What could be more hip than spending a weekend immersed in books, art, readings, dance and live music? So off
to Tampa I went to attend the third annual (and my second)
"Celebration of Words," Deep Carnivale in historic Ybor City. The festival, which in its past two years has taken place on a single Saturday, was extended
this ear to an enire weekend, beginning with an Authors' Reception on Friday September 11th and featuring over 100 authors,
poets, performance artsts and songwriters through Sunday afternoon. But that wasn't the only sign that Deep Carnivale
is growing at a healthy rate. Most of last year's performances took place at the
Circulo
Cubano, the 100-year old social club across the street from Hillsborough Community College's Cantina and bookstore.
This year, the readings were held on various stages within the college’s Performing Arts Center, and the festival even
spread its reach to some of the city’s hot-spots, with two events at the Don Vicente de Ybor Inn and a celebration of
Bay Area Artists at New World Brewery on Sunday.
Another new and very exciting difference since last year was the incredible turnout. Even a wet start on Saturday morning
did little to dampen the celebration; it might have actually helped. As every bookie knows, there is no better time
to enjoy a good read than a rainy weekend. And good reads abounded. The halls of the Performing Arts Center were
lined with tables selling works by local writers as hordes of kids rushed past me on their way to the Band Room for “Kids
Go Global.” Aside from books, of course, there were stations where kids learned about
various cultures including Mexico, Germany and Africa. The India table offered crafts like
Mehndi, the ancient art of hand-painting. But the crowd favorite was definitely the Bahamas display, where
kids made paper-maché pirate hats, and left wearing false teeth and eye-patches.
Readings began at 10:00am and continued non-stop in the center’s Mainstage and Studio Theater. Because of the
rain, the musical performances which were supposed to take place in the outdoor courtyard were relocated to the gallery where
sound-related pieces by local sculptor Bradley Arthur were on display. The walls throughout the venue were hung with
gorgeous charcoal sketches and collages by Cuban-born artist, Ernesto Piloto-Marquez. Another difference since last
year and something I really loved: this DC was serious, I mean deeply serious, about celebrating words in every artistic expression.
Aside from the readings, there were staged plays, book art, modern dances interpreting whispers and silences, spoken word,
slam poetry. Even the improvised relocation of the singer/songwriters to the art gallery seemed to capture the general message
of the festival—all these art forms speak to one another.
The morning's first event was a panel discussion on biography titled “Writing about Real People” including
Tampa writer John Capouya and John Leland (New York Times reporter and author of
Why Kerouac
Matters and more recently,
Hip: The History, about which he delivered the festival’s
very cool keynote speech). I stayed at the Mainstage to watch the All Out Repertory Company’s mixed-media performance
on addiction which featured a modern dance act as background to poetry. Festival regular Lori Karpay read a disturbing
piece about “the seventh floor psychiatric ward” where pills are doled out like candy, “the windows are
bolted shut,” and where the desperate speaker
cries out, “All I ever dreamed of was to live my skin.”
A highlight was a group of three spoken word artists from central Florida, Alex Ruiz, Curtis Meyer, and Brandan O’Halloran,
whose amazing ability to memorize lengthy verses was only second to their poetic prowess. Performing separately, and
then all at once, the three took on literary critic, Harold Bloom, who they quoted as lamenting that “slam [poetry]
is the death of poetry.” Firing back at Bloom and a professor who asserted that “anyone who majors in English,
majors in death,” the poets wielded sharp words and sharper wit, threatening to “torch the Louvre,” and
exclaiming, “The best poet I know is a freaking taxi dispatcher.” There was nothing dead about this performance.
The words came quick and cut deep through the tension between Slam and Academia. At the poem’s end, Meyer quips,
“After this festival I’m gonna get drunk with my friends,” because, he adds, “it makes me feel alive.”
O
ver in the Gallery Room, Tampa Bay songwriter Jules Dobrowolski was strumming out some original tunes that could only be described
as comedic-country. One love ballad was dedicated to “Mrs. Lincoln,” by whom he meant Abe Lincoln’s
wife, Mary Todd. Serenading a dead ex-president’s wife may not seem so strange or so funny at first, but Google
her picture and you’ll get the joke. Dobrowolski prefaced his next song, “An Acquired Taste,” by asking,
“You know that person you once fell in love with and no one in your family could understand what you saw in them?”
He rounded out his set with another song sure to have the ladies scrambling to meet him backstage: “Hard on the Eyes.”
I wondered if that one was also dedicated to Mrs. Lincoln. Jules did sing one straightforward sweet-song, which prompted
me to ask him how he defines his music and whether he considers himself an anti-romantic. “I like dark comedy,”
he said. “I either sing about the recognizable, or take the recognizable and flip it on its head.
Funny as Dobrowolski's ditties
were, I was happy to venture into the Studio Theater to find poet Donald Morrill reading an actual love poem from his dreamy
collection of prose poems, Impetuous Sleeper, which he described as “a book
about trying to be awake.” In the poem titled “I Do,” the author makes a lyrical inquiry into the
questions at the heart of marriage: Can you ever fully know another person? What is love, if not a “remarkable
accident?” Can it last, and when it does, what is the mystery that holds two souls together? At the poem’s
climax, Morrill tells of a couple who returned to their cottage one afternoon to find the French doors wide open and 14 hummingbirds
roosting in their bed. The couple moved the birds outside, carrying them individually without waking a single one, and
later confessed they had no idea how they’d managed such a thing. Morrill’s tender response: “Isn’t
there always the sleep of 14 hummingbirds in marriage?”
I was swooning like John Keats on seeing a lock of Milton's hair. I needed a double shot of slam before the keynote
speaker, so I headed back to the Mainstage for another dose of spoken word. One minor complaint I have about the festival—the
events ran at a rainy-day pace. I was early for the 1:15 pm performance by spoken word poet Lizz Straight, and
at 1:36pm, still no Lizz. Whispery words set to a groovy lounge beat played while the auditorium filled with well over
100 audience members. Within moments dancers filled the stage. As they moved in, the music became purely instrumental,
the words replaced by expressive bodies that shouted noiselessly across the room.
Following the dance was an Exquisite Corps performed by Adrienne Nadeau, two high school students—Rina Sanders
and Brianna Miller—and the long-awaited Lizz Straight. The four women touched on femininity, image, sexuality,
religion, and death, right to Straight’s poetic manifesto: “We sacrifice our lives to save yours.”
I met with Nadeau and Straight after the reading
and asked exactly how poetry was a sacrificial act and whether it could actually “save” us. “It’s
a sacrifice,” Straight explained, “because of the vulnerability involved. Spoken word poets put themselves and
their lives out there to be judged.” Nadeau added that they know poetry can save lives. “The experience
of being on stage is nothing,” she said, “compared to the people in tears after a reading, telling you just that—that
you’ve saved their lives by giving them voice.”
At last
it was time for the keynote speaker, John Leland, who delivered a very cool lecture based on his book,
Hip: The History. Leland began with a definition of “hip.” According to a character
in Albert Murray’s
Barber Shop, “The first thing to being hip, is being
hip to how hip the other fellow is.” Leland chronicled the history of hip, from its arrival in America as the
West African word
heppe, which means “to open your eyes,” through five
historical “convergences” between black and white societies in America which produced such cultural artifacts
as slang, Greenwich Village, the Harlem Renaissance, beat poets, be-bop, punk, hip-hop, and the internet. According
to Leland, who admitted that there was “nothing less hip than writing a book about hip,” hip is about an awareness
of what is and isn’t authentic. And the characteristics
of hip tell us a lot about how America produces culture. It happens from the bottom up, usually at the interface of
black and white societies; hip reverses hierarchies, and is born of mixed origins. Hip may have become an advertising slogan,
but Leland asserts it’s ultimately not about consumer trends, but rather an openness to what others might know, and
a willingness to listen. I asked Leland whether our country’s recent economic woes fueled by greed and hyper-consumerism
indicated that we had completely lost touch with the “authentic?” “Are we here,” I asked him,
“because America is no longer hip?” Without hesitation Leland affirmed that this is a time to reevaluate
what’s important in our lives. “If ever we needed ‘hip,’" he said, “it’s now.”
There
were still over 20 acts left, two writing workshops, and a tribute to Susan Hussey, a local author and playwright who passed
away in February. But I had to make the long drive home. What was the more “hip” choice I wondered?
And would my editor understand this piece would be a week
late, because I was still in Ybor, in search of the authentic?
I left Tampa Saturday afternoon, but plan to be back for Deep Carnivale 2010, when I expect the festival to have grown
even larger and ever cooler. I considered Murray’s barber shop and Leland’s reminder about how to identify
hip: “Try to talk and listen to people who might tell you something you don’t know.” What else had
Deep Carnivale been? I never knew slam poetry could be academic, that Mary Todd could be sexy, or that dancers could spell
out words with movements. I always thought poems were cool, but I never knew they could save lives. And I’ve
always felt book fairs were hip, but now, proof positive. To borrow a phrase from festival organizer David Audet, this year’s
Deep Carnivale was “off the chain!”
ESTHER MARTINEZ’s nonfiction has appeared
in
Newsday, The Daily Beast, and
The Columbia Observer. One of her rants was recently published in the Opinions Section of
The New York Times. Is that enough to call herself a New York Times writer? (Cause she’s gonna…
) You can read her
FBR Reports piece on Deep Carnivale 08, which is
archived, here.
