Rachele Cermak | Life Stream & Portfolio

Hip-Hop/Spoken Word Issue, June/July 2009, Page 6, Discover

I sat at my sticker laden laptop inside the Black Dog Café at 5:35 p.m. on a Monday. Most of Saint Paul, Minn., becomes a ghost town after 5 p.m. so I’m surprised to find there is much commotion inside. Among the table tops of computer screens lie an assortment of plates, coffee mugs and a few magazines. I waited anxiously. I couldn’t remember his name.

More attentive to my surroundings than my e-mails, my eyes latched onto a man. He was of vague resemblance, but I wasn’t sure if he was the same man from the Artists’ Quarter I met a week ago. I looked down and kept clicking away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a paper sign placed on a table to my left. BHCCOS it read. I quickly Googled the acronym.

“Brutally Honest Constructive Criticism on Slam hosted by Matthew Rucker will be held Monday March 16 at the Black Dog,” read the Web site.

Well, at least I was at the right spot. And, at least now I knew his name.

Writing has always been a release for me. During my first dose of depression in eighth grade, my counselor told me writing would help organize my thoughts. All the way up until my senior year of high school, words become a positive way to vent my teen angst. But throughout all of those years, I was never able to put form behind it.

I had always felt poetry was fluffy, too rule-driven, and boring. I just didn’t belong with the craft. I wrote as though the words would someday be lyrics and, judging by what was on the Top 40 Charts, I didn’t have to try very hard to complete a “song.”

Then a part of my soul changed. I wasn’t angry or depressed anymore, so what came out of the pen wasn’t an explosion of emotions. In fact, it actually became hard to write because I didn’t know what to record if the ink wasn’t being bombarded with tears during the process. I learned that some sort of form must be applied to channel my words and motivate me to continue to share my perspective.

That’s when I was introduced to hip-hop. Not Chamillionaire or Sisqó one-hit-wonder hip-hop, but true, bold, brilliant lyricism right in my own backyard of Minneapolis. I watched at shows, listened 40 times over to their tracks on my iPod and learned. This was the form I was craving. This was exactly how I wanted my words to flow. That right there, I would think to myself. What she’s doing, I want to be able to do that!

I have never been a musician, though. My love affair lies with the words. I wanted to perfect my form of self-expression and dispel the played out lyrics and redundant rhyme schemes my notebook had been plagued with. Then I came across slam poetry. It is the most raw, judgmental experience of exposing your heart you’ll ever go through. This is where “performance” poets can die or flourish. I asked myself, Do you think you can really grow to be so talented that you can lead and compel an audience with only the tone of your voice and the words your tongue releases?

I sat at the Black Dog in front of Matthew hoping that I could learn to perform like those I admire.

“First step: Be conversational – loose track of all things confining. Rhyming does more to hurt a poem than help it, unless you know how to use it right,” Matthew says.

What? I thought that poetry was all about rhyming. I mean, that’s how songs are written. Once I heard this, I knew all of my poetic attempts needed serious revisions.

“Make sure you have something to say for at least two and a half minutes.” Matthew continued. “In fact, just write something out that’ll take five minutes to speak and then cut.”

Well, that wouldn’t be too difficult; I’m always getting in trouble for talking too much. In kindergarten, I was the one who always got the red card for being too social.

“Memorization is not all that important,” he told me. “Project your voice, but don’t yell. Revise constantly. Respect your audience. But above all else – you need to have confidence in yourself.”

Confidence – a word commonly plastered on the posters in high school health classrooms. Gaining it has always been an internal battle for me. Some days I feel invincible; other days, I take every innocent comment as a personal attack. I realized that no matter how much I paid attention or how well I learned to write, if I can’t find an undeniable belief in myself, I’ll never be able to reach my goal of sharing my perspective with an audience.

I started attending more slam competitions than hip-hop shows. I watched as the poets took to the stage. I watched the way they moved, how they calmly collected the words they were about to use to entrance the audience. I sat close in hopes that the confidence they emitted would somehow soak into my skin. But it didn’t.

No, this kind of confidence can only emanate from my heart and, luckily, that’s also where my passion lies. I realized that if I can write with passion, the words will inevitably be laced with confidence. The more I believe in my piece, the more strength I will have while reading it,I thought to myself.

I intensely worked on revising my first piece. I made sure to attend every slam-oriented event that I possibly could, and I always stopped by the Artists’ Quarter on Monday nights for a chance to talk with Matthew about revisions.

After one of the open mic nights, we had a minute to talk. I could already notice that my choked up, dry throated, twisted gut feeling wasn’t as apparent while I was reading as it always had been. I took a breath and started to read the page that was filled with words printed in Times New Roman but written with a determination that no font could translate.

“I don’t feel connected to it,” Matthew said afterward. “It’s too rhyme-driven still. Make it more conversational. Include more images, and maybe that’ll help let the audience in.”

Wow. Really? I thought. But I didn’t get frustrated or offended. Instead, I listened. I knew that to get better I needed to apply every concept that someone critiqued me on. Every ounce of feedback is an opportunity to learn, and disregarding it is only cheating myself.

A month went by, and there was another scheduled date for the BHCCOS workshop. I attended, and once more it was only him and me. I had written a new piece to give my mind space from the original one. After I read both, Matthew noticed a pattern in my writing style.

“You’re giving a narrative, only telling the audience what happened but not showing what you felt,” he said. “You can’t be afraid to be naked on stage. You need to expose everything you don’t want to because that’s what the audience thirsts for.”

It made perfect sense. I was only gaining the confidence to speak about situations, not to express how I felt during them. But the odd part is that, in life, I have no problem telling someone what I think. Then it hit me. I never have a problem sharing my opinion when I’m talking about what they’re feeling, but to share my honest secrets requires a whole new level of confidence.

I sat at my computer and revised for hours. Nothing would come out right. Each line was too narrative. I didn’t know how to describe how I felt about something that I had tried to repress. I wondered how my dad, my mother, even my stepbrother, would feel if they were sitting in the audience. I kept pressing backspace so my cursor would delete what I never could share face-to-face. My previous writings were all meant to stay safely on the pages of notebooks, but this one was being written to be performed. That thought put my mind in a shell.

It was the night of the Soap Boxing Grand Slam. The Artists’ Quarter was lined wall-to-wall with bodies. Seven poets were competing to be on the Saint Paul slam team that would go to nationals. Not one forgot a word, not one put emphasis where it shouldn’t have been; they ripped their chests so far open with each breath they exposed the vocabulary skeletons surrounding their hearts.

As I watched the audience’s response I finally understood what Matthew meant. I can’t be afraid of being naked on stage. These people came here to have a poet’s voice caress the back of their throats so they choke up, tickle their irises so their tears well – they came here to relate,

I went home and stared at my computer screen. I wrote every line to answer the question “why?” instead of “what?” People want to connect and learn from those around them. The audience would be more critical of me if I didn’t share my emotions.  The knowledge of this helped me gather the confidence needed to share my perspective through poetry.