Hi, I'm Carl and I'm in recovery from mental illness. My life took a leap forward at the Sacred Poetry Slam. Now, I'm trying to catch up with this review.
A slam is usually violent. So you might think a Sacred Slam is a contradiction in terms. But insert the word "poetry" and you have "Sacred Poetry Slam." Poetry can unleash the sacred and absorb the pain of a slam. The result is creative energy.
That creative energy electrified the crowd at Sufi Books in Manhattan on Saturday, January 8. Two groups, Sacred Slam and the Verrazano Foundation, brought together the "chronically normal" and the "acutely crazy" for a stigma-busting evening of poetry that made everyone present walking contradictions in terms.
Based in Staten Island, the Verrazano Foundation's mission is to overcome stigma through the arts. Ken Byalin, president of the foundation, prefaced the event with an anecdote about the price of admission: $5 for "crazies" (mental health consumers) and $10 for the sane ("them"). What if everyone said they were crazy? Receipts would fall but those in recovery would prosper. Stigma wouldn't exist because we would all be "nuts."
Whether people identified with each other when they walked in the door, true communion took place by the end of the night. A dozen poets "touched in the head" spoke from the depths of their souls. Does that mean the mentally ill are the new oracles? We, the mentally ill, don't know more (or less) than the rest of the world. We're all in this together. But as the saying goes, if one is in bondage, we're all in bondage.
Sacred Slam is a group that promotes poetry as lived experience and performance. Ian Goldner, director of the Slam, was not afraid to ask a simple question: "What is mental illness?" He replied, "Tonight we will sketch some answers to this question. Whatever the historic claims, we will bear witness to personal truth. This is not the full symphonic voice of the mentally ill. These [poets] are just a chosen few."
Mindful of our responsibility to our brothers and sisters, we, the poets, dedicated our "personal truths" to the search for a collective meaning previously denied us. The video "Scripts to Recovery," directed by Rachel Simpson and produced by the Verrazano Foundation, was shown at the slam. It shatters the myth that mental illness divides us not just from ourselves but also from our peers. Here, a couple dozen "wackos" read bits and pieces of their autobiographies. Those stories reflect, crisscross, deepen, and even lighten each other.
Faced with the artistic question, "What do you do with consumers whose recitations make them look like talking heads?" Simpson replied cinematically by giving every person the individual attention and peer support they needed. She also used the camera to transform the space and time that hang so heavily on the "inmates" of mental hospitals into a human presence that is larger than life (and death).
I was riveted by the consumers' words, such as "No one believes in recovery;" "We have a lot to say after our previous silence;" "I need to explain my experience to myself;" "We want to be an average person on an average street;" "We want to be out on a limb, be wacky, be who we are." Or, as Rachel Simpson insists at the end, "We want to bring to the table people who are excluded [as well as] 'normal' people and the not yet diagnosed."
Among those figuratively sitting at the table on January 8 was Bonnie Chernin, author of "Mother-Daughter Story #4," She exclaimed, "There was a good spirit in the room and the video. We need as many voices as possible. Everyone should be heard."
Angelo Cerio's line "HELP SHOULD NOT HURT LIKE THIS," from "Black Sheep of the Universe," pained everyone in the audience.
In "We Are the Wildflowers," Paul Chipkin asked, "Were we ever intended, like wild horses/To be broken, then tamed?"
About her hospital restraints in "Bedside Chat," Kathryn Fazio said the following to her companion, "But fly, I am naked/Without wings like you/How can I follow.../Shuuuuu, the night nurse shoe."
In "Wolves," Jack Ferver portrayed a brutally (dis)honest therapist and an all too patient patient: Said the therapist, "It's your fucking fault you're so miserable/We wish we could help you/But you have fallen behind the pack/The working wolf pack/We wouldn't even eat you/You bring us down/That's why we ask/"Are you okay? You look tired."/So you'll feel how truly tired you are/And just die/Just die/Just die."
In "Truth," Edward James gave one of the answers to the question, "What is mental illness?" "Never tell the truth unless you know it is in your best interests to do so. This is my primary rule, when dealing with doctors [psychiatrists], and one that has worked well for me over the years."
While in the hospital, Ed Knight learned to "engage strangers in chitchat...I became an expert at weather, weather about gardening, weather about fishing, weather about difficulties in getting to work, weather about swimming." No wonder his piece is titled, "Facing Anxiety."
Sam Pirro, in "Extrication," prefaced his description of a scary nighttime bus ride with this lament: "Up to my old tricks/Taking to the streets. Again/Spending money, what little I have, prodigiously. Again/Sitting on benches and in restaurants, writing for life. Again."
If you have a taste for dark humor, then Cindy Sostchen would have warmed you with her "Ward Stories:" "...the doctors gave me mortar-and-pestle pills and held their collective breath/were they waiting for me to twitch, blow a fuse, wail at the window or dance the hora for them?/a hallucination would have been applauded/but I remained colorless and dormant as a doormat...."
Rae Unzicker's prose poem, "To Be a Mental Patient," is considered by some to be the anthem of the recovery movement. She ended it with, "To be a mental patient is not to die, even if you want to—and not cry, and not hurt, and not be scared, and not be angry, and not be vulnerable, and not to laugh too loud—because, if you do, you only prove that you are a mental patient even if you are not. And so you become a no-thing, in a no-world, and you are not."
You might as well forget who you are and what the world is. In "Forget Me Not," I concluded, "I can't remember why history repeats itself and why it can't teach us a lesson the first time." It's up to the actors, poets, and audience of Sacred Poetry Slam to teach all of us a lesson we won't forget.