The Winner and Still Champion

by Phaedra Greenwood
The Taos News, June 22 2000

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Spirits were high and the Sagebrush Convention Center was packed from stage to door with the literati of Taos and fantastic fans of romping rhymes and moving metaphors at the World Championship Poetry Bout, Saturday night (June 17), the culminating event of the 19th annual Taos Poetry Circus.

This year, two-time champ Sherman Alexie faced challenger Bob Holman.

Organizer Anne MacNaughton introduced "the Don King of Poetry," the sweet and always controversial Peter Rabbit, who ascended the stage wearing his traditional red velvet fez with the gold trim. In a raspy voice Rabbit welcomed the crowd to "the greatest poetry show on earth" and waved to the many prestigious guests including noted poets Terry Jacobus, Kenn Rodriguez and John Trudell.

Jacobus mounted the stage and kissed Rabbit passionately on the mouth.

Regaining his composure, Rabbit announced that Sonja Feher won the Open Slam event at El Taoseño Lounge this week and Melissa Goodman of Crested Butte, Colo., won the Youth Slam.

Brigid Meier was timekeeper for the Taos Poetry Circus' Main Event. Judges were Pati Martinson, co-director of the Taos Country Economic Development Corporation, Taos County Chamber of Commerce director Gayle Martinez and former Taos Postmaster John Flaherty--"the only postmaster in America with gruntled employees," Rabbit said.

Taos Talking Pictures founding director Josh Bryant, in cowboy hat and beard, played referee, attempting to fill in "those sizzling size shoes" for the unimitable Steve Rose, who is rumored to be in Ireland.

But the highlight of the volunteer help, the one the crowd was waiting for, was the outrageous and sexy Whitney Dillon, "Queen of the Wild West. " Although he lost his black veil, he kept his copper halo as he strolled up on stage to play "ring girl, " the one who holds up the numbers indicating the rounds. He was dressed in a short black velvet tunic with copper-coiled breastplates, sort of like a motorcycle retro-Madonna.

And then, at last, the audience had their first look at "the great white hope, Mr. Mouth Almighty, fastest-talking wild man in the world, Bob Holman."

Holman was dapper in a dark suit and matching hat.

Then came "the word warrior, poet, novelist and screenwriter from the Pacific Rim--I couldn't even weigh him, he's so heavy," Bryant said, "wearing Indian garb under his street clothes, two-time winner of the World Poetry Bout, Sherman Alexie."

Alexie, a Couer d'Alene Indian from Seattle, looked healthy and well-fed, his hair cut to shoulder-length, wearing ordinary street clothes.

They embraced, got ready to rumble for the next 10 rounds with a five-minute rule. Round seven would be free-form and round 10 extemporary. Judging is based on the "10-point-must system." The judges' tallies constitute the official score of the bout.

With the toss of a coin, Holman sang his first poem from unseparated sheets of computer paper that dangled to his knees. Yes, he certainly had some rhythm and some of it rhymed.

He said he was just back from Africa where he learned how poetry originated. He saluted the student slammers, "trail blazers, hell raisers" and "applause for all who answer the call."

It was a warm-up, a throw-away, because Rabbit and Bryant had already covered that ground.

Alexie followed with an ode to neon and aluminum, his father recycling beer cans to buy more beer in "the reservation law of diminishing returns." He went off on snow falling on dark braids, lighting a fire in the Dumpster "and the Indians will dance," and Crazy Horse who never died but climbed on top of the Hindenburg, a gas zeppelin, and lit a match. If you asked him what his favorite color was, he'd say, "Adell's black hair reflecting red neon." And "when the copper pipes froze last winter, I crawled beneath the HUD house and discovered America."

The audience grinned in the comfort of familiar territory--poverty and aluminum beer cans.

Holman danced energetically around Alexie in round two with: "It's up to the poets to write the real history."

He recounted the events of 1990. Nelson Mandela is free and it's wake and shake, turn of the century, gyrate the millennium time, past time, post future, history is on fast forward and the Berlin Wall is tumbling down. Here come the storm troopers and he's Jewish.

Holman's gestures were animated, his style almost breathless as he roamed the world of politics looking for social justice.

He revealed that his father was the only Jew in Harlem. He moved to Kentucky and married a coal miner's daughter. He jumped from that to Glasnost, then China and students bicycling toward Tienenman Square. In America it was time to be the best parent, to work extra hours to pay for the best child care while you're away. Paranoia is a national pastime and liberated women are nudging "old gray dinosaur pooh-bahs from there penile thrones."

Alexie seized the ball and came back with "Why We Play Basketball," spreading kerosene and setting fire to the snow-covered court because "we were Indians who wanted to play basketball.

"We are a small tribe. We build small fires." They were "small boys who would grow into small men" who played until their mothers and fathers came searching for them and carried them home. He came back to the game years later. "How I loved that ball as I dropped it into that net after years of patiently waiting."

Basketball becomes a metaphor for war (which it probably is anyway). "We play basketball because we want to separate love from hate." He captures the ball, climbs into a tree and refuses to come down until they name him captain.

The level of applause shows that everyone gets it.

In round three, Holman returns to the Lower East Side where "Spanglish" was the lingo, hanging around on street corners in the oral tradition remembering a man named Jorge Brandon, "the patron saint of the barrio," a sign painter in steel construction cap painted with the words, "El Coca Que Habla," the talking coconut who gave away poems before the beginning of time when you could rhyme sublime with sublime and "the syllables became birds," and though he is gone, "I see you there always again."

The audience was with him, you could tell by the applause.

Alexie struck home, shaking his finger at pizza delivery men who lose their way in the street mazes of Albuquerque, which he saw flying in, imagining an old man waiting in one of those houses alone until somebody else's idea of the West came calling.

"Southwest Airlines is coming to Spokane," he said. Cheap flights anywhere they can land for 30 minutes and take off again, but "I'm an Indian with money and that makes me very dangerous."

Somehow--nobody is sure how--he slipped off into baseball, then making love with the radio off because his wife can't concentrate if she starts listening to the lyrics.

The leap of association is as strange as the flight from Seattle to Albuquerque.

Round Four begins with Holman, who offers rambling introductions in a gentle voice. Using rhythm and wordplay--"Everything I said it, I said because I read it--he has recorded his own mythology in "language water, rocks, poetry and hot pants."

"I got a rock and roll mythology," he says, "with heavy duty political intent." Then he's out in the kitchen "fixin' up one of those Frito pies. Take a slice. A slice? Oh, take a taste. How nice!"

And that's as close as he came to home cuisine in Taos, New Mexico.

"That hurt," Alexie said, launching into why Indian men fall in love with white women, a portrait of a blue-eyed waitress in a doughnut shop who says, "This is my Job." (Job as in the Bible.) She can't be just a waitress, he decides. She is possibility. Bright, disciplined. A theologian who has turned her back on academic pursuits. When their fingers touch he feels a segment of immeasurable time in which he feels forgiven "or maybe merely aroused."

Holman swings into round five with a story about his brother the musician in Cincinatti, Ohio, who has written a song that says, "I'd rather be crazy than stupid/So how come I'm crazy for you?…Loving you is as dumb now/As when this thang began/I may be crazy…but I'm jus' stupid in the end."

That got a laugh because it was so casual and spontaneous. But was it competitive? He was losing tension.

Alexie made a splash with a poem about water, a woman who swims naked every day in the ocean. Erotic, but cold. He made the leap to dumping a cup of hot tea in his lap, which left him with three-degree burns which he once told a white women were scars from a "highly traditional ceremony."

From there he bounced to the jet, using his seat cushion as a flotation device in the unlikely event of a water landing. Then a pool in Southern California where the water was two parts hope and one part broken heart. And he prays to a glass of water on the window sill.

During the intermission the audience mills around discussing the bout. One thinks Holman is going to win because of his rhythm and more intricate structure, but actually prefers Alexie. Another says Alexie has more range and depth, whereas Holman is "spouting patter."

Author John Nichols said Holman's poetry is more interesting and more varied.

Carolyn Forche likes Holman's language and delivery, "almost like a hip hop guy," and commends him for his literary and historical allusions "while he makes us laugh."

A woman thinks Alexie will win because he's "less gimmicky. His poetry stands on its own. Seriousness and humor are quite a combination," she says.

"Holman gave more of a performance," another comments. "They're both so wonderful, I don't know who to choose."

Slam poet Jim Navé said Holman is reporting his own reality. "He doesn't really care if he wins or not. Sherman is superb--he always rallies--but it's like he doesn't know what he's going to do when he gets up there. But a Jew from New York, reporting his own reality by way of all these cliches, is all over the map."

The audience was attentive as the bout resumed.

In round six, Holman revealed how his daddy killed himself in a Cincinatti bus station, and a last phone call home. "I drank poison. I'm going crazy. I got no brain. They're after me."

Then back to the East Coast, where "Like everybody else, I wasn't a Jew until I came to New York."

He talks about the Jewish High Holy Days, the days of awe and "cleansing summer sweat from the streets of New York." And a green blue field, blue, wide white eyes breathing through eyes of death. He crosses the bridge alone as it dissolves and thunder pulls his heart into his father's eyes.

The room is very quiet as he closes with the line he remembers from his mother, "Robert, you will play like them/in the fields of men and women."

Alexie took the audience to "The Marlon Brando Memorial Swimming Pool" where "you'll almost believe that every Indian is an Indian" and Coyote accepts an Oscar for lifetime achievement.

Holman extemporizes on fascism for round seven and challenges the audience to "think the other thought," not the one you usually think, the "not me" one that waits on the edge of dreaming. A violinist accompanies and mocks him as he dances to the music because "this is the round where dancing is allowed. The 'other thought' is always behind you when you turn around. And the dream you won't surrender when you get out of bed in order to transcend in the end," brings cheers from the crowd.

Unflustered, not even breathing hard, Alexie evokes pathos as he recites a poem about the stick game, a guessing game, he explains. When you're about to lose your last stick, you sing the one stick song to bring back all the others.

His stick song is splattered with a bright explosion of crimson and magenta, brown and white crimson. He sings the stick song to bring back his cousin who jumped off the bridge--"Pink marrow on white water/falling cousin/I sing you back." He sings back his old grandfather, his small, crushed uncle beneath the fallen tree, his coughing grandmother with her lover tuberculosis, his diabetic aunt, his sister who burned in the trailer, "I sing you back…near the end of the game when I only have one stick to win with."

The question is, can the Taos crowd identify more with the underdog of the disenfranchised Indian or the always-at-risk, risk-taking Jew?

Pointing his finger, waving his arms, Holman returns to a place where "history sits in a corner/reading a book about how people used to sit around a fire" playing music, telling stories, where "the line curls and lays out in front of you/like a prescient shadow" to lead you back to the place where you eat them. With cadence and candor he seeks "the invisible like that divides the word silence/listen, listen close."

Maybe it's too far out, too intellectual.

Alexie hitches up his belt and launches into, "Things for an Indian to do in New York City." He walks down the Avenue of the Americas and tells all the cab drivers he loves them. He imagines that everybody in the city with dark hair is a mugger, and everyone is a bearded or a beautiful poet.

"I roll over a drunk in the doorway and he quotes Robert Frost/My God! He's homeless and formless."

He wrestles with his identity and loves you still, he says, the way he has been taught to love you--with fear. But there is an Indian, a real Indian, sitting right beside him on the F-train, a real Indian all the way from Brooklyn and the city, and "surprise, surprise, you're my wife."

Holman comments on the "Performance Poety" in round nine, how he doesn't like the term, but he falls to his knees and rises to the occasion. In a rush of words, he steps out from under the ropes, dives off the stage into the audience. Maybe its just part of the act? He whips out his pen light and keeps reading, asks for the house lights. "What's he doing now? He's going up. He's levitating! He's raising the roof. He never left the stage. It's what his poem is about. He's good. But I could write something like that. I see people every day in Taos who could write something like that."

Sure. Well, maybe. It's a show-don't-tell kind of act with a trickster quality, ingenuous and totally present.

Followed by Alexie in his way on mice as he and his friends dump six garbage cans and behead, beat or crush the fleeing rodents because the reservation taught him to hate, he said. He chased the last mouse into the last corner, stepped on it and broke his spine. Discovered blood on his shoes and knelt to pray for mice "who only wanted to be mice," like him and his cousin who "only wanted to be/wanted to flee the reservation."

Blood on their shoes. That was real. That got their attention.

Round 10, the nemesis of poets. Bryant presents his hat and each of them choose a slip of paper with a word, a grain of sand around which to create their pearl of a poem.

Holman draws the word "beads." He sits down, presses the paper to his forehead and remains motionless with his eyes closed for half a minute. He stands, opens his mouth to a vision of somebody in a hat covered with beads, a vision of new art, beer caps and soda pop bottle tops, a figure of being, new jeans covered with beads and liquid spruce smells. He was talking to his father who said truth, purity and simplicity are always covered with beads that refract the thoughts of those who hear them, back into the form of beads and spruce forms, back into the origin of words.

A little disjointed, but not too bad. What will Alexie come up with?

He pulls the word "mask." He spreads his hands. "You don't have to put me on the colonial pyre/stick my eyes and fill them with hot wire/'cause to tell you the truth/I'm a liar."

He rattles on about the masks that are all the same, drunk and bitter or beautiful, about the mask he wears when he's alone.

"Who do you love? Shout out their name? We wear these masks because we don't know who to be." He looks in the mirror, pulls back his hair and sees his father's face. "I love the man. I'm becoming him."

A wave of applause overtakes him.

It's done and the loud speakers blare, "another one down, another one down, another one bites the dust."

One of the audience says, "They put on a really good show. No matter which one wins, they both put everything they had into it."

Someone else comments, "It was just great! Divergent voices, recurring themes."

Five minutes later the announcement comes--a split decision.

Just like last year, when Alexie won in a split decision with challenger Wanda Coleman.

Judge number one votes 96/94. Judge number two votes 95/95. Judge number three 96/94.

In a split decision, the former champion retains his crown.

Sherman Alexie is declared the first three-time winner of the 19th World Championship Poetry Bout and half the audience gives him a standing ovation.

Holman is big about it.

"I love this guy, too," he said, grinning at Alexie. "I think what he's saying right here is the best of what poetry ought to do in this country. After this there's nothing left but the Nobel Prize."

Alexie acknowledged Holman who, with some others, began the populist poetry movement. "I love what I do," Alexie said. "The act of creating it, performing it, and all of you here screaming and shouting."

Alexie accepts, again, the Max Finstein Memorial Trophy, and the prize hand-beaded cap and silver belt buckle. And when the votes are counted, the People's Choice Award is a landslide vote for Alexie.

Holman was a more energetic performer with more spirit, but in the end, Alexie had more soul.