their tongue and elect the loved ones they
know as ever present to run their country with an iron skillet and flowing
river. In both instances, I see them stretch a community across a page like a schematic
of what work in this world is still to be done. In this work, I look for
myself. Often, I find scraps of other poet’s voices in my poem, ideologies and
small blessings. Someone once asked Smith how they write their voice so
definitively in their work. InsertBoy,
Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, you hear them give a live reading every time you
open their books.
Dr. Tara Betts
explains vocal performance within slam on V.S Podcast. She states how she had
to train her mentees ways in which their voices can be used as another tool to
score higher in a bouts. In the car on my way to my first ever slam, we trade
turns round robin style performing the pieces we think we will do at
Rustbelt. I open up about my poem Twerking in White Spaces and the
experiences I faced during college being in a predominately white fraternity.
It is mentioned that in certain placements of the poem, I should sound
uncomfortable, others sound joyous, ending the poem in fear. I initially wrote
the poem as a satirical take on black culture interpreted in white spaces as a
replicable act or joke. It was written on my iPhone in the back of a wedding as
I prepared myself for the inevitable moments where I would be asked to teach
everyone the latest dances displayed in rap culture. The voice here and the way
I presented on stage has a lot to do with the sudden betrayal or uneasiness I
feel when a friend asks me how I perform my blackness.
The dictation of how
I want the work to sound is most often my foundation for a poem. I do not sit
at a desk and force myself to write. I do not have set hours each day or some
ritual. I just work on a line that comes to me and see where it leads, often
editing the work along the way. Everyone has a different method to what makes
them tick. I can definitively say I read something or listen to it on Button
and figure, “I could write this differently.”
Jason B. Crawford (He/They) is a black,
nonbinary, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI.
In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as High
Shelf Press, Wellington Street Review, Poached Hare, The
Amistad, Royal Rose, and Kissing Dynamite, he is the Chief
Editor for The Knight’s Library. Jason is a cofounder of the Poetry Collective
MMPR, a group of poets who came together for laughs, bad memes, and nerd
culture. He is also the recurring host of the poetry section for Ann Arbor
Pride. Crawford has his Bachelors of Science in Creative Writing from
Eastern Michigan University. His debut chapbook collection Summertime Fine
is due in 2020 through Variant Lit.
Website: JasonBCrawford.com
Instagram:
jasonbcrawford
Twitter handle:
@jasonbcrawford
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page: By Jason B. Crawford
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