At Verbal Onslaught, Poets Find Courage in Vulnerabilities

Inhale the cigarette, exhale smoke. From the lungs and into the air, the words traveled from the minds of poets and into the hearts of the audience. In a loud and smoky room, warm ripples from the stage reached a large audience in an evening where vulnerabilities were exposed and a volatile mix of anger and humor brewed.

Spoken-word pieces with rhythm and rhyme rocked the house on Thursday night at 51 Main with Verbal Onslaught, a monthly verbal mic open to students and community members. With all cheers and no jeers, the brave poets — many of them first-timers — gave voice to their experiences, bringing light to heavy genres, with subjects that expanded from losing virginities to cancer, from falling in love abroad to gang violence.

Alex Strott ’15 confessed on stage that what she had to say was “not a poem, but a rant about a dyke on OKCupid,” how she could not help staring, imagining the world of possibilities both romantic and sexual. Strott worked up the courage to finally message the girl only to find that “she never responded so f*** that b*****.”

Ravenous for some turbulence in the night, Dahlak Brathwaite, a performer with Word Becomes Flesh — a spoken-word theatre group invited to the College for a weekend-long performance — stepped out of the audience and into the stage, warning the audience with a little sarcasm: “If this offends you, don’t worry.”

He proceeded to unleash a spoken word poem about the black stereotypes that eclipse his individuality. His commanding speaking style alarmed the audience as his voice accelerated in volume and anger, relaying his experience of being told he was an exception “one of the good ones, a good n*****. I wasn’t trying to prove to anyone that I am good and qualified.”

Brathwaite ended by slamming the microphone to the floor of the stage, and the audience applauded wildly, though some felt not entirely sure what they just saw. Debanjan Roychoudhury ’16, host of the night’s event, set to gain back the audience by tempering the anger with humor: “People here are scared. Who’s scared? Raise your hand!” he said with his hand in the air. No one raised a hand, turning their heads to see if others felt the same way.

But rare and controversial voices need not to be feared but rather embraced.

“We want people to feel uncomfortable and a little bit out of their comfort zone,” Roychoudhury said. “That’s the point of Verbal Onslaught — is to be in your face. It’s not to offend, it’s not called Verbal Assault, but the point is to challenge at a place like Middlebury College, a place that claims to be multicultural and pluralistic. It keeps us on our toes and goes to show that as much as we know, there’s more to learn.”

With anger and surprise intertwined, the night of spoken word poetry — featuring a group of students unlike the slam poets, who compete — combined lyric and comedy so unstaged that the event relied on friends of shy poets to drag them in front of the mic — even if it means some teasing and snaring.

The members od Word Becomes Flesh, for example, stopped by 51 Main to sit as audience members, but they quickly turned into special guest performers. “They got really into the moment, because it was not what they expected,” lead organizer of Verbal Onslaught Day Williams ’14.5 said. “They kept egging each other on, and their last member wasn’t actually going to get up and then someone got up and challenged each other: ‘well, we all got up, so what are you scared of? Do you not have something good enough to do?”

“That is the real spirit of an open mic night just like when you would see people come with their crew in New York City and I thought, ‘this is a real open mic night!’”

“You come in as an audience member and then five minutes later, you’re the star of the show,” Roychoudhury said.

But some premeditation is necessary to even the capricious operations put on by the Verbal Onslaught. “I love that Word Becomes Flesh helped keep the crowd hyped,” Roychoudhury continued. “Typically, if they weren’t there, we would have plotted friends or one hype-man in the crowd to keep it going.”

The result of Word Becomes Flesh’s large presence in the room was that there were two stages: all eyes were on anyone speaking into the mic, but audeince members simultaneously turned their attention to Word Become Flesh, whose energy could not be ignored.

This energy built a bridge between audience and performer. Looking into the faces of these performers, one could feel an intense solidarity with the performer rooted in same feeling. Whether consciously or unconsciously, it was possible to see parts of oneself reflected in someone else and that renders the world a little less lonely.

“Spoken word is two layered: you have what people are saying but then you also have the emotion and the intention behind it when they’re delivering it,” Williams said. “The performative aspect — that’s the connection to the audience. I may not necessarily understand that complex metaphor, but that emotion behind it is what I connected with and that’s what made me snap.”

Success in Verbal Onslaught doesn’t necessarily translate into badges to be worn. Verbal Onslaught is not an official student organization, a fact that may come as a surprise. Even without a budget, it finds ways to thrive, without having to spend a dime. Verbal Onslaught binds with another student organization it hears is putting on shows or bringing poetry to an audience and asks to become part of the budding scene.

Williams admits that at Verbal Onslaught they have no a strong desire to be an official student organization — they want to remain separate from bureaucracies. The microphone will remain open to townspeople, students, professors and even tourists in an effort to keep being welcoming.

Verbal Onslaught’s choice not to be an official student organization is a statement on how little to no creative, non-academic, uncensored space Middlebury provides. The written word, it seems, is usually subject to be scrutinized, judged and editorialized.

“We don’t have the opportunity on campus to write the way we did when we were in high school,” Williams said. “Middlebury doesn’t structure the school in a way that provides space for non-academic writing. Even for people who want to submit pieces to the Campus or Blackbird, there’s no opportunity for people to free-write with other people, bouncing words off of people. This is not an organization; the school’s not watching you. [Free-write] happens at my house. Let’s just write and share.”

Verbal Onslaught hosts workshops that attract a full range of people — welcoming all who are shy and extroverted alike, retooling poetry to be victorious — not competitive. With an air of calmness and genuine love for fun, these are, by design, the people to help take arms against all frights and insecurities.

If someone comes to them shy and scared, Roychoudhury will coach the fear out. “So many times, the problem is that people have a fear of messing up,” he said. “But it comes with practice. If I wake you up at 3 a.m. and you recite it [on cue], you have overcome that fear.”

He cites Diku Rogers ’16, who delivered a poem about one-night stands on campus with command and force, as someone who has transformed wholly through the workshops. “She came in kind of nervious,” he said. “Now she’s got a smooth confident vibe, having found her own persona and rhyme schemes. People felt that energy.”

Under new leadership this year, Verbal Onslaught is experimenting with integrative approaches through synergy in all forms of art. There has been talk of bringing back a live painter they’ve had in years past who painted in the background while artists performed spoken-word poems.  The resulting art piece that now hangs in the back room of Crossroads Café. In the spirit of inviting all people to come up on stage, Verbal Onslaught is also integrating open mic with African dance, song and drums.

For many of the first-timers who grabbed the mic that evening, Williams describes the weird cathartic experience with a fiery passion as if envisioning the first time she performed her poem. “It’s off the page and it’s a living thing,” she said, gesturing with her hands in front of her and moving as though performing a poem is an act of taking over the audience. “That first delivery is where I’m looking for a reaction from the audience: ‘Did they get it?’ It’s in the world now, but I’ll make edits, know what it’s missing — I’ll even change words in the moment, knowing it will sound better. You’re in it, you’re becoming it and you feel your art coming to life.”

Like Williams, we all visited our pasts that evening. By slamming the sport of spoken word the way Dahlak blasted the microphone against the stage floor, the lasting impact of the words used to describe moments of vulnerability and panic, in the end, fortified us.