Andrea Gibson

I was too old for poetry slams to be an important part of my life when they hit the scene. They finally became a big enough phenomenon that they made it into my attention around the time I was busy having a baby and then raising a child while working, with all that entails. I went to a few, and liked them, but I had a lot going on.

Performance poetry is not exactly the same thing as slam poetry, I gather, providing both an umbrella term and a less confining set of attributes. It preexisted slams, and runs alongside them now. Poetry readings are performance poetry, in a sense, but I assume the implication is that they're more reading and less... performance.

(At this point I pause and say: I'm writing about a topic I know little about because I want to share something I liked, which I can tell exists in a context. Thus I'm blundering into that context. Be warned.)

All this to say, I just learned about the poet, performance poet, or slam poet Andrea Gibson, and then discovered their recent Tiny Desk Concert. It's called MAGA HAT IN THE CHEMO ROOM.

Andrea wrote this about the poem on the YouTube post:

I wrote this piece at the end of treatment last year. Though there's a lot of humor in the poem, it speaks to the many emotions that surfaced while watching people with wildly different politics than my own navigate illness and mortality in the chairs right beside me. Thank you for watching, everyone. (All identifying details in the poem have been altered to respect the privacy of fellow patients.)

I cry too much and not enough about the state of things these days.

This is 7 minutes of worth it:

This is Andrea's official website.

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Thanks to Leigh Finke for pointing me to Andrea, and for all of the work.