Celebrating National Poetry Month

Soul Expression
By Jonathan Gramling

Poetry isn’t some stuffy snobbish pastime for the affluent and influential and intellectual elite anymore. It isn’t just Keats and
the Elizabethans. Poetry has been taken over by a new generation that has made it hip and cool. Maybe it was the
emergence of Rap in the 1980s that made rhyming and rapid-fire speaking all the craze. It became the speech from the
soul that fired up a new generation.
Teen poetry slams are hardly polite sophisticated teas where the audience strains to hear the irrelevant musings of some
soul who passed from the scene long ago. No, teen poetry slams are in your face, straight from the heart expressions of youth
from every segment of society. They are sometimes raucous affairs where the poets and the audience let their feelings
known while always “respecting the mic.”
For the past few years, the UW-Madison’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI) has been working with teen poetry
clubs at Madison’s high schools. Josh Healy comes in during the noon hour or after school to work with the students on how
to write their tomes and express their feelings. The clubs, the performers and the slam audiences are definitely a
hodgepodge of students united by their love of the spoken word and the electricity generated by the performances.
Every Wednesday, the teen poetry club meets at West High School during the lunch break. During the period, ten or more
students come together to hone their skills. Near the end of one recent session, five of the young poets gathered together to
talk about their chosen mode of expression. Each of them came to poetry differently. Sophie Rhem got involved through a
friend and then thought it was very cool when she learned her dad used to write it. “I realized it was kind of in my blood and
it came really easy,” Rhem said.
The father of Kweku Brewoo’s best friend used to work with poets “back in the day.” Brewoo went with them to see some poets
and he got inspired and started writing.
Lewey Hurd is a musician and he got involved in poetry because he thought he would improve as a musician and
songwriter. “I started getting into more poetry-based music like some hip hop artists like Talib Kweli,” Hurd said. “I decided I
would give it a try.”
A seventh grade literature class got Elliott Gilbertson-Brown into the poetic mood. “My teachers thought I had a lot of deep
emotions, I guess,” Gilbertson-Brown said. “So I figured I would keep writing. And then I went to the City Slam with Daara J.
After that, I just kept writing.”
And Will Holt’s father loved music and was into Rap. He asked his dad to teach him how to write. Joining the poetry club was
a natural progression.
All of these young poets felt a need to express their feelings and thoughts and poetry was the best vehicle for them. “It’s like I
can’t go up to somebody and be like ‘Hey, this is my whole life,’” Rhem said. “But it lets me tell people about me and a lot of
people get to know me better after they have heard some of my poetry because I write about the things that you can’t just
talk about, or at least I can’t talk about anyway. It’s a lot easier for me to say it in poetry.”
For Brewoo, it allows him his freedom of expression. “I am able to say a lot,” Brewoo said. “And as Josh always says, always
say what you want, write what you want and no one can stop you because your words are your words and they stand for what
they stand for. Poetry to me is more like do what you want to do, do what you have to do and do what you have to do to
present yourself. It lets me say whatever I want. I love it.”
Hurd feels he has a message to give and poetry is the vehicle to get him where he wants to go. “For me, the biggest thing is
the messages,” Hurd exclaimed. “I’m all about change in our society and just in any way possible. If I can make a difference
through my words and through my art, that’s what I want to do.”
Gilbertson-Brown comes across as a shy young man who finds it difficult to say how he feels, especially to those of the
opposite gender. “I’ve written poems about how it is really hard to call girls,” Gilbertson-Brown said. “And I can’t just go up to
that girl and say ‘Hey, I can’t call you. It’s really hard for me.’ If I just say it to whomever through my poem — and it’s not
directly at her — it’s a lot easier.”
And Holt just finds it easier to write. “When I’m talking, I really can’t get my thoughts out,” Holt said. “But when I put it into
poetry, it’s just a lot easier for some reason. It’s pretty weird.”
When asked if a poet can only tell truth because of the feelings they express, the assembled poets had a divergence of
views. “I think in poetry, it’s not really a lie, even if you don’t tell the truth,” Rhem said. “It’s like you are going with the flow
and you’re telling a story and it doesn’t really seem like a lie, even if it kind of is.”
While Brewoo feels that if it is a lie someone wants to express through poetry, then they should go right on ahead because
they are expressing themselves. And yet, the truth always seems to come out. “When you are presenting it, everyone can
know when you are lying or not because it is so felt by the audience and yourself as a presenter of your own words,” Brewoo
said.
Hurd feels that it isn’t a question of a lie or the truth. It’s all about the art. “Poetry is the art and it is made of its own
technicalities and its own structure and its own emotions and they are all real,” Hurd said. “No matter what the issue is, the
art is going to remain the same. It’s hard to explain, but that’s where I’m at.”
The truth is so much easier to write about than a lie, according to Gilbertson-Brown. “I could sit here for hours and write a
horrible poem how I can fly, when I can’t,” he said. “It’s not something I know, so I wouldn’t know how to write about flying. It
would be just so much harder and it’s just a lot easier if you write the truth because it’s stuff you know about.”
For Holt, sometimes a lie can serve to express the truth. “I think if you are going to lie in your poetry, it should really
represent something that is true,” Holt said. “If you are telling a story, it should have some moral about it that is true even if
the poem itself is not actually true.”
It has been said that a writer really doesn’t know what she or he is thinking until they commit their thoughts to paper — or a
computer file for that matter. Rhem felt there was some truth to that statement and it took her back to what had been said in
a philosophy class. “The ancient Greeks thought that writers didn’t really know what they were doing, but the gods would
send down the powers through the writers and the writers would be like ‘Oh, look at what I just did,’” Rhem observed. “’I didn’t
know I could do that.’ I kind of feel like that sometimes.”
For Brewoo, it is the impact of some external force that causes someone to write and they won’t really understand their
reaction till they press pen to paper. “And you’ll never know what your next line is going to be,” Brewoo said. “The impact
just hits you and then it allows you to write what you have to write. And usually when you read it to yourself, you say ‘Yes, this
is right’ or ‘No, this part isn’t right and I have to do something else about it. I have to think back to that impact on me and
what changed me.’ Then it is easier to write what impacted you. You can’t just write something out of the blue. That’s kind
of hard.”
Hurd had a more esoteric explanation for the creative process. “The poetry, the art, comes from the feelings and from what
you think and what you believe, all that stuff,” Hurd said. “But definitely, I think when it really reaches the point of you writing
it down in poetry, it takes it to a new level and it takes on a higher meaning because you did it in a manner that other
people couldn’t and you really couldn’t see before and now you have this product.”
Poetry takes one from the superficial to the depths of one’s soul, according to Gilbertson-Brown, and it’s hard to know what
that is until it’s down on paper. “When you go to write it down, you’re constantly rethinking it, and rethinking it because you
have to think about how to say it,” he said. “That’s when you discover just how deep the rabbit hole goes in your head. You
could think ‘Oh, I don’t like dogs,’ and then write a poem about why you don’t like dogs and then end up figuring out that you
really do like dogs because you are just thinking about them so much.”
For Holt, it’s a foregone conclusion on how he feels about something before he begins to write. “I know for me, I know how I
feel before I write a poem,” Holt said. “Sometimes, that might change while I am writing it. But most of the time, it’s pretty
much the same. Foe other people, it might be different and they don’t know how they feel until they finish writing the poem.”
These modern-day bards may come from different places, but poetry has placed all of them on the road to soulful
expression.
The West High Poets: Kweku Brewoo, Sophie Rhem,
Lewey Hurd, Will Holt and Elliott Gilbertson-Brown