I'll bet you all have questions.
[LAUGHTER]
And we have time for a few.
So if you want to raise your hand,
I will come to you with this microphone
and you can ask a question of both Craig and Yona.
They've both been very generous to offer their answers.
So first question.
This question is for Craig.
I had the pleasure of living on the Big Island for a while
and one of the delicacies there was spam musubi.
I got a song about that too.
Is that also on Oahu?
Yeah.
So for those who don't know spam musubi
is basically a piece of fried spam put on top of sushi rice
and then wrapped in the seaweed, the nori.
And then sometimes there's like teriyaki.
I actually do have--
it's delicious.
It's amazing.
And the kids, it's like a big lunchtime,
kids pack it in their lunchboxes for school.
It's a big food you see a lot in like plantations or whatever.
But it's still very popular.
There's a group on Oahu that set the record for the largest spam
musubi and they made it during this food festival
called Spam Jam in Waikiki.
This is the largest festival in Hawaii.
Thanks for your comment.
So I remember when you came to our class
and I looked at you and I said, "intentions?"
with a lot of question marks, same question.
Intentions with what you read today?
Sure.
So besides being a poet, I'm also an activist.
I'm trying to get involved in the food movement
and thinking about how poetry can
help decolonize our diet, yeah.
I also have an audio album of poetry,
it's called Undercurrent.
You could download it on your iTunes
it's $9.99 for the album, $0.99 a poem.
Anyways I'm working on the new album
is called Ruined Appetites.
So basically I want to ruin people's appetites.
That's my intention.
I want you every time you are about to open that kind
of spam, think about me.
And when you're about to eat some Vienna sausage,
think about Tyler.
This is a question for both Craig and Yona.
You both have beautiful styles of performance
that I think also other poets might want to emulate
but might be intimidated or not confident enough to pursue.
So for those in the audience who may,
I'm sure having listened to you, they're
like, I wish I could do that.
Could you two say a little bit about how
your style of performing your poems has evolved
and how you developed your idea of what you want to say
and also how you want to say it.
That's a great question.
My reading style developed over time.
And part of it was that it came out of, I don't know,
what I felt was this prejudice against what
people call performance poetry or slam poetry, sometimes.
That there had to be this huge distance between poetry
for the page and poetry that was supposedly performed.
And I think it's all a performance anyway even
the elbow patches on the blazer type of reading.
So I was just working through that question
over a long period of time and then
I also was influenced by Thomas Sayers Ellis and Tracie Morris,
more specifically, just thinking about the ways
that they read their work.
And I had to grow into it to become more confident about it.
But that's it.
Short version.
I should probably say I'm not always like this.
The rest of my book is very different.
But for those few poems, I think food
is something that we should celebrate
and that we should have fun with.
And so I tried to write those poems
and I tried to perform those poems in a way that's fun.
My dad always says too, if you're eating Vienna sausage
alone, you're doing it wrong.
Partly because food practices in the Pacific
are always communal.
They're meant to bring people together.
So usually I have my poetry entourage,
we're called Ruined Appetites, that's our band name.
But obviously I couldn't bring them
all here so I'm grateful for the volunteers and just
to find fun ways to get the audience involved.
In Hawaii, in the Pacific too there's
a lot of multimedia performances.
So there are poets who may also be hula dancers
or they're chanters who collaborate with musicians
and so on.
So I obviously can't sing.
Usually my wife is the one who does the singing for our songs.
And so just trying to find a fun way where,
you do something different, try to see what happens,
doesn't have to be perfect.
You don't have to be a great singer or a great performer.
Just have to have fun, I think.
Well, thank you both so much and thank you everyone for coming.
I would bet, nod your agreement or shake your head, no,
but I'll bet that they would be willing to continue question
and answer period informally.
I know for a fact that Kurt and Mark would
love to sell you a book and feel free to come up for a signing
and we'll see you all next time.
Thank you.