Jouissance de la Poésie

In other words, poetgasm.

If you don’t like first world problems or anti-academic statements, wait until next week to start reading.

Memory. It is a bitterly cold January day in St. Louis. I am shivering and purple-lipped in a half-lit seminar room, still wearing my coat in hopes that the meeting will not be long enough to necessitate taking it off. A professor leans across the table and says I’ve looked at your schedule. You need to cut German and your poetry club if you want to make the thesis work. My face falls. She says I know. But you really have the rest of your life to write poems.

I don’t know why I listened. We all have those moments of 20/20 hindsight, and it wasn’t until I finished the thesis -- a lukewarm 120 pages on dead white heterosexual men American modernism that entailed a soul-crushing defense, mortal enemyhood of one professor and several catfights academic arguments with another -- that I was acutely aware of how much I had missed.  I lost friends. I fell behind in a language that I loved (Überschlampe, however, remains the most accurate description of my cracked-out academic state of being). And I passed up almost a year of writing workshops, poetry readings, and slams where a sense of belonging had never been in question.

There is no way the professor with whom I had spoken in January could have known this. But the slam is holy. The poem is holy. Words on the page are holy holy holy. So when I arrived in Paris, poetry and research were side-by-side on my list of priorities. Questionable? Maybe. Necessary? Yes. I’d made a promise to myself that if I continued seriously in art history, I’d be better at maintaining a sense of balance. Because face it, art historians are poor forever. So we might as well have a little fun before dying alone in our offices, surrounded by our cats and mounds and mounds of unfinished research while getting the work done. Most poetry readings and spoken word events are held after research institutions close, so what is there to lose, other than sleep?

And I could always pass it off as an auxiliary research project, right? After a particularly rough introduction to the cutthroat world of French academics, it didn’t sound like such a bad idea.

The groups I plugged into -- Spoken Word in Paris, Ivy Writers Paris, and others -- make up an extremely supportive community. While they are NOT the only poetry groups in the area, they are more concerned with craft and editing than many. Gone is the hyper-competitive drama and splitting vocal cords of college slam poetry; here to stay is a crowded, warm bar or café and warmer invitation to perform.

Spoken Word in Paris!

In many ways, the French spoken word scene seems a distant cousin to the American one, largely because it is much newer. Universal themes -- poverty, crime, racism, and someone’s pain always trumping someone else’s pain -- abound, and there is a Fédération Française de Slam Poésie, with a near-identical set of slamming rules for those who are interested in taking that route. There remains an homage to the popular Def Poetry Jam genre, among them Grand Corps Malade or Pilote le Hot.

But there are more weekly venues dedicated to the beauty of stringing words together. Every Monday night I enter a magical poetry portal exhausted, and in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, I leave it completely reborn. The scene is extraordinary because it is about making connections with people who respect you for who you are organically, not who you will be after 8-10 more years of doctoral study or next career move.

And that, my friends, is something hours of research cannot always promise. Not even close.

(I'll gush over the research side next week...)