Review of Andrea Gibson's Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns

The following review was written by guest reviewer and 2010 Split This Rock panelist, Bob Blair.


The title of Andrea Gibson’s first nationally distributed poetry book, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns, suggests a radically unorthodox fusion of body and spirit -- a striptease to the tune of Amazing Grace, lyrical commentary on tawdry realities. The volume’s 26 poems deliver their provocative synthesis with panache.

For example, Gibson’s Katrina poem, entitled “Yarrow,” consists of an initial 27 lines about a trip to New Orleans, the pre-hurricane pleasures of the city’s music, food, and easy hospitality and a year spent gardening there. Then she pays off with these four devastating final lines:

when I heard of Katrina
I thought, “The flowers, save the flowers…”
I never thought for a second
We wouldn’t save the people.
Pole Dancing includes pieces Gibson has previously performed at various campuses and poetry slams and released on CDs. Written to be staged before live audiences, sometimes competitively, the book’s longer poems display slam poetry’s tight focus on the actor/poet’s persona and the rhetorical intensity necessary to hold and inspire a crowd. The poems -- mostly emotional personal narratives and barbed social commentary delivered in staccato rhythms -- blend anger, sarcasm and humor to build a tension (and audience interest) that drives toward each piece’s dramatic closing declaration. (“She’s not asking what you’re gonna tell your daughter./ She’s asking what you’re gonna teach/ your son.”)

That theatrical style, well suited to polemical oratory, can feel more natural to the stage than the page. But Pole Dancing’s clear, colloquial language, biting (and often bitter) wit, wild metaphors and engaging narratives ensure that Gibson’s work easily survives translation from CD and video to paperback.

Gibson, who calls herself a political and opinionated queer poet/activist bent on promoting social change through a cultural revolution, writes poetry that highlights her views on war, race relations, gender roles, faith and various species of bigotry and violence. What her poems forego in subtlety, they more than offset with their energy, directness and passion.

· On the Iraq war: “Somebody pray for the soldiers./ Somebody pray for what’s lost./Somebody pray for the mailbox/ that holds the official letters/ to the mothers, fathers,/ sisters and little brothers/ of Michael 19…Steven 21…John 33./ How ironic that their deaths sound like bible verses.” (“For Eli”)

· On mental health: “Doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there. / It’s that we ignore the ones who are./ ‘Til we find ourselves scarred and ashamed/ walking into emergency rooms at two am/ flooded with a pain we cannot name or explain,/ bleeding from the outside in.” (“When the Bough Breaks”)

· On family relations: “‘Cause I have been half a decade now/ falling slow from the hands of your letting go,/ crashing down upon the pages of our separation/ where you’ve written me into paragraphs of/ short-haired dirty-hippie man-hating queer./ And I wonder if you even remember my name.” (“Marble”)

Woven through the political and social commentary, and at the center of Gibson’s most powerful (and personal) poems, are Pole Dancing’s meta-themes: love and survival. For love (and its survival) is, arguably, the undersong of most of her rants/hymns. It’s what lasts when the anger dissipates and the pain dulls: Love’s sensuality and mystery, urgency and obstacles, loss and remembrance, a sometimes hopeless desire that never can quite be abandoned.

And if you forever choose to shred the blanket of our blood
with the knives that hold our differences
we will both forever sleep cold.
But I will never forget the perfect warmth of your soul.
Will never forget my mother knew
that fairies danced on basement walls
and her song
the way she sang it when she woke me
would take me to a place where feet could walk on ceilings
and feelings were always smarter things than thoughts. (“Marble”)

When your heart is broken you plant seeds in the cracks
and you pray for rain. And you teach your sons and daughters
there are sharks in the water
but the only way to survive
is to breathe deep
and dive. (“Dive”)

And what perhaps qualifies as the most surprising love song in the whole hymnal:

The Yoga Instructor

When the yoga instructor broke Natalie’s heart
she started hanging out at the Holocaust Museum
hoping to put her own pain in perspective.

On the phone I did not tell her
how I fell in love '
the day George Bush was elected President,

and how I fell asleep that night
wrapped in the sweetest peace
I had ever known.

Reduced to the printed page, Gibson’s work may lose the stage presence and vocal stylizing of her YouTube ouvre, but her voice is as strong as ever. Page poetry turns down the volume and freeze-frames her rhetorical fireworks in ways that allow the reader to notice the craft, savor the clever details: halos as handcuffs, bullet casings as seashells, tears strung like Christmas tree lights, and the human heart as a “Labrador Retriever/ with its head hung out the window of a car/ tongue flapping in the wind/ on a highway going 95.”

Pole Dancing is the sort of oral poetry that transforms tapestries of disaster into prayer rugs. It’s what you’d get if Sylvia Plath and Lenny Bruce had a love child that was adopted and raised by Audre Lorde: sad, bad, audacious, energetic, and wildly imaginative.


A review copy of Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns was provided by Write Bloody Publishing. You can read a preview of the book here. The book is available for purchase at Write Bloody Publishing for $15.00.

Andrea Gibson, a Boulder CO-based spoken word poet and four-time Denver Grand Slam Champion, is an independent artist and social activist who has self-released four CDs (Yellow Bird, When the Bough Breaks, Swarm, and Bullets and Windchimes). She won the 2008 Women of the World Poetry Slam and will be one of the featured poets at the Split This Rock 2010 Poetry Festival.

Bob Blair is an economist with a former English Lit major’s residual taste for modern and contemporary poetry which he satisfies by scavenging second-hand bookstores and facilitating weekly poetry workshops at Miriam’s Kitchen in Washington, DC.

Read other reviews of Split This Rock poets here.

Violence in a Scared Space: Reflections on The Shooting at the Holocaust Museum

Today's guest post is written by Joseph Ross, and has been adapted from JosephRoss.net. His bio follows.

If there are such things as sacred spaces, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is one of them. From the moment one enters, there sits an unusual quiet. To enter the museum’s galleries, you are given an identity card bearing the history of a person who entered one of the camps. You are ushered into an elevator, which echoes those of the camps. In various places, you walk through startlingly common things: a sea of shoes left by those killed in the camps, a train car which took Jews and others to the camps. You view actual concentration camp shirts marked with the yellow star, for Jews, the pink triangle, for gays, and various other emblems to distinguish the Nazi’s murderous categories.

My experience there is unlike that at any other museum. There often exists a kind of reverence. You touch the wood of a train car that once held so much suffering. You view actual shoes left by those going to the gas chambers. There is not the typical “tourist place” chatter. In moments like these, one is only left with silence.

Wednesday, there was a shooting in this very space. Of course, there are shootings everyday in America. People are killed daily in liquor stores, on street corners, in churches, mosques, and synagogues, even. While we rarely hear of murder in a museum, we cannot really be surprised.

A couple of years ago, I went to a lecture series at the Holocaust Museum, about the situation in Darfur. One warm summer evening during the lecture series, they showed slides on one of the outside walls of the Museum, all images from Darfur. It showed people’s faces mostly: the elderly, children, lots of smiles, some sorrows, kids playing games, all the human reality one would expect. A few of us stood on the sidewalk below and watched, transfixed. It was during this slide show, and prompted by the lectures, that I sought to give voice to some of what I learned. This resulted in a series of five poems called The Darfur Poems. Unconsciously, I found myself writing in the voice of one who washes and prepares dead bodies in a camp in Darfur. I was trying to find a way out of my own silence, in the face of suffering.

There is so much hatred in America, the world. There is so much misunderstanding and even at times, a deliberate desire not to understand others. There is also, of course, such easy and self-righteous access to guns that we can never be surprised by violence in this country. Not even violence in a place that seeks to say: “Never Again.”

Even we poets may be stunned to silence for a time. Yet we must work to give voice to the love that lives beneath our shocked silence. It is that voice which is truly sacred.

Joseph Ross is a poet whose work has appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetic Voices Without Borders 1 and 2, Come Together-Imagine Peace, Poet Lore, Beltway Poetry Quarterly and The Potomac Journal. He co-edited Cut Loose the Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture. He will be teaching in the College Writing Program at American University beginning in August 2009. His writing can be found at JosephRoss.net.