At 2014’s Open Book Festival, GLAMOUR Book Club caught up with spoken word poet Jacob Sam-La Rose to talk social media, attention spans and the different places where we’re happy to see poetry popping up.
What have you been up to since you attended last year’s Open Book Festival?
I run a spoken word education programme at Goldsmiths University in London and I’ve been doing a lot of work advocating for that. It’s an unusual programme because it talks about placing poets in school as educators. I’ve done a lot of professional development for poets over the years, and all sorts of different workshops in master classes and how to survive as a poet. Sometimes as a writer, you’re not making money from your actual writing (and many writers don’t) aren’t, so you have to look at other avenues to bring in money – often by becoming teachers.
The poets who are in the programme are actually taking the MA Writing Teacher course at Goldsmiths. When we place them in schools, they’re placed as members of staff and ideally, we’re looking for a 2 to 3 year placement so it’s not just a short-term residency. In the programme, we look at how poetry can really have an impact on young people, how we can change people’s perception on poetry and how we can encourage people to work with poetry in different ways?
I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of traveling and to take poetry to different spaces and different audiences. In my early years, it wasn’t unusual for me to hear people say “I don’t like poetry, but what you do is okay.” There’s something that we, as poets, can do to change people’s preconceived notions of what poetry is and how those notions can actually manifest. A part of that is the way that people come to poetry through school and through teachers, how for some it becomes this scary thing you have to analyse and if “you don’t get it”, there’s something wrong with you.
Like the question in the exam that’s on that one line you didn’t understand and it’s worth 20 marks and you end up hating Sylvia Plath for the rest of your life.
Yes, and how do we break past all of that? Part of my work has mostly been about that. I also run a programme for aspiring and up-and-coming poets back in London called the Creative Professional Development. It pushes them in their creative writing and looking at poetry as a platform for life. Beyond that, in my own writing, working on my next collection and doing some of the work that we’ll be showcasing at the festival with Tony Stuart. I’m really interested in how we marry modern day technology with what we do as poets – not just from a marketing perspective, social media or building audiences, but in spreading the word. Technology impacts on our this process as well as the creative process so I’ve been experimenting with that.
Some would argue that poetry is great for a generation that’ s being told they have a short attention span – w ould you say that poetry is something that translates well to a digital medium, because it is generally a shorter form than fiction?
I think there’ll always an argument for that because poems are shorter, discrete units of text. It ignores the motion of an extended body of work, so for example, yes we can interact with the poems or discrete units, but what about our interactions with collections of poetry and how a collection of poems is put together?
For example, I put collection of poetry together, because I work as an editor and I also put my own work out. I’m really interested in how we create something that stands together as a whole and even if it’s more of a narrative, what type of experience the entire collection creates. We live in a world where an individual item is taking dominance – like with music, rather than sitting down and listening to albums, people would rather download a single, and that individual track creates a more fragmented experience.
I’d really push for changing the thinking around entire bodies of work and the building of links between one individual piece to other bodies of work in a curated fashion. I’ll give you two examples: on YouTube you can watch a performance and on the right hand side of the screen, they give you more pieces that may be related. Then on Amazon, you buy a book and there’s an algorithm that says because you bought this, you might like this other stuff people have bought as well. How do we make use of those kinds of ways of thinking, those kinds of algorithms, those kinds of tools to support discovery for other related material?
I’m really interested in the idea you were talking about, about young people having short attention span. I think it’s just a different way of thinking. I don’t have the figures or stats so I’m going to get into the whole issue, but I know that there are arguments for and against digital technology and how it impacts on our ability to focus. I was listening to something just this morning about bi-literacy – this understanding that there are different demands that are placed on you from different mediums and I think again it’s something we need to think more about in terms of scheming lots of information that’s one way of accessing content text, data whatever. We shouldn’t forget long-form reading and I think those need to be balanced. I think we’d like to believe and it would be nice to believe that our youth will naturally learn the necessary tools and necessary ways of thinking in order to adjust to the demands of any particular context of circumstance, but I think we can support that thinking a bit more.
You run a programme in London then come and speak to South African audiences – are there any differences you notice between the two audiences?
The social media over here and the way the people have adopted social media for promoting events is amazing. South Africa and Singapore are the two countries where I’ve seen the most kind of chatter through social media channels about events I’ve been involved in than anywhere else I’ve traveled in the world. That’s mind-blowing really in the field of poetry and it’s been fascinating for me to see different poets compared to the last time I was here. There was a real awareness about relationships between spoken word poetry and page-bound forms of poetry.
When I was in South Africa last year, I was in Johannesburg and Cape Town. In Johannesburg, what I experienced was much more on the spoken word side of things, then I came to the Open Book Festival and there were different understandings of poetry that I engaged in and that’s been fascinating. I’m not sure how vast the difference is on an international bases, but I think that the awareness of this relationship is becoming something more and more starkly defined as time moves forward. I know that there are very similar arguments and conversations happening in the UK and the US and it’s not as simple as it used to be – that page poets stood against performance poets, for example. I find that whole debate really fascinating.
Do you think in general that it’s a good thing?
I think the debate is a good thing. I come from a place where I’m often defined as a spoken word poet but I don’t see myself as a spoken word poet as such. I’m a poet full stop. I accept that term in the broadest sense because I do enjoy standing in front of an audience and making a connection as much as I enjoy digging out that form when poetry sits on a page.
I come from a space that’s in-between so I’m really excited about the conversation and I’m weary of any one particular form being pushed into dominance. I work with a lot of youth slams back in London and slam is a way to get into a wider appreciation of poetry. It shouldn’t be the only destination for you, but it should ideally be a starting point and a window in a wider world of poetry. Slamming itself is great and wonderful, but let it be something more than that. Let it be a symbol for you to find yourself.
Find out more about Jacob Sam-La Rose here!
