It’s the last day of August, and the peach glow of summer’s final sunset is making its slow, languorous descent over the windowpanes. I’ve watched sunlight fall through the Workman’s Club windows the same way at least five times, always on a Wednesday, always with poets I sort of know taking part in another fundraiser and always from the couch at the back of the vintage room. I used to be a regular fixture at such shows, where I’d inebriate myself with metaphors and mojitos. Somewhere along the way, though, it lost its buzz for me. One of the beauties of the Dublin slam poetry scene was its closeness, how after hitting up a few spoken word nights you could get familiar with the poets and organisers. It’s also one of its downfalls, as with more events you frequent the more familiar poems and cadences and even postures become. Rather than a critique of the poets, this is more so a symptom of our small community – we rarely get many outsiders. Rhiannon McGavin was one such outsider.
The Los Angeles native was visiting Dublin as part of an extended trip to Europe with her mother, a romp through France and Ireland that, when she tells me about it the next morning, sounds like something out of Gilmore Girls – endless days spent “walking through fields and eating wild plums”. Her announcement that she would be performing at theatre company Malaprop’s fundraiser “Bad Dates/Sweet Love” comes over Instagram and Twitter, where McGavin has built a loyal fanbase (12,000 and 4,000 followers, respectively). Indeed, her renown is such that Malaprop are keen to stress how special an event this is. Afterall, it’s not every day the Teen Poet Laureate of Los Angeles shows up to your spoken word night.
My first mistake was thinking I could know her based on her online presence alone. After two or three performances McGavin is introduced, and suddenly I’m experiencing the surreal sensation of being in the same room as someone you’ve only interacted with digitally. Kind of like on a Tinder date, the divide between the real McGavin and her studied online persona becomes startlingly clear. The “real” McGavin is strikingly different to who I expected to see, jarring in another way to her performing style but no less charming. At 18 she’s younger than you expect and very petite, though I reckon her flowing blonde tresses, impressive in volume, add to the illusion of height. Her eyes are rimmed with blue eyeliner, which, I know from one of her videos, she wears when she wants to feel brave, but when she performs she oozes charisma and ease. The poems she reads are both tragic and witty, with one called “Biology” featuring the standout line “Just call me the protein helicase ‘cos I wanna unzip your genes”, while still adhering to the slam format. What comes as somewhat more of a shock is the way she delivers them.
The poems she reads are both tragic and witty, with one called “Biology” featuring the standout line “Just call me the protein helicase ‘cos I wanna unzip your genes”, while still adhering to the slam format.
Her voice is measured in a way that is jarring to the Irish ear. And not even an ear predisposed to liking spoken word, but one that frequently hears other Irish people nattering away, singsong and rambunctious. The Irish tend to drop their lines with a smirk, caught halfway between laughing and grimacing and usually with a strong, unabashed brogue. McGavin’s delivery is different, less casual and playful than Irish slam poets. Borderline deadpan, she’s instantly familiar to us because of that distinctive LA accent – round vowels mellowing sharp staccato consonants and a swing to them that imbue each word, each sentence, each image with a charming wryness. It’s the voice of Hollywood and American commercials and the refined artworks that are infomercials, and it’s every bit a performance as they are. Glimpses behind the facade are there though in the gentle squeaks of her voice breaking that even a packed club room can’t obscure.
McGavin shot to fame in 2014 when her poem “Somewhere in America” went viral. Co-written with Belissa Escobedo and Zariya Allen, fellow members of Get Lit, a Los Angeles-based poetry organisation, the piece speaks directly to the anxieties of modern America, such as poverty, illiteracy and sexual assault. The trio opened for John Legend at the Hollywood Bowl, following that with an appearance on the Queen Latifah Show. Both appearances speak to the respect paid to spoken word in the US. Indeed, a cursory glance at her YouTube channel shows that the young poet is somewhat used to online success, with most of her uploads averaging at 6,000 views and poetry videos reaching as many as 22,000 views. Making YouTube videos since she was 12 – “it was mostly me just talking about Shakespeare for a few years” – hers has become a central voice in the community. This is evidenced by her “YouTube Abuse Recovery” video, released after the 2014 VidCon sexual abuse scandal. This saw multiple women accuse popular Youtuber Sam Pepper of rape, which reached almost 250,000 views. Through her tutorials, writing tips and endlessly supportive Tumblr page, she’s become something of a beacon for the young, sensitive, angry girls (and some boys) of the online world.
It’s hard to tell how much of this success is due to McGavin’s status as a true Los Angelian and the relatively close proximity to stardom that can bring. When we meet the next morning in the Botanic Gardens, the slam poet, who was born and raised in the heart of LA, details the experience of growing up in such an environment: “It’s very rare for people to actually, like, grow up and live in Los Angeles. Like, people just move there usually. It was … a lot.” Between bites of scone, McGavin states that more often than not people marvel at there being more to the city at all: “It’s funny because a lot of people see Los Angeles as, you know, a big Kardashian mess but the Kardashians are like, eight people and it’s a city of three million or whatever. There’s so much history and culture that people just ignore in Los Angeles because they see it as Walk of Fame, Rhodeo Drive and there’s no other streets at all. It’s just so false, geographically speaking!”.
Her defense of LA as a centre for culture is an admirable one, and she speaks with a knowledge only those born to the city could have, but Shakespeare was still her gateway literature drug. At seven years old, McGavin was enrolled in a children’s Shakespeare performance group, a nerdy kids dream hobby because “you could curse, and people wouldn’t know! You could insult people without them knowing about it, it was like a whole other language”. The Bard has remained a main inspiration for her, along with poet Anne Carson, the classics, “daily life things” and “plants in general”. With the latter in mind, it’s suddenly clear why she suggested the Botanic Gardens as a meeting place.
If you wanted an idea of how the separate spheres of Hollywood and underground poetry rub up against one another, look no further than Da Poetry Lounge, founded by Dante Basco, best known as the voice of Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender and as Lost Boy-in-Chief, Rufio, in Hook.
Slam poetry developed in the US in four main areas: Chicago with Mark Smith, often honoured as the founder of slam poetry, New York with the Nuyoricans movement, Washington DC with Busboys and Poets and LA with the Flypoet Spoken Word and Music Showcase and Da Poetry Lounge, the largest and longest-running poetry lounge in the US. If you wanted an idea of how the separate spheres of Hollywood and underground poetry rub up against one another, look no further than the latter institution. McGavin points out that Da Poetry Lounge was founded by Dante Basco, best known as the voice of Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender and as Lost Boy-in-Chief, Rufio, in Hook.
Despite the instances of celebrity glamour threaded through the Los Angeles slam scene, it originally emerged as a solution to a far darker issue – rampant low literacy rates. Los Angeles currently has the second-lowest literacy rate in the US, with funding consistently being redirected from libraries and English departments. In 2010 alone then-Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, cut millions from the arts and educational sectors, including $22 million from the library budget. What this meant was that of the “budget dollar” recreational opportunities received 4.2 cent, educational opportunities received 2.1 cent and arts and cultural opportunities received just 0.4 cent. The media outcry following such cuts made it evident that the people of Los Angeles wanted and appreciated their cultural heritage but often are left to their own devices when cultivating it. As McGavin later notes, in a sarcastic drawl: “Well if we don’t put it into the military, what are we supposed to do with it?”.
Addressing the poor literacy rates of Los Angeles is central to one of McGavin’s main activities, Get Lit, a non-profit organisation that seeks to remedy it through spoken word. Founded in 2006 by Diane Luby Lane, the organisation operates on the mantra “claim your poem, claim your life” and is a radical way of altering the life direction of Los Angeles’s youth through writing and performing. As McGavin explains it, its approach is also incredibly hands on and prolonged: “So what we’re doing is we go into public schools that don’t have good English departments or theatre departments, and we bring in classic poetry – that’s everything from Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, and also we had a bunch of Kendrick Lamar lyrics this year. Stuff that will actually interest the children and get them interested in reading and writing. So everyone picks a classic poem, they write a response poem to it, and then that’s what they slam with.” She emphasises that the slam element of slam poetry – the gesticulations, the typical cadence, the three minute time limit and the competitive aspect – is a “gimmick, a trick to get people out and into seats and into poetry circles” so in this sense it appeared as the perfect medium for accessing disadvantaged youths who, for one reason or another, felt that literature was a club for which they had no membership.
McGavin’s team was highly successful, winning second place in her freshman year of high school, and from there she was recruited into the Los Angeles slam team. It’s a mission she has continued to pursue with her involvement with Brave New Voices, an international slam festival showcasing outstanding poets from around the world, which also takes the awareness ethos a step further in carrying out community service in each city it visits. That the focus remains on young poets in the competition is essential, McGavin says, as that way “the emphasis isn’t so much on the composition, it’s more like education and awareness”.
Awareness is a key point. Even the most casual of searches across YouTube or Tumblr will offer up slam poems, dynamic in their social commentary and analysis. Free verse on anti-immigration laws, rape culture and police brutality are a dime a dozen, many made wholly unique by the poet’s own investment in the topic. McGavin states that any slam organisation worth its salt will have a social justice aspect, as coming within spitting distance of the anxieties of our time is central to the medium. “It’s interesting when people hold it to very high standards”, she says, “considering that slam poetry as I’ve known it is primarily working-class poets, women poets, poets of colour.” Given this, it comes as no surprise that slam poetry and spoken word have become important political tools in the US. It certainly seems as though in the months leading up to the presidential elections, through the promises of Mexican walls and doubts cast over the capability of a woman in power, more poems by immigrants and young feminists have sprung up. I ask McGavin if there is a direct correlation between the two or whether Buzzfeed and similar news sites are just honing in on them more: “I definitely think that slam poetry is having a massive renaissance right now because of the social unrest. Especially with teenagers, who are mad and confused, and art is a really great way to process that.”
Certainly one is in no short supply of genuinely angry poems, but McGavin’s own poetry shows that often it is the more subtle line that betrays the most. Take “Tree Verse” from her poem Post Winter, which she reads from at the Workman’s gig: a retelling of the Greek Persephone myth, she casts the tree as the helpless observer of the injustices done to the queen of the underworld. In a line that would almost pass you by, McGavin opens the canonical myth up to contemporary narratives of rape culture and victim blaming, as the tree laments: “Persephone, I am sorry, for all the people who saw you sleeping on the couch and left the party. They saw you at the gas station and kept driving. I’m sorry, for my own weak limbs. You shouldn’t be another read blot in my rings.” In this sense, McGavin is yet again worthy of note for how she manipulates her source material to be endlessly relevant to young listeners, despite reiterating an already well-mined trope.
When you see the meticulous parallels being drawn in such poems, it’s hard to understand how a literary connoisseur could genuinely loathe slam poetry. Sure, it’s louder and more obviously emotional but there is a core of sincerity that, regardless of whether or not the poet can rhyme in perfect couplets, arrests the ear as well as a specific skillset. “People don’t understand what a skill it is to convey what you mean in three minutes or less to an audience”, McGavin says. Since its establishment the medium has been an easy target for criticism, and when it isn’t being viciously lambasted by the litterati, it’s being written off as the hot new thing of 1987, of 1999, of 2014. McGavin doesn’t entertain such criticisms: “It’s always funny when people try to pass off spoken word as a fad, because I mean, talking has been around longer than written language, I think as English majors we can acknowledge that!”. She cites prominent slam poet, Mo Brown, who reasoned that if you hear a bad song once, you don’t write off music as a whole. It begs the question as to why slam poetry is always in the crosshairs.
It’s always funny when people try to pass off spoken word as a fad, because I mean, talking has been around longer than written language, I think as English majors we can acknowledge that!
One possible reason is the San Andreas Fault-like divide between canonical poetry and spoken word. Traditionally poetry would not engage with politics in a direct manner, instead obscuring it with analogy (Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Masque of Anarchy”) or extended metaphors (Derek Mahon’s “Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”). There was a suggestion that to face politics in any other way was beneath the high and mighty poets. That’s why we all loved Seamus Heaney so much. Another possible reason is the proliferation of young people who find and seize slam poetry as their medium, using it to lay bare raw emotions on the cusp of maturing. McGavin certainly agrees with the latter and for this reason vehemently defends America’s young poets. “Youth poetry is the most sincere of all because you haven’t had time to get jaded yet”, she says, torn between a laugh and a sigh. “Underage poets speaking sincerely or from personal experience on social issues, people just want to garner that for monetisation.” Certainly the young voices of the US are some of the most potent and crucial amidst the ongoing political and social unrest, but they’re also the most vulnerable. Being a young person’s medium it makes sense for slam poets to use sites like Tumblr and Twitter to their advantage, but it also leaves them open to a great deal of harm and abuse. McGavin notes that poets are no longer thinking of a local audience, but a global one, and the pressure of having to represent yourself as accurately as possible to such a diverse population can repel young people.
This becomes particularly problematic when the subject of trauma arises. Like all creative mediums, there’s a lot of potential for slam poetry to be cathartic, but often you’ll see increasingly younger poets aggrandising their issues and putting them on a global stage via the internet. “I think there’s a big problem in slam of exploiting your own traumas, like who has the most traumatic experiences, which isn’t healthy”, McGavin says, as we turn down a path towards one of the Botanic Gardens walled-off plots. “So I have very set levels for what I’m comfortable talking about in poems. There’s a level where it’s a poem, then a level where I’m talking about a general social issue, then a level where it’s just removed from me completely in a short story.” We stop at the replica Viking house, its structure reaching back like reeds through Ireland’s history. She pauses. “If you don’t feel better after writing the poem or after performing it then there’s something to reevaluate there.”
Throughout our interview, McGavin has alluded to instances in her past that are evidently traumatic. She doesn’t mention people or places in particular, but rather a time that she is, by all accounts, miles away from. I’m tempted to ask her for details, but it never feels like the right thing to do – walking with her through herb gardens and bloom-lined promenades and the lush Victorian greenhouse, it feels selfish to transport her back to a less-happy place when she’s so obviously luxuriating in Ireland’s greenness, wrapped in an equally green “sweater” bought for a pittance at the Dublin flea. As it is, this trauma has led her to founding a community of young girls and boys who look up to her for advice on recovery and making something good out of something bad. So I don’t ask and hope that the LA Teen Poet Laureate leaves as influenced by Ireland as she has influenced its slam-loving community.
