Claire Sammons


Blah, Blah, Blah
Thursday, April 17th

The Blah, Blah, Blah spoken word poetry night at the Bowery was a learning experience for me, yes, but hopefully for the young performers too. Imagine a stage located next to a full bar and the room is packed with clean and energetic high school students and their English teachers. To get the crowd ready for the show, the DJ threatened us with Mozart, and after sufficient cheering rewarded us with “I’m hot cause I’m fly, you ain’t ‘cause you not.” The night started as a youth open mic, which was for the most part very cute, as the kids spilled their guts about their crushes and body images.  

The majority of these open mic-ers were charged up on hormones or anger, with choice lines such as “Paint the walls of your vagina with my paintbrush of ecstacy” and “I’ll electrify your cervix as if I were Zeus.”

One young poet, Reynold, teetered on the edge of performance until he became more comfortable on stage. His repeated line “Their fingers bend and twist like leaves in the wind,” was punctuated heavily and accompanied with dramatic pantomime. When he broke through his self-consciousness, he had a natural and charismatic stage presence, and seemed to connect with the audience. The fact that he wandered away from the confessional and played with the space between poem and performance placed him at the top of the class.

The rest of the readings had an overtly sociopolitical focus, primarily in an urban context. The causes were all worthy and well-known; rants against the war, racism, imperialism, consumerism and pop culture (though some poems also referenced Hollywood movie titles and celebrities).

The Blah, Blah, Blah series is a great place for teenagers to hang out with friends, vent about their hormonal woes, and not get into trouble. I think I’ll leave it for them to enjoy.