SOULSPEAK is a poetry of soulsharing, of empathy, of communal celebration.
One of the major themes of this book is that tribal art was a human activity, and that contemporary versions of that art, like SOULSPEAK, allow us to reclaim that communal part of our heritage.
First we need a partner, at least one. The most natural partner for SOULSPEAK is your current partner: husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, best friend, mother, father, lover, daughter, son, grandmother, grandfather. It’s the person you most like to be with—that you are most comfortable with. This is because you want to practice SOULSPEAK with someone who is a soul mate in every sense of the word. It’s about as close as you’re going to get (in this day and age) to a fellow tribe member. SOULSPEAK is a poetry of soul sharing, a poetry of empathy, of communal celebration.
Now is the time to listen to the speakings on the CD. It is the only way to reawaken your body to the art of speaking. The art of SOULSPEAK will seem like just so many words until you begin to absorb it by listening to it. Play all the tracks that contain speakings as you would play music: in the car, cleaning, walking. It doesn’t have to be a big event. Just play them as background. Your body will get the message.
You also have to prepare yourself for the fact that speaking is much easier when done with a partner. To attempt it alone is to choose a more difficult and less fruitful path. Creating poetry with someone else may go against everything you know about poetry, but this is a different poetry⎯a very human poetry that wants to be done with others. This you will only understand after you have created a speaking with a partner. It will be an awakening.
SOULSPEAK is a communal poetry that (in its essential form) has no passive audience. The participants are the audience. The only people who need be present are those actively participating. No observers, at least at this point. This means that SOULSPEAK should be done in the same way that tribal man did it, as a communal celebration of the mystery of life—as a way of speaking to the gods. Approach SOULSPEAK as a celebration of the mystery of who you really are. Don’t think of it as an academic or therapeutic exercise, both of which are deadly to art. Think of David dancing wildly before the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred “Holy of Holies.” Or of Ray Charles at his most inspired. Either will do. Similarly, when asked to consider SOULSPEAK as “a way of speaking to the gods” or as Homer would have it, to the god within you (“I am one who can sing before you as to a god.”), abandon all the ways you hide from yourself. After all, you can’t hide from the gods. This is a time for speaking. Not a time for hiding.
If you still feel you’re not quite ready to speak with your partner, play the CD section called First Speakings. They’re by people of all ages and backgrounds—just like you. Listen to them. Play them while you’re walking around the house—while you’re driving. Don’t worry if you don’t get every word, they’ll find their way to you eventually. When you feel ripe, you’re ready to do your first speaking.
I was in the wrong skin, but didn’t know what the right skin was.
When people describe their first speaking with a partner, it’s usually something to the effect that it felt powerful, or strange, or deep, but good. And that it just seemed to happen, of its own accord. There is a sense of awe in their eyes. A couple once said to me that it felt as if they were both giving birth to the same entity. This communal creation of many voices and yet one is SOULSPEAK in its most natural and most potent form. It is the form you should always strive to achieve if circumstances allow it. This may seem strange, but it is the way the body wants to speak: with others. In either case, you quickly become aware that speakings, by their nature, are physical as well as spiritual events. You can feel the body allowing the soul to take form. It is a primordial experience and one that leaves us in a state of wonder. That sense of wonder often leads to an awakening.
Sometimes that awakening is announced by no more than a whisper. Sometimes it can be quite forceful. In either case, a door will open. You can choose to walk through it or turn away. If you walk through it, you will begin a journey. Where that journey will take you no one can say, but it will be uniquely yours and it will be filled with moments that will feel beautiful and true. That journey will be filled with moments when the body will stop, and turn towards the sun, or the moon, and allow the soul to speak, to display itself. This may seem a strange journey, as many of our writings on the soul advise an inward journey, often a solitary one. What I am suggesting, however, is that there is an alternative direction, and that is allowing the soul to display itself outwards, communally, through art.
It is always difficult to say where journeys begin. We think we know, but as our journeys progress, we become less sure. In my own case, I find it more and more difficult to say where SOULSPEAK began for me. If you were to ask me today, I would tell you it seems to have begun long before I came into this world. I would tell you today that it feels as if something very ancient, something not of this time, a presence, is working its way out through me. And though it is not of this time, it is a presence that most definitely wants to be here, on this earth. It is a presence that is very persistent in its desire to speak. It is a presence that keeps telling me we have become lost—that we have forgotten who we really are. But it is also a presence that keeps telling me we can find ourselves. Knowing who we really are can be accomplished through an art that is truly within us, sleeping, waiting to be awakened. That art, the art to which I have been led, and to which I am leading you, is SOULSPEAK.
That is a large claim to make for any art form. There are undoubtedly others, but SOULSPEAK is the only one that has made itself visible to me. That visibility, by the way, came in stages, and is still occurring. When I tell you that I am continually unsure where my journey began with SOULSPEAK, I can also tell you, without reservation, that I have absolutely no idea where it is taking me, or why. All I know is I am doing what I should be doing: the world is leaning with me. It is equally clear to me that coming face to face with an art form as primal as SOULSPEAK can’t help but affect you in some fundamental way. It has affected my life and the lives of the poets I work with, but it has also affected many ordinary people, of all ages, who have taken it up. It becomes a way of life. This may not be immediately apparent at first, but at some stage, SOULSPEAK becomes as necessary and as beautiful as breathing.
Perhaps the only way to prepare you for the journey you may take is to describe my own journey as best I can. Not that my journey is especially significant. It may interest some and not others. The impact speaking had on my life and work is significant, however. What impact it will have on your own life is hard to predict.
If you are but a casual reader of this book, with no interest in actually trying to speak, the art of speaking will have little or no impact on you. But if you succeed in creating a speaking and continue to do so, even on an intermittent basis, it will probably alter your life in an important way. This is because speaking is the most profound, elemental, human way we have of communicating. Simply by learning the art you will have shown a desire to communicate on the level of the soul. You will have displayed your soul to others, through art. The truth of that display is beautiful and makes us less alone. It says to us: This is what it means to be human. When an art like SOULSPEAK enters your life, your life has to change—if for no other reason than you have found a way (that is already within you) of touching others with the soul’s truth. That act is beautiful and healing to both speaker and listener. Where speaking will take you is up to the gods, but it will take you somewhere.
The Journey Begins
Something in me said, “Keep doing it this way.”
As for my own journey, I’ll have to start somewhere we both can recognize, so I’ll start with my decision some twenty odd years ago to sell my half of a computer company I had started. Although the company was prosperous, my partner had become unbearable. I wanted out. That world held no more interest for me: whatever skills I had in that area had long ago been exhausted. It wasn’t really a life for me. It never had been. Rather it was something I had stumbled into, for better or worse, on my way to being a poet. I remained a poet, but one who wrote very little poetry. In effect, I put my life on a shelf. When I took it down some twenty years later it was unrecognizable.
As to where I was going, and what I was going to do, I had no idea. I wound up in Florida, in Sarasota, not really knowing why. Oh, I could have given you a lot of reasons, but they would all be wrong. Then, one day, a poem came to me. It was a celebration of my marriage to the woman who had helped me save my life. It had been some time since I had written a poem, but I knew it was a poem, a real one, not just words. A door opened. More poems followed. Years passed, but very quickly. I felt like I was in one of those science fiction movies where the hero goes through many physical changes in a matter of minutes. That’s how fast the poems were changing. I held on for the ride. It was as if someone inside me knew what they were doing. Someone who was very impatient. I was getting published, receiving honors. I sensed the poems were good, I just didn’t know how good. I approached a well-known poet my brother knew. He was kind. He told me I could continue to be clever, or I could begin to take risks. Emotional risks. I could begin to be a poet. I didn’t like that, but I knew it was true, and I have always tried to honor the truth, no matter how painful. I allowed myself to change. To become more open. The poems also changed, became more real. I began to read my poems at poetry readings. They were good, but for some reason, they still didn’t sound right. Not only that, they didn’t feel like me. I felt uncomfortable. I was in the wrong skin, but didn’t know what the right skin was.
I went to a writer’s conference. I needed direction. On the way, in New York City, a thief stole my car. It was recovered, the thief arrested. I was immediately thrown into the labyrinth of the New York City Justice System. I thought I’d never emerge with my car. I was going nuts. My son, a writer, suggested I use it as material, in that offhand, patronizing way sons have. On one of my endless subway rides back and forth to the Criminal Courts building, a long poem began to simply wend its way out, a different poem. It was me, talking. Almost without effort. I’ll give you a taste:
Stolen Poems
For Dixon Toro, who stole my very old maroon Chevrolet in NYC. It was recovered, and Dixon arrested, 6 days later in the Pelham Gardens Motel at 2 in the morning.
Two years on Rikers, that’s heavy time Dixon.
You’re going to get it too. Glucksman says so,
he showed me your record. Like a bill of lading, he said.
Crack probably, that’s what Glucksman thinks.
I remember listening to him in the Criminal Court Building
nodding, Yeh, crack. But it wasn’t crack Dixon,
it was something else, the way I’d babied it,
that’s what I think, the way it gleamed
beneath the vapor lights. That deep maroon.
You should’ve kept walking Dixon,
punched a Porsche instead, got high
for a week, bought earrings for Lydia,
plantanos for her kids. It must have been
the envelope. The way it lay there on the seat,
crisp, like money. Dixon, listen, I know
you read my manuscript, my twenty poems.
I found them on the back seat floor.
With the cans and wrappers.
And then, Consuela. Ah yes, Consuela.
Who lived downstairs. Who went to Hunter.
Who did the books at Hector’s bar.
Who smoldered. Who was unfuckable.
Who was always reading, who couldn’t
take her eyes off you, who liked
your friend’s poems, who didn’t know
you were thinking of leaving, of writing poetry,
that the crack was killing you, that Justin
was sleeping one off, that you had his car,
that Lydia was not your wife, that her kids
were driving you crazy, that you had always
wanted her, and Yes, Consuela,
that he would slide down your belly,
his tongue like a swollen animal,
the motel door open and the traffic
streaming by like rifle tracers
and you moaning, No, Dixon,
Dios, no, favor.
Listen, Dixon, it wasn’t the poems.
That they weren’t yours,
that you used them on Consuela.
I’ve done that, maybe worse. Everyone has.
It’s what you didn’t do. You should have called,
sent me a card, put a Personal in the News,
told me some were shit, some made you shiver,
that Consuela had unfolded like a
wet flower, that she tasted like smoke,
like a forest. You should’ve told me
how it felt Dixon, lying there, pressing
her nipples when it all came down.
Somebody, you should have told somebody, Dixon,
anybody: the guy across the cell from you,
the one the jailer just brought in, the bookish one
with all those poems. Look at him. He’s on to you,
and not amused. He can’t believe
you’ve got the nerve to hit him up
for cigarettes then flop down
on your bunk like that, your arms outstretched,
and tell him that you’re doing time,
You swear to God, Your mother’s grave,
for something that you didn’t do.
When I looked at the poem afterwards, I realized why it had felt different from anything I had done. It was an unabashedly narrative poem. It was me, telling a story. When I realized that, something in me said, Keep doing it this way. I let the storyteller loose. It didn’t matter to me that narrative poems were often held in disfavor by my fellow poets. The poems felt right. They felt true. The skin felt more correct. Around that same time, a series of pidgin monologues suddenly burst out in the persona of an Australian aborigine, Eldred Van-Ooy. The language was a Melanisian pidgin, called Tok Pisin, that I had been drawn to for some unknown reason. Like a magnet. I began studying a Tok Pisin phonetic dictionary prepared by linguists. Then, one day, I began writing in a language that was only spoken. The poems came out of me as if I were talking, or maybe it was the aborigine, Eldred. I couldn’t tell which. I’ll let you judge. Here’s a sample:
Drimtaim (Dreamtime)
Baimbai ol waitman i-singawt long mi: “Eldred.”
Eldred then became my name.
long skul, em i-singawt: “Van-Ooy.”
Van-ooy at school.
Behain mi go long haus, em i-singawt: “Abo.”
“Abo” when the day let out.
Yar kam na go.
The years passed by.
Olsem san. Olsem mun.
Like suns. Like moons.
Drimtaim i-kam. Drimtaim i-go.
Dreamtime came. Dreamtime went.
Na ol waitman i-no tokim mi em i-saevi Drimtaim.
But no one spoke of dreams to me.
Em i-tokim nem bilong olkain samting.
They only spoke of naming things,
Em i-tokim: wan, tu, tri, wan, tu, tri, tasol.
And numbering.
Wantaim long skul mi tokim drim bilong mi.
One day at school I spoke of dreams.
Tisa i-tokim mi olsem; “Mi nogat saevi.
The teacher asked
Yu tok Drimtaim long mi, orait, Drimtaim i-stap olsem,
If dreamtime always stayed the same,
Drimtaim i-no stap, olsem de?”
Or changed, like day?
Mi tok: “Drimtaim i-stap olsem de:
Dreamtime is the same as day I said:
olsem em yu, dispela tebal, dispela buk, dispela skul
Like you, this desk, this book, this school,
olsem olgeta samting i-stap hir
Like everything that waits me here
olgeta taim mi wek long dispela rum.
Each time I wake inside this room.
There was no doubt in my mind that something momentous was happening. I just didn’t know what. It was as if something within me was trying to get out, speak on its own terms. Oh, I had plenty of explanations, but they were all wrong. A year or two later, on a visit to California, I became very restless. My father was on my mind. He had died a few years before. We had been estranged. I was slowly erasing him. I knew it was wrong, that I had to right it, bring him back. I began to pace my motel room. I couldn’t be contained. I went outside and started to walk on the grass next to the freeway. The noise was deafening. I began to think about our lives. I opened my mouth and started to speak to some imaginary listener about our life together. As I started to speak, I had the sensation I had just entered a hotel with many rooms. I entered one of them. I saw my father and myself. I was twelve. Whatever had happened then, happened again. And as it did, I told the story. As soon as I finished, I suddenly found myself in another room. A different time and place. I saw my father and myself again. Whatever had happened then, happened again. And as it did, I told the story. I went from room to room for over an hour and then it stopped. It was one of the most wondrous and most powerful events of my life. I knew I had created something unlike anything I had done before. Not only had I honored my father, I had honored something in myself. I had opened a door to something very deep within me, that’s how it felt.
At the time, however, I didn’t really know what that door had led me to. All that I knew is I could recreate that story whenever I wanted, simply by walking into that imaginary hotel. The doors to each room would open all by themselves. It would simply happen again. I told the story publicly twice and then I stopped telling it. I had set things right. I sent a video of a performance to the poet who had advised me to change. He told me something interesting, something I’d sensed but hadn’t quite put into words. Or maybe I had. He told me there was a cadence to the stories. Something like poetry, he said. I didn’t know it then, but I had rediscovered the art of oral poetry. I was doing what Homer had done thousands of years ago. It had just come out of me, without my knowing how or what I was doing. I became more obsessed with speaking poetry. I wanted my poetry to become more and more speech-like. I wanted to speak to people, not at them. I founded a poetry theater where I could work with musicians and actors and other poets interested in performance. I began speaking my written poems to music, to create intertwined duets of the written poetry of my own and others. But I was still writing my poems. Despite my earlier experience with my father’s story, I hadn’t put the two together. I hadn’t put the act of unpremeditated, narrative speaking together with poetry. Then, one day, a series of short poems came to me that were very mysterious. They were so speech-like, I immediately called them “Speakings,” but I kept typing “Spaekings,” like old English. Here’s a sample:
Third Spaeking (Speaking)
The men looked across the river at the women.
They wanted the women, but what
they really wanted was the part
that flowered when they touched it.
Some men wanted the part that flowered
to be colorless. The women refused.
These men became women.
Other men wanted the part that flowered
to be red. Like blood. When it wasn’t
red enough, they crushed the women
to make them bleed redder.
There was no doubt in my mind that something was trying to get out. But again I had no idea what. I just knew it was very old. SPAEKINGS. One thing, however, struck me quite strongly: the poems were immediately memorable. I could recreate them orally on the spot, just like I could my father’s story. That just doesn’t happen, by the way, with written poetry. Which is why poets have to read from a text, or memorize verbatim. I was very close to something, but I still didn’t know what. That problem was solved one night at the theater when I began rehearsing a poem I had written specifically for a talented but irksome young trumpet player. After a few takes, he threw down the trumpet, told me to change my poem, and wrote down some idiotic lines that ended the session. Later that night, as I was walking, I realized what he was trying to tell me: that the trumpet wasn’t like the guitar, that I had to riff to accommodate the phrasing of the trumpet. The light went on: a refrain poem, short riffs. The door opened wider. I started to actually create the poem by speaking it. It was a refrain poem, a poem of tiny one-line stories with a repetitive hook. And like the poems in Speakings, and my father’s story, it was instantly memorable. It became a part of me. It went like this:
Think of the Loneliness of Whales.
Think of the loneliness of their journey.
Think of the cavernous dark
they must travel through
with nothing to guide them
but the sound of their own singing.
Think of the loneliness of their mating,
The soft dark wall of one brushing against
the soft dark wall of the other.
And then think of my loneliness,
standing here, singing this to you.
I had walked though the looking glass. Poetry and my father’s story had come together. I knew instinctively that I could create poems orally. I told my partners in the theater that I’d discovered the key. I told them all you had to do was wait for a poem to start to come to you and then speak it out as you would a story. That was the key. Only stories. Like you were talking to a friend. Spontaneously, without premeditation. It was a momentous evening. If it sounds simple, it was and it wasn’t. What I didn’t realize was that we would eventually have to forget everything we knew about written poetry, that this was an oral/aural poetry with completely different aesthetics. What we also didn’t know was that it was going to be a long hard journey, and with no one to guide us—only the sporadic scholarship on preliterate poetry that I eventually discovered. I didn’t know it at the time, but the form of oral poetry that had come to me was the very earliest form of oral poetry, a simple refrain that was improvised upon. Whatever was emerging in me was starting way back. At the very beginning. Another indication of our going way back to the beginning, although again it wasn’t clear to me at the time, was that for some reason we began to respond to each other’s refrains. We didn’t know it then, but antiphonal poetry (or communal poetry) is at the very heart of oral poetry—its earliest expression. Later, as I studied the scholarship on oral poetry, it became clear to me that our progress in oral poetry was approximating the manner in which ancient oral poetry developed. As we began to trust the act of unpremeditated, narrative speaking, we advanced from refrains and responding to refrains to creating straight narrative. But we still found ourselves wanting to respond to what was being said. We sensed the true communal nature of oral poetry.
We had no idea why except that it felt correct. And sounded right. We were learning to trust our ears, not our eyes. And our instincts. We also began to work with musicians in a different way. We found that oral poetry was so flexible we could easily adjust the cadence of our speech to what was happening in the music. Later we became so confident in the act of speaking we were able to let the music take our speakings to places we never imagined. After a number of years, it seemed as if we had
accomplished what we had set out to do: to create a more speech-like poetry that spoke to people, not at them. It seemed to me that we had also created a poetry that was more in step with our times, a poetry that created a true communion between poet and audience. Someone gave it a name, but it really named itself: SOULSPEAK. Well, the name was correct but we were completely wrong as to what we had really done. We didn’t realize that, however, until we began to perform SOULSPEAK.
We were essentially blind to the true nature of SOULSPEAK.
Well, when we first performed SOULSPEAK for an audience, some people got it, and some people didn’t. We didn’t really understand why. Speaking had always seemed to us to be the most accessible, most generous form of poetry we had ever encountered. It was meant for everyone. Why, then, wasn’t everyone getting it? There could be lots of reasons, we told ourselves. It was totally new. It was multi-voiced. It was too different. It was too deep for everyday audiences. It was a poetry that required we be good performers and we weren’t all that great. The list seemed endless. Needless to say, they were all good reasons, but they weren’t the right ones. What’s more, to complicate matters, many poets disliked it, almost sight unseen. We were astounded by their inflexibility. After a while, it became clear to us that most poets wanted to hold on to what they knew. It seemed as if they intuitively sensed the risks involved in speaking and chose not to take them for as many reasons as they could think of. Perhaps these poets would eventually catch up to us, but maybe they wouldn’t. At any rate, there was no sense waiting. We knew we were creating a real poetry, even if it was radically different. We also knew that our path was correct and there was no turning back.
Over a period of time, however, as we began to teach a specialized version of SOULSPEAK to at-risk children, our success with the children made us wonder if SOULSPEAK was really meant to be performed for a passive audience that knew nothing about it. Maybe it was just too strange, too different. Our success with children, however, was telling us that people would get it if they did it first. We were finding that they could really hear SOULSPEAK once they created a speaking themselves. Doors seemed to open of their own accord. Thus, doing SOULSPEAK enabled one to truly hear SOULSPEAK—to hear the multiple voices more easily, and also to hear its sound, its peculiar beauty. This led us to wonder if the primary form SOULSPEAK should take was not as a performing art, but one where everyone participated, a true communion of souls, just like its ancient counterpart. This realization didn’t occur immediately. To tell you the truth it took years. We were essentially blind to the true nature of SOULSPEAK, namely, that it was to be performed in the same manner as tribal poetry: no audience, only participants. It could be performed for a passive audience, of course, but for a general audience to truly “get” SOULSPEAK, we found it is much easier for them if they have already created a speaking. You could see it in their eyes. People got it after they did it.
All this should have been apparent to us from our work with children. For some reason, we simply ignored the fact that once the children created a speaking, they took to SOULSPEAK immediately. At the time, we thought there was an essential difference between the version of SOULSPEAK the children were doing (which used seed words) and the SOULSPEAK we were doing, which didn’t use seed words. But there wasn’t. The seed words were just catalysts. I don’t know why we were so blind to it. Maybe it was a kind of snobbery, because the only difference was the manner in which we brought the whale underneath the boat. After years of speaking, the poems would just happen for us. The whales were always underneath us. The children, of course, were a different matter. They were complete strangers to SOULSPEAK. The use of catalysts had allowed us to bring the children into the world of SOULSPEAK immediately. We could have a group of twenty children doing spontaneous, oral antiphonal poetry in a matter of minutes. And the poems weren’t nonsense. They were profound. Everyone in the classroom knew it too. Nobody had to be told that these were real poems. You could hear the gasps of recognition. Even from kids who had refused to participate, who told us they hated poetry.
Sometimes the poems were so deep that some teachers became co