Last night, I went to see a performance by a Middle East peace activist, who has done work with the Christian Peacemakers Team in Israel & Palestinian territories. He played guitar and sang songs - maybe not so concerned with staying in tune or keeping a consistent tempo, but he was all right and he had a good heart, and I liked his poetry quite a bit. I’ve found a lot of people look down upon slam poetry. Certainly I can see their reasons, but I generally dig it.

So he (Jim) performed for awhile, and then asked his friend to come up and read a poem she’d been working on. I don’t remember her name, but I change everyone’s name on this blog anyways, so I guess I’ll call her Laura. Laura was a shy-seeming, tiny woman in late middle age, with long dark gray hair and a sky blue scarf that reached down to her ankles (after being wrapped around her neck a few times). I’d put her at 5′ tall, an optimistic estimate. Anyway, she takes a few hesitant steps to the microphone and announces that she’s not quite finished with the piece, and actually she had been working on it up until a few minutes ago. Hmm. Okay, well, impulsivity is cool.

She starts into what sounds like a standard slam poem (slam poem? I’ve never heard anything called a ’slam poem’ before…oh well), a rant about U.S. political affairs and globalization, with maybe a little more flow and rhyme than your average blog. Then she started transitioning into scat (no, she did not start pooping onstage - it’s a style of singing that involves nonsense words and noises). “Doo bo doo cha! cha! Dee dee boo cha cha!” ‘Uh,’ I thought, ‘okay.’ She started really getting caught up in the flow of it, flailing her arms and her scarf around, which was actually kind of cute. And then I noticed Jim, the previous performer, sitting right in front of her - he was really getting into it too. Jim happens to be a white guy, which is all well and fine; there are plenty of white guys that groove to a beat without running the risk of looking absurd. Unfortunately, Jim looks more like he’d be at home at a LAN party or a Linux convention. That didn’t let this stop him from throwing his hands in the air and going, “Uhh, uhh” in beat with Laura’s scatting. For some reason, I felt kind of dirty watching this.

And then, after several minutes of “dee dee boo cha!” she transitioned, with absolutely no warning, into the biggest, loudest banshee wail that my ears have ever witnessed. Now I go to rock concerts pretty often, I love riot grrl bands with lead screamers, and all but two of my top ten favorite bands love experimentation with ear-jabbing feedback and guitar distortions. I was floored. I looked around at the audience, consisting of mostly elderly people - gray hair, hearing aids and all. Everyone looked forward with a straight face, watching this little lady flap her arms like a bizarre newborn chick trying to escape its eggshell prison, but instead of chirping she went “dee dee boom chah! Dah dah doo dee chah! AIEIEIEIEIEIEIEIEIE!!!!”

The best part of all this was that one of the campus political groups was having a meeting upstairs from where the performance was. They ended their meeting in the middle of Laura’s poem, just about when the scatting started, and some of them were lucky enough to time their descent downstairs to concur with one of Laura’s screams. I had a tough time not laughing at the poor poli-sci majors, turning their faces in horror towards us and backing away rapidly once they came to their senses.

I don’t mean to belittle her work at all - I’m not very used to this type of poetry, first of all, and second of all, I recognize the use of the banshee wail as a sophisticated literary technique geared to make us feel uncomfortable about the subject matter. It wasn’t a poem about puppies and gingerbread cookies; it was about death and war and injustice. But…um…the banshee wailing kind of hurt my ears. I wonder if all the old people had to turn off their hearing aids. Maybe I’m getting old, cause I’m not sure I’m really getting it…