‘My Spanish’
— Joyce Chong
My Spanish reaches for words at the top of a shelf with no stepping stool, is hit in the head with all of the words that I’ve been hiding up there.
I want to gift you all today with a slightly older favourite, something that sparked my endless love and admiration for spoken word poets. There’s something so vibrant and so much more powerful about performing poetry and not just reading it. It’s not just the words, which run spilling like river rapids or the timbre and the sound and the tone or the visual of the writer delivering their work exactly as they intended it to be read, to be heard. It’s the intensity that all three create as a final product. The way the words rush out, the way these poems always seem to take a turn, cut a corner so quick you start to get dizzy. And before you know it, it’s cut into something deeper.
I have so much love for the way this poem works, the personification of language, the way it blurs with identity and history and family in ways where there are no seams or clear cut lines. There is no dictionary definition, and no way to separate the person/people/memories from the language and present it as objective, as unadorned fact, an intangible item untouched by stereotype and history. There is no uncomplicated way to talk about language, but there are intense and bright and powerful ways to bring it to life.