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Minnesota Original
is made possible by
Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund,
and the citizens of Minnesota.
(male narrator) On this edition
of Minnesota Original:
the National Poetry Slam,
competitive spoken word
from their work.
rehearses with
in a new performance space
for early music,
The Baroque Room.
themselves as being loud,
loose, and a little cranky;
The Tex Pistols Band performs.
These artists and more
now on Minnesota Original.
electronic music plays
My name is Kyle,
my stage name is Guante.
My name is Khary Jackson.
and I am a slam poet.
The title of this poem REACH,
and that is written in
all capital letters.
is Bridalplasty.
An Open Letter
to Walt Disney.
One. On the first day of school,
we make a list of the
characteristics of a good poet.
But see this is not a poem
about poetry...
Your little girl will wonder
before your wedding.
the right to call her pretty.
And what if she is,
devastatingly so...
We have come to lay claim
to your children,
your cotton candy dinners,
on the magic of the world,
when they sprout into adults
still trembling from the dark,
and spare us your assertion...
chuckles Well, a poetry slam
is both an art and a sport.
It is performance poetry done
in a competitive format.
the intent
to express out loud
to an audience.
So it's a little
bit of poetry,
a little bit of rhetoric,
of hip-hop possibly,
different vocal forms.
A lot of theater too actually.
kind of mash together.
Don't paint my house white
and tell me it's heaven.
Don't bring me a sack of beans
and tell me they're magic.
Bring me magic! Paint every inch
of our bodies heaven.
On the first day of school,
do not make a list
of a good poet.
Make a list of the people who
will weep when you die-- 7.
We are remote controls.
in dive bars.
have to offer.
It's great, it's beautiful,
and it is not nearly enough.
in poetry slam.
It's just you and the microphone
and an audience.
Can't bring a flute.
There's no music, no props,
no other people on stage,
naked art form.
what a person can do
on a stage in front of people
without any stuff.
I played sports for a long time,
and there's no rush
like killing a poem.
3 minutes and 10 seconds.
Let's face it; no one wants to
especially if it's mediocre.
We are judged by a panel
audience members.
never even heard
in their lives.
scoring, 0.0 to 10.0,
based on originality, content,
the performance,
happens to be judging that day
chooses to judge them on.
I personally don't write
for a slam audience.
I write for myself,
and if the audience loves it,
then they love it,
and if they don't, they don't.
If you feel like the room
is pretty dead,
you have a poem that can wake
them up and get them going,
you're gonna do it, and if it
works out, it'll probably
improve the show and you'll get
good points-- everybody wins.
believe a frog became a prince
through the kindness
of a good kiss.
The girl hurled the frog
into a wall, and that, you see
Have you felt it?
with the joy
that offered to tear you in two?
knew of such a joy;
Your so-called Ariel
does not get the prince.
She dies!
The 7 dwarfs did not
bear their own names.
Perhaps you'd understand
if you lived
on the graves of peasants.
They live and die nameless
the oral tradition itself.
and it's a bunch of fun stuff.
This poem is called Her Name.
their heart broken yet.
Maybe you're the one to do it.
So, you gotta read the room;
be sensitive to what's going on.
One night before supper
and couldn't finish.
who art in...
who art in...
I knew the word.
I knew the word, I could
feel it, I could see it.
across the table from me,
at me with those eyes.
They got no business
looking that sad,
that daisy woman
down them precious cheeks,
and all I could say
was please, please Lord,
give me back her name.
One of the most beautiful things
about spoken word
the story of either yourself
or people you know when those
stories don't always get told.
I think people appreciate
hearing feelings or ideas
or experiences that they've had
expressed in an elegant way
what I've been trying to say
point my friends to this poem
if they ask me about it.
Did you not respect him enough
for finding you beautiful?
his body feels next
to the cool touch of a
mannequin, will you leave him
for a man who believes women
look better in photographs?
my lover caressed my stomach,
my body recoiled.
clear off his arm, begged him
to leave that strip of skin
barren and unnoticed.
He said he would not,
tight to my flesh.
They whispered into me,
You have 10 new reasons
to love yourself completely.
Poetry slam is different.
Incredibly inspiring.
Random.
Humbling almost.
Oh, I don't think
one adjective could grab
because
one of the essences of
poetry slam is its diversity.
Uplifting, yeah.
I would say diversity.
Introduces poetry in a way
that I don't believe people
have heard poetry before.
Diversity in the type of poetry
you're gonna hear,
the people delivering it.
The whole idea is that
anybody can walk in.
A fundamental tenet
of slam poetry
is that everybody has a story.
A homeless dude could come
and win a poetry slam.
It doesn't matter what your
socioeconomic background is,
what your cultural background,
your religious background,
there is a place for you
where you're not only welcomed,
but embraced.
transcends the way
that we're always segregated,
whether by neighborhood,
race, ethnicity, class,
all these different things;
like pushing everyone together
and being like
What's your story?
Let's talk about it.
Let's listen to it.
understand this--
the beauty of a parking lot
at twilight,
how the sky burns blue,
the sweetness of every second,
is on the 11,
who actually looks at you.
for $7.00 an hour.
white noise, cartpushers,
cashiers, janitors.
don't believe in in a country
who's name we can't pronounce,
but we're fighting.
but we're fighting!
We're losing...
but we're fighting.
The National Poetry Slam is
the world's largest annual
and brings up to
84 teams of poets from around
the world together
to compete and see
who's the best,
and we're now the best
twice in a row.
Poetry slam democratizes poetry.
to have an MA
to know what poetry is,
you don't
have to be a grad student.
Poetry is for everybody.
Poetry once upon a time
was taken
and given to the elite only,
could read and write,
and that's what it became,
a written art form.
it was an oral tradition.
We've brought it back
to an oral tradition now.
in this crazy country,
what we experience.
You don't need a gallery,
you don't need a museum,
you don't need an auditorium.
in the street
for the world,
and that's beautiful and rare.
One of my favorite pictures
that I've ever made,
at the State Fair
I went to the cattle auction,
and I'd been to
the cattle auction,
of the fair other years,
Ronald McDonald was there!
so excited, I'm like oh my god,
Ronald McDonald at
the cattle auction?
I just know a picture
is gonna happen today.
Ronald, and I waited and waited
this one moment came together.
I just love that Ronald's
kind of just subtly back there
with this poor kid who--it's
very emotional for these kids
who have raised these animals
they were first born,
auctioning them off.
If I were the type to put
little bubbles in my pictures,
which I'm not,
but all I could think of
is Mmm, hamburgers!
harpsichord plays
My name is Tami Morse,
I'm a harpsichordist
group called Flying Forms.
is Mark Levine,
with Flying Forms.
We're a husband and wife duo.
playing Baroque music
Early music means music
written before 1750.
That includes
the Baroque period,
Renaissance and Medieval.
It's kind of a general term
for what we do, which is
performance practice,
term because we play music
that we think they played it
during the Baroque time.
Also, we play on instruments
to the specifications
of the Baroque period,
which is 1600 to 1750.
is a copy of an instrument
a 1750 instrument,
and Mark plays a Baroque violin,
specifications of the times.
The big differences
between a Baroque violin
of minor things that add up
to make a difference sound--
the neck of the instrument
and a little thicker;
there's no chin rest;
the base bar and some of the
wood inside the instrument,
there's simply less of it.
The strings are made of gut.
The largest differences
tend to be shorter,
is they have a concave curve,
where a modern bow has a
convex curve, this direction,
and it completely changes
the dynamic
and how you make sound.
We are recent additions
to the Twin Cities,
because there's
in town, and what we found is
there are a lot of early music
groups in town.
There's the Lyra Baroque
of smaller groups as well.
Maria Jette solos
new performance space
called The Baroque Room, and
it's for any chamber music,
but the idea is that it will
specialize in early music.
in downtown St. Paul
at the corner of 4th and Wall.
the Farmers Market.
I'm Maria Jette, I'm a singer,
I live in the Twin Cities
and sing all kinds of music, but
one of my absolute favorites
especially music of Baroque.
The Lyra Baroque Orchestra
started as the Lyra Concert.
the one Baroque orchestra
in the Midwest,
the only one before you get
to San Francisco.
singing solo
devoted following,
over the last few years,
realize what a jewel is
what great players they are
they're doing.
has in the last maybe 10 years,
little hermit crab,
sort of nonvoluntarily
into much more of a niche
than it should have here.
singing a duet
a sadly neglected treasure,
the next few years,
especially now that we have
this wonderful room,
The Baroque Room, that
Flying Forms has put together,
is going to be a real impetus
in early music,
for the early music folks here
to come to and kind of help
the movement burgeon.
So I'm guessing that
this is kind of a germ
of a great new life for Lyra
and the early music community
in the Twin Cities.
electric piano plays softly
When it comes to how I
execute work and my style,
I really like spontaneous ideas
that are conceptually strong,
and then once I have that idea,
I really like to try to help it
the most perfect
and appropriate execution
that it can have,
and I think that's why I work
in so many different mediums
because not every medium is
appropriate for every idea.
muted trumpet, electric piano,
and bass play slow jazz
is observe something that seems
seemingly mundane and hopefully
make something interesting
out of that,
or extract the creative
potential from that object.
piano plays softly
(Serik Kulmeshkenov)
everything real small in art.
these miniatures.
it's cultural.
I like small sculptures.
of my nature,
everything what is small.
I'm a freelance graphic artist,
and mostly I do printmaking.
I do bookplates,
and bookplates,
they are democratic art.
You can do everything;
it's poetry, it's still life,
animals, composition of fonts;
actually, no limits
on what you do.
considered miniature prints.
category within printmaking.
generally pasted right inside
the front cover of a book,
and they will depict
ideas of the owner--
hobbies, interests,
and all that kind of thing;
and they almost always have
ex libris in them,
which is Latin for
from the library of.
What I like in bookplate,
by my mind.
It's a little harder, of course,
doing bookplate by hand.
It may be easier
working on a computer.
You can do finer, nicer work.
printmaker, I am engraver.
under a video camera,
and images transfer to screen
much, much better.
And this closed-circuit TV
like black and white.
So I use only black and white,
it's easy for me.
zoom in, zoom out--
great equipment for me.
what could I do?
First I started when I
was living in Kazakhstan.
In 1985, my first friends,
they were from Russia, Ukraine,
maybe just a few months,
from Bulgaria, Poland,
and Italy, that's why
I had many friends,
and so I did bookplates
for Japanese collectors,
Chinese, Italia,
Portuguese, many, many.
scheme of the engraving world,
he's very unique, he fits within
Ukrainian and Soviet traditions,
but also with the Japanese.
There is a sense of surrealism
that is in Japanese engraving
that you don't find
in a lot of other places.
I mean, obviously, you'll find
bits here and there, but I feel
relate to that as well.
It's real art because artists,
they put the same amount
of time, power, soul,
creating small miniature.
some part of that person
like a reflection of his soul.
very much very alive art.
drum plays intro
country blues beat
in the back
I carry my money
in a brown paper sack
Mose said it in the '50s
and it's true today
'cause nuthin's okay
So many aces so little time
Mama's in the corner
sure lookin' fine
with a nod and a wink
Pay the man
by the end of the week
Don't worry
'bout nuthin'
gonna be all right
'bout nuthin'
'Cause nuthin's
gonna be all right
Nuthin's gonna be all right
Along a border
with a high-de-high
so da man won't bide
'bout to go downtown
in the midnight round
'bout nuthin'
gonna be all right
Don't worry
'bout nuthin'
gonna be all right
all right
guitar solo
it's all out on the line
Goin' all in,
gotta let it ride
Oh, double
or nuthin' mama
through the night now
gonna be all right
all right
'Cause nuthin's
Gonna be all right
all right Nuthin's
gonna be all right
I got nuthin'
Be... got nuthin'
Got nuthin'
electronic music plays
CC--Armour Captioning & TPT
(woman)
is made possible by
The State
Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund,
and the citizens of Minnesota.
orchestral fanfare