~ social media ~
#BlackPoetsSpeakOut: poetry video as a tool for online activism
News coverage of the nationwide response to the grand jury’s decision in Ferguson, Missouri this week has focused on the protests in the streets, but reaction online has been just as intense. This is nowhere more visible than on Twitter, where hashtags such as #FergusonDecision and #BlackLivesMatter have been trending all week, shared by white and black users alike. One slightly less visible hashtag, #BlackPoetsSpeakOut, is continuing to gather steam, and really shows how people can mobilize on social media and online video hosting sites to share topical poetry and raise consciousness. According to the blog Cultural Front, it began with a group of Cave Canem poets on Facebook.
In solidarity with the movements to address racial injustices related to police brutality, including the killing of Michael Brown, poets have been reading poems online under the hashtag #BlackPoetsSpeakOut.
The project came about from a brainstorming session between Amanda Johnston, Mahogany “Mo” Browne, Jonterri Gadson, Jericho Brown, Sherina Rodriguez, & Maya Washington on a Cave Canem Facebook group. Together, they developed a posting strategy.
The readings open with the statement “I am a black poet who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry.”
Click through for Cultural Front’s selection of links to some of the pieces.
It’s interesting to see Facebook (where some of the videos are also hosted), YouTube, and Twitter all being used in concert. Twitter has long had a high adoption rate among African Americans — so much so that “Black Twitter” has become a unique sociopolitical phenomenon.
Black Twitter is a cultural identity on the Twitter social network focused on issues of interest to the black community, particularly in the United States. Feminista Jones described it in Salon as “a collective of active, primarily African-American Twitter users who have created a virtual community … [and are] proving adept at bringing about a wide range of sociopolitical changes.” […]
According to a 2013 report by the Pew Research Center, 26 percent of African Americans who use the Internet use Twitter, compared to 14 percent of online white, non-Hispanic Americans. In addition, 11 percent of African American Twitter users say they use Twitter at least once a day, compared to 3 percent of white users.
It’s perhaps not surprising that Black Twitter would rally around a campaign to share poetry, given the value placed on the adroit use of language. Quoting again from the Wikipedia article:
Several writers see Black Twitter interaction as a form of signifyin’, wordplay involving tropes such as irony and hyperbole. André Brock states that the Black Tweeter is the signifier, while the hashtag is signifier, sign and signified, “marking … the concept to be signified, the cultural context within which the tweet should be understood, and the ‘call’ awaiting a response.” He writes: “Tweet-as-signifyin’, then, can be understood as a discursive, public performance of Black identity.”
Sarah Florini of UW-Madison also interprets Black Twitter within the context of signifyin’. She writes that race is normally “deeply tied to corporeal signifiers”; in the absence of the body, black users display their racial identities through wordplay and other language that shows knowledge of black culture. Black Twitter has become an important platform for this performance.
(Click through for more, including links and footnotes.)
For maximum viewing convenience, here’s a YouTube playlist. You can also search Facebook and Tumblr. (Decentralized movements are the best kind, but they can be challenging to keep up with!)
“Speke, Parrot”: Poetry video in Middle English goes viral (sort of)
I first saw this due to a link from Chaucer Doth Tweet on Wednesday. Apparently I was far from alone. BBC News (or to be specific, #BBCtrending) calls it “The 500-year-old poem that captivated Reddit.”
A complex political satire written almost 500 years ago doesn’t seem like an obvious candidate for viral success, but its unusual pronunciation has struck a chord online.
The poem, called Speke, Parrot, was written in the sixteenth century by an Englishman named John Skelton. A group of students at a Dutch university set the poem to pictures and asked their professor to read it aloud, pronouncing the words as closely as possible as to the original Middle English. It’s almost unintelligible to the untrained ear, but that seems to have been the key to its popularity.
The students uploaded the video to YouTube on Tuesday. Their friend posted a link to the history sub-forum on Reddit – a popular online discussion board – where it took on a life of its own. It has quickly become one of the highest rated posts of all time in that category, with more than 2,000 “upvotes”. The video has now been viewed more than 110,000 views on YouTube.
“I was quite surprised myself,” says Sebastian Sobecki, professor of Medieval English at the University of Groningen, who voiced the short film. He tells BBC Trending that in the poem Skelton – tutor to English King Henry VIII – satirises a new breed of courtiers, eager to impress King Henry and his policy makers with their fashionable opinions, and language skills newly acquired overseas. That’s why he refers to them as “parrots”; you could call them the hipsters of their day.
The conversation on Reddit homes in on the way the poem is pronounced, rather than its political meaning. “It sounds like a medley of Scottish, Dutch, German and English to me,” wrote one. “To me it sounds like the Spanish Ambassador from Blackadder,” said another.
“They’re exclusively focused on how we know what Middle English sounded like,” notes Sobecki, who says a huge body of research makes it possible to recreate the sounds with relative accuracy. “It seems that there are a lot of people outside academia who take an interest in that, and that’s big news to me.”
(Yes, I just repeated the entire article, techno-parrot that I am.) The video is now up to nearly 130,000 views — keeping in mind that YouTube counts every time someone started playing the video as a view, regardless of whether they finished watching. Still, for less than a week, that’s extremely impressive, and suggests to me that contemporary poets and poetry-filmmakers shouldn’t worry about a poem being too weird or obscure to capture the public imagination.
The article refers to this as a viral video, but it’s worth asking whether any poetry video can truly be said to have gone viral yet. According to a Wikipedia article on viral videos,
There isn’t exactly a set rule for how many “views” constitute a video “going viral”. In a recent blog post, YouTube personality Kevin Nalty, aka Nalts, asks the question “How many views do you need to be viral?” In 2011 he said, “A few years ago, a video could be considered “viral” if it hit a million views.” But Nalts updated that definition. He said, “A video, I submit, is “viral” if it gets more than 5 million views in a 3-7 day period.”
Don’t miss a post
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy