Slam poet's performance a slam dunk

Author: John Patrick Allen

Staceyann Chin removed her shoes and socks (revealing toenails painted a shimmering green) and wove through the audience to stand in the center of the room, where she began to recite her poem, "Why I Love My Pussy."

Chin was last Thursday's headliner at Verbal Onslaught, a monthly poetry reading and spoken-word performance held at 51 Main. Verbal Onslaught typically fields only student writing. This time, however, a number of groups, including MOQA and the Office of Institutional Planning and Diversity, collaborated to bring Chin, an internationally known poet, political activist and performer to Middlebury.

Before Chin's performance, students from the College (and one from a local high school) read original poems and improvised verses in a rap-like "cipher" format. The intervals between performances were filled with pulsing, wordless music.

The atmosphere changed palpably when Chin stood up. She requested that the music be stopped, explaining that she wanted the audience to take time to appreciate silence. Chin was by no means an old woman (late 30s), but she was concerned with the ubiquity of background music and noise in present-day America. She wondered aloud whether people of the generation to which most Middlebury students belong ever experience silence.

In a way, that comment reflected the mood of the whole evening. A keen awareness of context - historical, cultural, and personal - pervaded Chin's performance. Twice during the performance, she read excerpts from her memoir, The Other Side of Paradise, available in bookstores next June. Both sections described her childhood in her aunt's home in Jamaica. Although the events in the memoir were far removed from the experiences of the average Middlebury student, Chin seemed to know exactly the right amount of explanation necessary to render an accessible yet detailed picture of her coming-of-age stories. Her memoirs were testament to a belief she had expressed earlier in the evening, that "There's nothing one human feels that another human can't feel."

Chin's initial comment about Verbal Onslaught's background music was also characteristic of her writing's honesty and forthrightness. She conversed with the audience at length between poems - "conversed" rather than "lectured" because the tone of her comments was never didactic or polemical. She presented every sentence as a gift, an invitation to participate in the performance. Chin owned her poetic voice so fully that it was sometimes difficult to distinguish the beginning of a poem from the conversation that had preceded it.

That is not to say she had no points to make. Chin was unafraid to use poetry to question and refine beliefs. She read "CrossFire," a poem that leaps from personal to political to spiritual questions, reminding audiences that answers to each need not be mutually exclusive: "God is that place between belief and what you name it. / I believe holy is what you do / when there is nothing between your actions and the truth."

For Chin, politicization of poetry sometimes seemed not only possible but necessary: "Against the Odds" begins as a love poem but is derailed by the speaker's inability to forget the political and emotional reality of being alive during the Bush-Obama transition.

Chin is often classified as a "slam poet." She has appeared in poetry slams in venues from Denmark to South Africa to Broadway. However, she often bucked the stereotypes that usually accompany the label "slam poet." She self-mockingly reflected on her older, more bellicose work: "I was very fierce. I was going to…blow s**t up with words."

Chin does write about gender issues, politics and her own heritage. However, she does so without ever becoming off-putting or self-obsessed, two fatal traps into which "slam poetry" often falls. Perhaps in part because of her interracial and intercultural heritage, Chin is wary of all labels, especially those which accompany typical definitions of rebellion.

Staceyann Chin's brief appearance at Middlebury was a huge success, almost single-handedly justifying the existence of 51 Main. Her words were as welcome and unexpected as silence.