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Poet interview series for NaPoWriMo
By Leslie D. Rose // Interview by Donney Rose
April 15, 2015 (15/30)
Poet and organizer Anna West (Baton Rouge) discusses effective arts integration and the cultural power of youth spoken word programs.
For Anna West, there is a critical difference between the connotation of the words founder and organizer.
While the Columbia College Chicago and Harvard Graduate School of Education graduate is known for her work in creating/co-creating spaces for youth poets to exist in their art - she is best known as a person who is able to plan things carefully.
“The art of organizing is to be facilitative, to invite people to come together so that we develop the capacity to act on our mutual agency, and to learn a great deal from one another in the process,” West said.
And by definition, she has been organizing since she was still young enough to be enrolled in youth programs herself. She has had her hands in some of America’s longest standing youth literary programs, including Young Chicago Authors, WordPlay Teen Writing Project – now Forward Arts, Inc. (Baton Rouge) and Mass LEAP (Boston, Mass.).
“I don’t want to downplay my contribution as an organizer to these amazing and now long-running organizations, but I also don’t want to call myself founder because the connotations of that are tied up for me in a masculine and colonizing narrative that suggests that great individual actors are the ones who bring communities like these into being.”
Community has always been important for the native Baton Rouge poet, and it shows through her organizational abilities and in the legacy of community-building modeled throughout Young Chicago Authors, Forward Arts, Inc. and Mass LEAP.
This year all three of the aforementioned organizations received notability by way of being named among the 16 grantees for Youth Speaks’ Brave New Voices Network Leadership Cohort. The Cohort’s purpose is to build a sustainable field of organizations that intersect arts education and youth development practices with a deep focus on long-term civic engagement and public presentation.
It’s an ideology that West shares and has been working on perfecting over her 20 years of youth literary and arts integration activism.
“I think about organizing youth spoken word poetry programming as primarily being about the work of making spaces through which we all can imagine and act on our collective power, and in which I, along with others, have a chance to be grounded in a community that is committed to democratic openness and care for one another,” she said.
But what appears to be of the most important concepts of West’s work is to garner public awareness to the stories of the following generation(s).
“I’ve gotten tired of trying to explain to folks who really don’t get it that youth poetry is ‘good’, aka, aesthetically complex enough,” she said.
“In spaces where we are taking young writers seriously, we are also creating opportunities to listen to how language works in tandem with emerging consciousness. I’m not saying that old folks can’t also be having some emerging consciousness, but there is something privileged about this ‘coming into being’ for youth. I stay fascinated with what that emergence sounds like in youth poetry.”
West continued that the relationship between self and other(s) is part of the artistry of youth spoken word. She finds many correlations between the rapidly-growing youth poetic movement and the settled-in adult scene, nationally.
“That balancing act between the individual and the collective is one of the biggest promises of democratic thinking.
There is a lot of teaching and learning going on as we engage in these spaces about how to coexist without erasing our differences or leaving power unexamined. I see the challenges that the larger spoken word community has faced in recent years, in terms of confronting sexual violence as part of the necessary tension that arises from having a space that is open for the individual to be heard, but that is also committed to interrupting unexamined power. So, it is in this context that we are all learning what democratic community could be. I really could not imagine anything more important than that.”
As many youth development workers utilize slam poetry to popularize the concept of teaching literary arts, West warns that while cultivating the next generation(s), one should be much more critical about the culture of celebrity that creeps so easily into youth spoken word spaces.
“The public pedagogy of youth spoken word is about creating open and democratic spaces where all voices and lives matter, and yet the open paradox of the slam continues to haunt us,” she said. “So, yeah, the points are not the point, but then making it to BNV becomes the point, or being recognized as the next hot upcoming poet is the point, or amassing a legacy of cool because our poem was the freshest.
We have to ask ourselves if we are building our careers on the spectacle of youth spoken word without sustaining the deeper challenge to build critical, transformative infrastructures that could enable us to challenge the vast power structures we live within.”
West jokingly admits that she could write a fifty page response to the theme of youth spoken word and literary arts cultivation and organization.
These days, West is a Louisiana State University English department PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant. She still keeps her hands available within the youth poetry movement in Baton Rouge, and as an adviser to other organizations, but has admittedly stepped back from a lot of spoken word spaces in recent years.
She said that it’s become hard for her to negotiate her own positioning, but that has done nothing to change how impactful the art of youths is and has been for her.
“As I’ve grown older, I have begun to recognize how the inter-generational aspect of youth spoken word poetry spaces has been critical to my own life.
I am transformed by participating in spaces where we can not only critique and counter-narrate, but also become the citizens of the world we hope to live in. Those are acts of radical imagination, and what I’ve begun to understand through nearly twenty years working in these spaces is that growing people of all ages need help nurturing our social imaginaries, our sense of what is possible.”
Leslie D talking to Anna West and displaying the excellence of Baton Rouge:
“In spaces where we are taking young writers seriously, we are also creating opportunities to listen to how language works in tandem with emerging consciousness. I’m not saying that old folks can’t also be having some emerging consciousness, but there is something privileged about this ‘coming into being’ for youth. I stay fascinated with what that emergence sounds like in youth poetry.”
