Sunday, April 15, 2012

SLAM!

My kind college professors welcomed me and my classmates back from spring break with research papers, lengthy lab reports, and midterms. This past week I took a midterm Wednesday morning and after a leisurely lunch, as a virus bypassed my immune system, I began to study for midterm number two, scheduled for less than 24 hours later on Thursday morning. Needless to say I did manage to survive the week though it will be another couple of weeks before I find out if my GPA survived.

Friday evening through Saturday my body was converted into a war zone; I wasn't sure if the virus or my body would win. I did all I could to help out my immune system by sleeping 5 hours Friday night and spending Saturday on my bed watching season 3 of One Tree Hill on my parent's Netflix account while eating Twix, Twizzlers, and a Cookie's and Cream chocolate bar. Later on Saturday I forced myself to leave my bed; I had promised some friends I would go into the city to watch Anis Mogjani, a poet, perform at a local university.

At 5:20PM I gave my dear friend Olivia a ring to ask when she wanted to leave. "10 minutes," was the answer I received. 10 minutes would have been manageable if I hadn't been incubating in my own filth all day. She amended her initial statement and I was given 25 minutes to make myself presentable/socially acceptable. I hopped into the shower, skipped the hair wash (am considering going "natural" and switching to baking soda and vinegar), and cleansed the rest of myself. I threw on a pair of jeans, black flats, a white linen button down, and some gold earrings before grabbing my beat up old Coach bag stuffed with tissues and heading out the door.

After a savory dinner of pho and spring rolls at Le's we paid for our tickets and snagged seats in the second row in the lecture hall where the poetry slam was to take place. The student performances definitely warmed up the stage and the audience for Anis, with their poems on love and sex. But when he came out on stage, Anis Mogjani spoke about more than love more than sex, he spoke about childhood, patriotism, racism, and of course: the underdogs. Here's a link to a video of Anis performing perhaps his most well-known piece Shake the Dust.

One of the many things that I enjoyed about his performance was the clarity of the language of his poems. Yeah, I get that metaphors can make poems seem so creative, beautiful or funny but the meaning of poems can be tough to decipher especially when you have to rely on your ears to take in the words and you can't necessarily replay each line until it makes sense. I also really liked his voice and his sense of humor. It was a great performance and for those of you who were there "I'm glad I came."