Quess?

QUEST/QUESS? QUESTING

You have the frankly advantaged disadvantage of being the oldest person in the room when Michael "Quess?" Moore performed Sleeper Cell on November 19, 2017 at Mercer Manor (1000 N. Rampart, New Orleans).  The performance was based on Moore's second book of poetry, Sleeper Cell ( Ascension, LA: Next Left Press, 2016).  The performance was a book of poetry trying to become a one-man theatre piece.  It is a work-in-progress , watered with all the puns "progress" might contain.  So be it.

You have the frankly disadvantaged advantage of being the outsider in a small crowd of younger people who finger-snap approval of slam poetry.  The oddness of the moment does not prevent your using lemons to make punch.  You happen to like some of Moore's work, and you do respect his intelligence, his activism, his determination to use poetry to teach something to somebody (some bodies). Lawd, today.  Language fragments into possibility.  So literary history puts Quess? in the new wave of New Orleans poets who accept the slam performance  challenge initiated in November 1984 at the Green Mill Jazz Club in Chicago.  On a crisp fall evening in New Orleans, you train eyes and ears upon what Quess? is questing for.  You bring to the task  some knowledge of what the Wikipedia entry "Poetry Slam" (http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_slam ) tells the Internet slam poetry has been and is along with some experience of having listened to spoken word poets slam.  This is not the first time you have considered what happens when poetry leaves the page to dance on the stage.  This is the first time you have brought age difference to the mix.

You are bringing to your witnessing of the performance a bit of concern that what can be excellent in reading the text of Sleeper Cell might be less good when the text is dramatized.  Quess? knows how to use allusion  to test a reader's cultural literacy as in these lines from "blood on the hands" (Sleeper Cell, page 32) ---

you who are born of frozen wombs

who know cold like second skin

& seek the warmth of other's sons…

The lines appropriately echo Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, and Wilkerson's title echoes words used by the most native of sons, Richard Wright, in the 1945 edition of Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth

So, in leaving, I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom…  (p. 228)

The tribute that Quess? is making to African American literary tradition is apparent on the page where it can be seen, but the tribute is less than obvious on the stage where it is heard or misheard.  And so much depends on who listens.  And so much depends on whether the slam audience knows or does not know where what it is hearing comes from.  So much depends on what Quess? intends to plant wheresoever!

Theory of performance, as you said to a colleague from Xavier University some months ago, always leaves a  crucial question -----WHEN IS PERFORMANCE NOT PERFORMANCE BUT THE REAL THING, THE REAL ACTION?     ---unanswered.  Is Quess? questing for a possible answer by putting his work and his body into the frame of drama?  If that is what he is intending, then a considerable amount of work remains to be done.  Rough spots have to be sandpapered; uneven edges have to be trimmed.  The logic of giving some of the poems to the audience as recordings and giving the audience some poems live out of the mouth and body language of the poet ----the logic of giving needs to be more apparent.  For example, the live delivery of the poem "Education" fits perfectly in a teaching moment for a New Orleans audience, and some members of the audience may hear why the allusion to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God in the poem is so on target ---or do we now say "point on?" The live performance of the poem "Post Racial America: A Children's Story" would be much more effective, for the purposes of the theater,  as a nuanced recording of the poet's voice accompanied gun violence.  Visuals would also make the live performance of the poem "So I'm touring the Texas State Capitol…" more effective .  And Quess? has to decide whether eating real food in performance serves a useful dramatic purpose for comedy or tragedy.

 Future iterations of the show might profit from feedback Quess? should request from those who have seen the "Fringe" versions. This is what you think about   ---- a future for poetry   --- as you walk back to your car on St. Philip Street in Treme on a sobering cool New Orleans night.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            November 20, 2017