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    Viral
    Viral
    Viral
    Ebook87 pages50 minutes

    Viral

    By Button Poetry

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    "I hear people talk about the dimming prospects of making a living as a poet, about the small and insular readership we can expect, about how poetry is dead. I think somebody forgot to tell the poets." -Michael Mlekoday

    In 2013, the following poems topped 200,000 views on the Button Poetry YouTube: Lily Myers’ “Shrinking Women”, Neil Hilborn’s “OCD” & “Mating Habits of the North American Hipster”, Javon Johnson’s “cuz he’s black”, Rachel Rostad’s “To JK Rowling, From Cho Chang”, Dylan Garity’s “Rigged Game” & “Friend Zone”, Guante’s “Ten Responses to the Phrase ‘Man Up’ ”, and Pages Matam’s “Piñata”.

    VIRAL contains all nine of these poems PLUS new, original work from each author. This anthology of poems and essays is a forceful argument for the continuing cultural relevance of poetry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherButton Poetry
    Release dateDec 16, 2013
    ISBN9780989641517
    Viral
    Author

    Button Poetry

    MissionButton Poetry is committed to developing a coherent and effective system of production, distribution, promotion and fundraising for performance poetry.VisionWe seek to showcase the power and diversity of voices in our community. By encouraging and broadcasting the best and brightest performance poets of today, we hope to broaden poetry’s audience, to expand its reach and develop a greater level of cultural appreciation for the art form.What we actually doButton produces and distributes poetry media, including: video from local and national events, chapbooks, collaborative audio recordings, scholarship and criticism, and many other products.

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Spectacular. Powerful pieces of slam style poetry that went “viral” & responses from the authors with the impact of time & increased perspectives; there are also antidotes on the future of the art form itself & modern representations of it. The writing hit hard and works to make you think about the “norms” surrounding some of our cultural issues & although this was published back in 2013 these voices are just as important now. I highly recommend.
    • 5/5
      I can't believe how much this connected with me. You do no need to have been in any of the situations, but you feel them! Something to read, something to share with others. Awesome compilation!

    Book preview

    Viral - Button Poetry

    Viral

    poems

    Button Poetry | Minneapolis

    2013

    Viral

    Javon Johnson, Dylan Garity, Neil Hilborn, Rachel Rostad, Kyle Guante Tran Myhre, Pages Matam, Lily Myers

    Smashwords Edition

    Copyright © 2013 by Button Poetry

    Published by Button Poetry, Minneapolis, MN, 55408

    http://buttonpoetry.com

    All Rights Reserve

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    ISBN 978-0-9896415-1-7

    Table of Contents

    Foreword

    1- JavonJohnson

    Cuz He's Black

    Cuz (S)He's Black Too Sometimes Queer

    2- Dylan Garity

    Friend Zone

    Rigged Game

    On Balance

    3- Neil Hilborn

    OCD

    The Mating Habits of the North American Hipster

    The News Anchor Is Crying

    4- Rachel Rostad

    To J.K. Rowling, from Cho Chang

    Media Matters: a Lecture Delivered at UC San Diego, November 2013

    5- Kyle Guante Tran Myhre

    Ten Responses to the Phrase Man Up

    Both Sides of the Is Poetry Dead? Debate Miss the Big Picture

    6- Pages Matam

    Piñatas

    To the men/people on the bus

    7- Lily Myers

    Shrinking Women

    Letters to Ourselves

    Notes

    Foreword

    I had the pleasure of being in a car with Neil Hilborn on a two-day road trip this past August when his poem, OCD, went viral. We were, as we’d done many times before—together and separately—driving across the country to recite and listen to poems.

    Having grown up working class, I was never really one for vacations; my mother and I would go up to the lake some summer weekends and sleep in Grandpa’s trailer, but that was about it. And now I’ve been to something like 30 states of this beautiful country—I dream, now, of living in a mountain town of West Virginia and looking out at the jagged cityscape just before dusk, for example, and I recall exactly how delicious my first Philly cheesesteak was after fasting a whole day and performing poems during Lent, and I’ve spent a hundred-degree afternoon in a broke down Greyhound bus in a parking lot in Missouri on my way to Austin, Texas, where I’d arrive half a day late and without all my underwear and notebooks which were lost in transit—and all this because of poetry. I’m cosmopolitan, now, which, as I understand it, is a fancy way of saying I’m fancy.

    I hear people talk about the dimming prospects of making a living as a poet, about the small and insular readership we can expect, about how poetry is dead. I think somebody forgot to tell the poets.

    In 2013—a year that saw article after article offering autopsies of some small, misshapen thing the author called poetry—the poets gathered in this anthology earned nearly 12 million views on YouTube collectively. 12 million! That’s about as many views as there are people in New York City and Los Angeles combined, by the way. And I wonder how marvelous a day it might be if everybody in both of those cities watched one of these poems the same morning.

    2013 was a year that saw, too, Trayvon Martin’s murderer go free, that saw Marissa Alexander and CeCe McDonald and countless others stand imprisoned for standing their ground, that saw the United States continue its wars, that saw, like all years do, large atrocities, and small but vital resistances. On the days of those atrocities, lots of people, frustrated and despairing and afraid, asked, why write poems? It’s a fair question.

    Rachel Rostad, reflecting on the power of literature to shape us and our society, argues that stereotypical representations of Asian women as tragic fetishes in literature and popular culture result in a culture that produces boys […] who see an Asian woman not as a person but an object, even when she’s handing out pamphlets at a protest. For Rostad, literature informs the ways we interact with each other—and even the ways we interact with ourselves. In her poem about JK Rowling, she realizes that her consumption of stories and movies has influenced her own self-understanding: "I wasn’t sure I was sad but I cried / anyway. Girls who look like

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