[REVIEW] Explode on Contact: Spoken Word Poetry Performance, by Ben Stokes

 

Ben Stokes’ 90-minute, live spoken word poetry show at the Valhalla Bar, Wellington, New Zealand on February 20, 2014

 

Review by Max L. Chapnick

 

In a dark bar on the outskirts of Wellington, New Zealand, Ben Stokes, a Kiwi native just returned from months abroad, preformed a spectacular 90 minute set of spoken word poetry before a local audience. With only one intermission, and under stage lighting more appropriate for heavy metal bands, his stream of words proved a feat in and of itself. Yet between these emotionally-charged poems, the time passed quickly. Stokes’s voice – both the tight diction as well as the half-chanting sounds he bestows on his words – held us captive. He is a young poet, and his craft is, at times, rough around the edges, but like an Allen Ginsberg of the 21^st century, the balance between rawness and polish allows his words to shine in the precisely jagged way a poet’s words should.

No doubt the line between a one-man theatrical show and a 90-minute spoken-word set is a fine one. But Stokes brushed all genre questions aside in an opening poem, “Chaos Theory”:

I’ll wear this word poet like it’s a Victoria Cross
earnt by firing round after round into the morning mists
of what we think we know.

(I was sent the poems after the show, but only two contained true line breaks. I’ve added in breaks as I heard them.) For Stokes, the “Victoria Cross” of his poetry materializes most truly as poetry spoken aloud. Poetry is his vocal badge and weapon, both of which are appropriate metaphors to describe a sense of shared human identity and emotional combativeness in his work.

In this set Stokes performed several poems that could be considered his “ars poetica”: “Lost Without You,” a love/hate poem on excessive drinking; “Drive Crazy” a carpe-diem ode; and, “YOLO,” an autobiographical bildungsroman.  In each, Stokes holds up the name “poet” as battle flag – using spoken word to connect with all of us who’ve ever drunk too much, loved too hard, or are “not well rounded enough to be a gear in the machine.”

For Stokes, social media distract from an immediate sense of living, to which his own identity is inextricably tied. In his poem “YOLO” he declares:

I can’t go back to being some fucking yuppie
infecting VIP lists like well groomed herpes
a mast like an army of Xerxes.
… this hashtag generation has become too strong
and before long world wide webs will tangle them to Gordian knots
as Instagram privatizes the pyramids and Angkor Wat.

Stokes’s references are intricate and well-chosen, and the rhythms of lines interlock with them, as if, in a meta-reference, like Gordian knots. Despite the slightly sanctimonious tone in hashtag and Instragam bashing, Stokes argues a grander point about media detracting from living in the present, living for oneself, or, as he terms it “taking my life… back.”

The most successful sections of these identity manifestos, I think, are the celebratory moments. One of my favorite lines comes from “Drive Crazy,” a love poem to someone unnamed, or, as I imagined it, to the audience:

             Print a thousand pages of classic literature
and paste them down so they pave a stage.
Then get an amateur theatre company to perform Macbeth on top of them.
People will say, why on earth have you done that?
Well because it’s a play on words, and I felt it was necessary.

 

The pun is corny – and these lines received a generous, deserved laugh – but the joke requires Stokes’ deep love of language and literature. Even in his purest, and stunning, love poem “Lost in Translation,” it becomes hard to distinguish Stokes’s adoration for his study-abroad girlfriend with his infatuation for verbal tenses.

Similar celebrations appear earlier in “YOLO.” Stokes proclaims:

            I want to be the moment in time when Bilbo thought ‘YOLO’
And walked out into the blue without shoes on
I want to be the fresh ink of a foolish tattoo on someone like you
I want to take the stage with two parts love and one part rage

Stokes, an admittedly mixed-up 20-something, knows how to be free: suddenly leaving for Hanoi, reading Tolkien, falling in love, speaking poetry on stage. More importantly, though, Stokes can craft these emotions into poems so chock full of references and stories, we share his blistering sense of freedom.

Not all of Stokes’s poetry speaks primarily of poetic identity; some poems are infused with a more combative texture. In “Armed with Endless Weapons,” Stokes lapsed away from intoned, almost rap-style rhyme, into a more story-telling poetic mode:

             … my friend answered, “grandmother’s jawbone”
in the greatest ever response I’ve heard
to the question “what weapon
would you use in a zombie apocalypse?”

Here Stokes references a Maori creation myth, in which the demi-god Maui uses his grandmother’s jawbone to control the sun. The internal rhyme drives his message, pairings of chime bunched inside verbal line breaks. Stokes’ verses compare questions with weapons, and explore the idea of a hatchet, not as something that divides, but as a punk-like symbol of unity. Later, recalling the refrain, he chants, voice thick with purpose, “So take up the jawbone. / And attach it, match it to your own.” Though Stokes deploys the language of warfare, it is somehow a war for unity, the rival of grudge, and the diversity of all our stories.

Having established himself as pro-Chinese-factory-worker-poet-lover-alcoholic (in poems such as “A Day in your Shoes, Manufacturing Plant”), Stokes goes on to support an unlikely heroine, Miley Cyrus, in “Ode to Miley,” besieged herself by both the left and right for sexual promiscuity and cultural appropriation. He acknowledges this:

 Miss Cyrus you may not be at your finest
But I’ve always quite liked you
Lick whatever inanimate objects you choose to

Stokes’s sense of duty to the world extends even that far. In fact, Stokes outlines an additional bond, his own past failure onstage, layered upon a subconscious fear of his failure during this very performance. But the audience laughed in the right places, and cheered loudly at the end. In “Ode to Miley,” and over the course of the entire hour and a half, Stokes convinced us all to be a little more poetic, in his style: judicious in our rage and generous in our love.

 

***

Max L. Chapnick is a 2013-2014 US Student Fulbright grantee to New Zealand, where he is an MA candidate at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. Originally from White Plains, NY, Max recently graduated from Washington and Lee University with degrees in Physics and English.