Pages ’n’ stages Walking and talking with Regie Gisbon BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Making a living from poetry has never been easy, but if you use the written word on stage, as performance poet Regie Gibson does, and if you’re intent on teaching both adults and children about poetry and myth, as Gibson also does, then you can support your family even as you build a life around the sounds and sights that language creates. Gibson brings his full-length show called "Blues-Rituals and Funk-Myths" to the Carriage House this Saturday, May 29, with guest musicians Akili Jamal Haynes and Amadou Lamine Toure. (He will also appear as the featured artist at the Carriage House’s monthly Re-Verse performance series, Friday, May 28.)

The show will include original, ancient, and contemporary poems as well as some re-envisioned works by Shakespeare and Pablo Neruda, with an emphasis on blues, funk, jazz, and "sounds the English language has no names for," according to Gibson. In a 2002 Re-Verse performance by Gibson of "The Word," those sounds included the groans of being violated, the moans of giving birth, and the wail of being born, all woven together into a gut-punching poem.

Gibson, 36, grew up in Chicago, working as an auto mechanic and a security guard for the Federal Reserve before going to poetry full-time. The 1998 National Poetry Slam Individual Champion, he’s taught and performed in seven countries, and his work and life appear in the film love jones. His first book of poems, Storms Beneath the Skin, was published in 2001, and he’s currently at work on a performance CD. He spoke from his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and three-year-old son.

Q: How did you get started as a poet?

A: I always wrote since I was a kid. My mother was a Jehovah’s Witness and my father was a police officer, so I often say that I wrote to deal with that situation. I started doing more of the performance stuff about ’91-’92 at a jazz club in Chicago called Spices. But I always had an understanding of the difference between the page aesthetic and the performance aesthetic.

Q: What is the distinction?

A: There are things you can get away with in performance that you can’t on the page and vice versa. Performance has all the advantages of conversation: emphasis, inflection, hand gestures to help drive a point home — it’s a very visceral reaction. On the page, you have to do that with spacing, punctuation, sometimes with a total remaking of the metaphor. There are some versions of poems that are different in the air than they are on the page. To try to make the point as strong in both media, they had to go through a transformation.

On the page, it allows you to luxuriate more in the poem itself; in the air, it allows you to experience it, and the people who are listening experience it as a group. So sometimes the group dynamic will make it come out different. The way I may perform if I have 50 people is different than the way I’d perform it for 350 people. But when reading it, the audience is just one person. For those of us who are interested in both the page and the stage, working both aesthetics is a constant job, to not let one slip for the glory of the other. I’ve always had one foot in the academic straight reading world and the other in the performance world. Since these worlds believe themselves to be mutually exclusive, that sometimes makes it difficult to walk.

Q: What kinds of things strike you to write about?

A: Artists are moved by those few things — birth, life, death, love — when those things show themselves in particular situations. All of us have a handful of subjects, like the handful of plots in novels. As I’ve gotten older, there are other things, such as what it is to be a father, and also there are now a significant amount of memories and experiences. I’m noticing the themes that keep playing themselves over and over in my life. I feel like there’s less pretension. As you get older, you become more comfortable with your flaws — they define you. I’m not inflicting them on other people, but I’m being self-effacing. I like to make fun of me.

Q: What traditions do you feel that your performance and your poetry draw from?

A: I’ve spent time in Germany, France, Cuba; I’ve been consecrated in Santeria and the Yoruba religion. My studies concentrated in world myths, the commonality of myths. I trace this interest back to being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. They didn’t encourage you to go out and explore, but they study world religions — of course, always with that twist at the end that they’re wrong. What happened to me as a young man and teenager was that I saw a lot of similarities in the different religions and that brought me to myth and to a Jungian understanding of psychology.

Q: Do you still compete in slams?

A: I do mostly showcase or exhibition stuff to show people how it’s done. I’m very supportive of the institution itself. Although there are some things I loathe, I think it does more good than harm. It is the democratization of art. I think it gives people a way to express themselves through poetry without understanding what poetry is.

Q: What do you think is the role of poetry in people’s lives?

A: In Western culture, particularly America, I think our institutions turned people off to poetry in the early part of the 20th century. But poetry comes in these sporadic waves of popularity. It usually tends to peak after traumatic events, because everyone retreats to language. Poetry is a way for people to say more than one thing. We’re never feeling just one thing at any one time, and metaphor allows us to address those complexities. It brings us together. When I say "tree," — for a brief moment, we’re brought together thinking of that. Poetry allows us to express those experiences on several levels. If I write down "I’m pissed," it’s one thing. But if I say, "I’m a tornado standing still," we get what that means in a different way, that I’m ready to sweep someone up in those winds.

Human beings are not that complicated, but they are complex. They have many selves to figure out and you never know which self you’re dealing with today. Poetry helps us to decipher that. It’s one of our oldest and most intense dialogues with ourselves. I think America needs that. But for the most part, we’re a nation of immigrants. Most of our ancestors came to make a profit or were brought here to make a profit for someone else. American culture revolves around the need to attain, to amass. Poetry and art let us know that there are other things we share in common.