Interview with spoken-word poet lisa b.

So far I’ve only met lisa b in cyberspace, and through her incredibly insightful and provoking written word. Queer poet performer from Victoria, B.C., lisa has been touring the country and landed in our humble town. lisa will perform at Trash’n’Ready this coming Friday (watch for posters!), and she will also perform two sets at Grassroots on Monday, March 14 at 8pm. Tickets are 5 dollars or pay what you can, and the mic will open up for budding MCs later in the evening.

How do you describe what you do?
I dismiss the internal censor and write stream of consciousness and then I edit it and memorize it and spout it through a microphone. Recently, I made a recording of my spouts with some musicians’ accompanying contributions.
Green tea and a nice pen facilitate this process.

I’m really impressed by the sheer number of poems you’ve written and compiled into chapbooks. Tell me about the process of putting together and distributing your words.
I’ve spent the last three summers in isolation from late April to late August in a fire lookout in northern Alberta. They fly in food and mail once a month. I write a lot of poetry out there. In the fall, I return to the city, type out the poems I’ve written in the last year, and - with the help of my partner and computer graphics design tech whiz, wyndi palmer, I lay these poems into Adobe Pagemaker, burn it onto a disk and take it down to Monk’s Office Supplies for printing. I sell these chapbooks at conferences and at shows and I mail them to folks I want to make friends with.

You wrote that poetry is “the most potent healing tool I’ve ever encountered. . . to speak healing truth is a subversive act . . .” Can you talk a bit more about that?
Writing and performing as a queer woman, as an incest and violence survivor, as someone pissed off and alarmed about the threat posed to all living things by the military industrial complex, mcdonalds and monsanto, means that I write and perform with a voice suppressed by what we tend to refer to as mainstream culture. I write and perform about all the things that nice girls aren’t supposed to talk about. Writing my experience has transformed my shame and pain into strength. And performing it for other people has created more space and safety for others’ healing. Spoken word implies an audience - listeners, which implies people gathered together for a cause, and the possibility of community building. And communal healing is a very subversive thing; no one’s making any money off that.

What poets/musicians/people inspire your work?
Alix Olson, T.L. Cowan, Tanya Evanson, Kinnie Starr, Evalyn Parry, Ani Difranco, Robin Akimbo, Tanya D, Utah Phillips, there are so many, these are only a few.

What does it mean to be a performer within the queer community?
To me, being a performer within the queer community means a responsibility to be out and loud and proud, to celebrate our community. It also means a responsibility to do some of the less pleasant work of building healthy communities.To me, it means addressing queer-on-queer violence: women beat other women, and women control other women too. It means recognizing and challenging sexism within our communities; it’s especially important to me to discuss changing power dynamics between ftms [female-to-male trans people] on testosterone and their girlfriends.To me, it means addressing the issue of addictions within our communities; we’ve got big problems there and I don’t think that it’s due to sickness or weakness - I think it’s about being oppressed and sometimes depressed, and if we don’t talk about it, it continues to hurt us.
It means supporting one another, licking each others’ wounds. And it means having fun I believe that our communities burst with talent and innovation. It’s the biggest reason I’m glad to be queer. It means sharing chapbooks from across the country, promoting each others’ art, creating events so creative and energizing, safe, sexy, and fun that we go home confident and satisfied and prouder than we were before.

How has your tour been going so far? What are some of the challenges and rewards you’ve found?
The tour so far has been exhilarating, exhausting, and a steep steep learning curve. I just did my first two combo shows with T.L. Cowan and that was even better than I’d hoped; she was incredibly inspiring to share a stage with(check out her compilation CD of Vancouver women in spoken word).

Ziysah