Bay Area, meet your home team. Their names are Joshua Merchant, Noah St. John, E.J. Walls, Gretchen Carvajal, Cassanda Euphrat Weston, and Jade Cho – spoken word poets, representatives of their cities in an international competition that has been the subject, even, of an HBO reality series, and all under the age of 18. Do you know about Brave New Voices?
A performance from BNW 2010 on everyone’s (least) favorite sustenance diet
The international youth spoken word competition has been shocking senses and giving young people a way to spit the most difficult and important aspects of their lives since 1998 (go here for our recent post on Youth Speaks, the SF organization that was instrumental in making this slam royale happen and coordinates the Bay’s BNV representatives). What happens is teams of high school poets, usually selected through city-wide slams in their own areas, hit the stage during three rounds, reciting poems in tandem and solo that they’ve been revising and perfecting for months. Offstage, the kids get to meet fellow poets from around the world, ciphering and practicing their performances into the night.
We’re stoked at the Guardian for our Bay beatniks, and we somehow hooked two of them for an email interview in the middle of their preparations for the competition, which starts tomorrow, Wed/20, and culminates in the final slam Sat/23 at the SF Opera. Like Youth Speaks executive director James Kass says, here’s your “unadulterated, uncensored kids.”
San Francisco Bay Guardian: Introduce yourself to the city — how old you are, how long you’ve been involved with Youth Speaks, what do you like about spoken word?
Cassandra Euphrat Weston: I’m 18, I’ve been involved with Youth Speaks for about a year. I love the directness and honesty that spoken word demands of me as a writer. There is only one chance to connect with the audience; there’s no leisurely re-reading spoken word poems, and that immediacy creates an extremely powerful connection.
Gretchen Carvajal: I’m 17, I’ve been involved with Youth Speaks for almost three years now, and I love the entire spoken word community, the freeing environment [of] integrity and vulnerability coexisting. All in all, spoken word is dope.
SFBG: You guys are less than a week out from Brave New Voices, how are you feeling?
GC: It feels surreal, we’ve been working at this for so long and it’s finally coming down to the wire, it’s Judgment Day. For real. Make it or break it. Think of every cliché used to describe this eye of the tiger moment, that’s what it is, times a million.
SFBG: What’s been the most challenging part about training for an international competition like this?
GC: Traveling from Newark to Oakland and Berkeley and San Francisco, it’s a lot of money to drop on BART. Also, several edits on the same poem can get a little repetitive, but it’s all for making the pieces stronger.
SFBG: What are you most looking forward to about BNV? What do you think is going to be happening there when a country full of young spoken word artists meet?
CEW: I can’t wait to meet poets from all over the country and hear their work. I don’t know exactly what will happen, but I know the experience will be absolutely phenomenal.
SFBG: Tell me something that you’re proud of about your San Francisco team.
CEW: I love how different we all are, and how close we’ve become over the course of the past few months. Everybody has pushed themselves into the most difficult conversations and poems. This effort definitely shows.
GC: I’m proud of the mix we have in our team, and how we coincide. Our team has so many different styles and we can contribute to each other’s style, making everyone diverse within themselves. I just love my team.
Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival
Wed/20-Sat/23, $6-100
Various Bay Area venues