Larry Jaffe

Adam Stone is a poet and recovering student, formerly from Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  His great poetry adventure started in 1997 when a public speaking professor, Phyllis Lee, at Cape Cod Community College convinced him to compete in a Forensic Speaking Tournament.  Four months later he was recognized by the National Forensic Speaking Association as the #1 interpreter of poetry in New England.  When, the following fall, someone told him he could perform his own poetry in similar competitions called “slams,” he was hooked.

     Adam went to his first Poetry Slam Nationals in Chicago in 1999, as a member of the Cape Cod team; and then to Providence as a member of the 2000 Boston Slam Team.  Adam has been described as a “twenty-three year old wonderbard” (Kim Jordan), and “what Dr. Seuss would sound like if he wrote for adults—if he were lucky” (Jack McCarthy).  He is the former cohost of The Daily Grind Poetry Series in Bridgewater, MA and the 2000 Spoken Word Poet Laureate of Cape Cod.

     These days Adam can be found at the People's Republic of Vermont Slams in Burlington, VT.  He has two chapbooks out, Thoughts Not Necessarily on Writing and Staying on the Right Side of the Breakdown Lane.  In his alarmingly large spare time, Adam edits a quarterly literary journal called Son of Words.  He promises his family he’ll get a real job again, soon.

Visit Adam’s “temporary” website.
 

Samples of the poet’s work:

 
Someone Said
 

Someone said poetry was art
Like storytelling, conversation, or flirting
And it poured forth from their soul
Because to them, the message was more important than the mode
Until

Someone said poetry was art
Like music
So they gave it a beat
Arranged their thoughts by vowel sounds and consonance
They sang it to their loves
They sang it to the streets
They sang it to their kings
Until some king or some queen or some scholar or

Someone said poetry was art
Like logic, or literature
And they shackled it into categories:
Rhetoric/Romance/Mystery
Modernism/Post Modernism/Cubism
Cuban Verse/Free Verse/Blank Verse
Sestinas/Sonnets/Raps or Hymns
Until

Someone said poetry was art
Like paintings or sculptures
And they hung it next to their Norman Rockwells
Friends, passing the poem on the way to the television room
Were forced to either comment on its “depth”
Or else dismiss them completely
Until, in passing

Someone said poetry was not art
But math
A finite set of answers to a given question
Few variables
Each simile assimilated into psychological profile

Because poetry was neither art nor math
But science
An alkaline measurement of a person's sanity
Less expensive than a doctor
More damaging than medication
Poetry had become a type of therapy
Like boxing or counting down from ten
Or art
I seem to remember

Someone said poetry was art
And they lifted it with their tongues
To the ears of those who would not look at it on paper
They enhanced the text with tone and texture
They taught it to their children
They sang it in their showers
But they dared not bring it out in public alone
For fear of embarrassment or opinions

Until someone said that poetry was art
Like dancing or drama
So they shouted it from street corners
Brought it to their museums, their coffeehouses, their bars
They commented on it
Compared it, contrasted it, comprehended it, competed with it
And they called these competitions “Slams”
Until one day

Someone slamming said poetry was art
At a price
Peace, souls, and entirely too much free time
To limit their thoughts to three minute time intervals
Someone didn't want to be known as a slam poet
Or a SPOKEN WORD PO-ET
Or a scholarly written poet
Someone just wanted to be known as a poet
Because somehow somewhere they'd heard that

Someone said poetry was art
Like thinking, living or breathing
And to be limited to either page or voice
Would be like being given the choice between inhaling—
Or exhaling
Sure

Someone said that poetry was art
But nobody bought it
 

 
Mangel-Wurzel

February: The never-ending twenty-eight days.
The month for leaving lovers and patient bones behind
and running with the flesh and melting snow.
February: The perfect crime.
               —Tom Robbins, from Jitterbug Perfume

I left saraH on Valentine’s Day.
Dumped her without even telling her she’d been dumped.
As a gift, I’d given her a stuffed bear.
The bear was purple,
the color of a common European beet
known as the Mangel-Wurzel.
A vegetable believed to assist the eater of it
in achieving immortality.
I named the bear for the beet.
Mangel-Wurzel held in his hands his own, unbeating heart,
which read: “Available.”
Because now, saraH was.

Word got back to me
that saraH was as oblivious to the meaning behind “Available”
as she was to the origin of “Mangel-Wurzel.”
When she did find out,
we did not speak for an entire February of Februarys.

When we finally did speak,
saraH told me in a whisper that she had
“cut the heart off of Mangel-Wurzel”
because she had found it in “poor taste.”
From this
I gathered that she had never placed the heart to her tongue,
for any Fannie Farmer or Russel Stover will tell you
that the heart tastes like chocolate.
Why do you think they shape the box that way?

“Besides,” I told her, “Good taste is subjective.
A great proverb begins ‘Good taste is death.’”
saraH told me to fuck off,
which completes the proverb
for ‘Good taste is death and vulgarity is life.’

saraH fell into shadow after that,
not appearing to me in daylight for three years.
And then, in the shadow of a candle flicker flame:
a 3 am phone call.
Would I come out and visit her
as a friend?
I accepted
as a friend.

But her presence grew into the immeasurable void of an inverse inferno
the moment I stepped off the plane.
“Read this!” she cheerfully commanded,
shoving a handwritten book of poetry before my eyes.

It was February again,
and this valentine’s Day,  saraH was convinced that I’d be hers.
But three years is a long time
to fan a flame that never burned bright enough to fill my heart.
The verse cried, “I love you more than words can say.”
I cried, “Foul!”
And saraH cried as she burned the book
and flushed its ashes down the Madison sewer.

I sat silent
as she emerged from the bathroom
that had served as her words’ crematorium.

We did not speak for an entire February of Februarys;
our bones calcifying into stone,
our faces flushed the color of the, now heartless,
Mangel-Wurzel.
 

 
Son Of Words
 

I am a knot in the branch of my family tree;
the bastard son of a bastard father
who attacked my mother with a blade and a gun
and filled my embryonic mind so full that I dreamed
fierce and vivid enough to bleed these roots red
and grow up blind to the ambivalence of aggression.

I am the missing face
in my real mother’s false family photographs;
the never mentioned,
(never forgotten)
number one son,
the airbrushed face in her nightmares,
the hushed “Nothing” when someone asks what’s wrong.

I am the what-might-have-been,
passed into the hands of strangers who deal in strange babies.

I am the second hand that ceased my adopted family’s smoking;
the little white liar who turned my mother’s thoughts
from mortality to morality
with the push of a pen and a twist of twisted truth.

I am the needle that drained the Catholic from my father’s blood;
the private, secular child, chosen
when the Catholic Church turned it’s back
on a formerly faithful altar boy.
I am the needle
that turned my father’s Christmas Tree into a common fir.

I am the lost gospel of a forgotten faith;
what Job might have been thinking had God and Satan been gambling on a neighbor’s soul instead.

I am the Hindu widow before the pyre;
reincarnated in the form of a cat
leaping from peak to peak without falling because he’s afraid
that the adage about landing on feet may not be true.

I am not the son of fate.

I am the lone-wolf,
packless hiker
trailing off to the sidelined,
jocular editorial commentary
to whatever deity will give me their time,
consumed
by my eternal internal quest to find out who the hell I am.

Am I the bastard my father made me?
Nothing more than a bullet from his fully cocked gun?
A random strand of genetic destiny?
Or was I molded by my adopted family’s hands?
Or am I an orphaned nomad cursed to question
every thought, every act, every decision placed in front of me
by God or Shiva or Allah or some author?  No.
I am not the sun this planet revolves around.
I am not the son of fate,
not the son of faith,
not the son of God,
not the son of man,
not the son of that monster,
not the son of his gun,
I am not that son of a bitch.
But I am a son

of words.
 

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