Spoken Songs
POETRY + SPOKEN SONGS
“Linda Black is percussion and wind. She is a performer who can combine, in one poem, fairytale images of moons and stars, then two stanzas later bang the drum with the harsh nitty-gritty of violence and abuse.”
– Martha’s Vineyard Times
Performance Highlights
For a period of about fifteen years from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s, I was performing a lot. In Canada and the US. I was the featured poet at the 25th Mardi Gras Poetry Extravaganza at the legendary Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans in February of 2000, and that same month, the featured poet at the venerable Cantab Lounge in Boston. I was the featured poet at the Canadian Poetry Association’s Annual Shaunt Basmajian Poetry Night in Toronto in 2002. I opened for author Richard North Patterson in March of 2004, and for Dr. John Francis on his Planet Walker Tour in May of 2005. Both of those events were held at the Old Whaling Church on Martha’s Vineyard.
Memorable Moments
Arlo Guthrie: I performed at Nectarfest, a music festival that took place simultaneously on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket in the summer of 1998. My slot was between Bob Weir and Arlo Guthrie! I was already nervous about performing in front of such a large crowd, but knowing that I would be sandwiched between those two legends really got my endorphins fired up. I performed The Revolution, which would end up as the title poem on the CD I would later record. When I got off stage, Arlo was sitting on a lawn chair, tuning his guitar. He looked up at me and said, in his famous slow drawl, “I liked your words.”
Dr. Howard Zinn: I opened for one of my heroes, Dr. Howard Zinn, at the Old Whaling Church on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 2003. When I stepped down off the stage, Dr. Zinn took both of my hands in his and just held them for a moment. He didn’t say anything, just sort of nodded and held eye contact with me. Like we were on the same page. I felt like I had been touched by an angel. Seriously, it was profoundly moving.
“Linda, brilliant! We really got them thinking! I don’t know how you created that wonderful, musical poem from all of those papers and reports!”
– Inge Kaul, United Nations Development Programme
UN General Assembly: My contract with the United Nations Development Programme ended in January of 1999. A few months later, I got a call from Inge Kaul, who was the director of the UNDP at that time. She said she wanted to fly me to New York from Martha’s Vineyard to perform Faith (the poem I had written for the Global Meeting of Generations) as part of her report on the conference. My flight was late. Inge was waiting outside of the United Nations Secretariat building on First Avenue. She ushered me into the building, handed my one small suitcase to an assistant, and told me “we have to go right in.” I followed her through the maze of hallways and two security checkpoints, until we came to a set of doors. “Ready?” she asked. “Sure,” I said. She pushed open one of the doors, and there we were, at a UN General Assembly, in session. I gasped! But then I pulled myself together. She was called within about ten minutes of us taking our seats. And just a few minutes in, she introduced me, and I stood up and performed Faith. It was quite an experience, watching all of the translators leaning into their microphones, translating my words into a dozen or more languages! After the session concluded, Inge said, “you looked so surprised. Didn’t I tell you you’d be performing here?” “Uh, no,” I said, “you just said it would be part of your report, you didn’t specify to whom, or where!”
Robert Munsch: I opened for the children’s author Robert Munsch at a festival in Guelph, Ontario in 1996. I had written a children’s play called Terrabloom, and would be performing a couple of hip-hop poems by two of the characters, Frank the Fish and Boris the Monkey. In the days before the festival, I was walking around the house practicing, reciting the poems out loud as I did housework, made dinner, whatever. My daughter, who was three years old at the time, came to the reading. She sat in the front row, with my friend Lisa. The stage was set up with multiple microphones, some with the stands lowered to accommodate performers who would be playing musical instruments. When I was called to perform, I walked to center stage and stood at the main microphone. I launched into the first poem, Frankly I’m a Freshwater Fish. “Who am I? I’m Frank / I’m just another fish on a bank / I’m a fish outta water / like a fish never oughta be…” My daughter jumped off her chair, and ran up to the edge of the stage. Someone lifted her onto it. She went to one of the guitar mics and started reciting right along with me. “But you see / this river’s so polluted / I’m a convoluted mess / I’m toxic waste / Wanna taste?” She knew the whole thing by heart! She had learned it, just by listening to me when I was practicing at home. At the start of the second poem, in the voice of Boris the Monkey, I stopped speaking, and just let her go with it. “My name it is Boris / and I live in the rainforest / I swing by my tail / and I never fail / to catch the next branch / I can always take a chance / I’m a monkey, ee ee / I’m a monkey, oo oo.” She got a standing ovation! And when Robert came onto the stage, he joked about not wanting to be up there after that show-stopping performance.
