Taylor Mali '87, a four-time national slam poetry champion, will be performing at Bowdoin next Thursday to, according to Mali in an interview with Orient, "delight, instruct, and entertain," and to continue his mission of inspiring 1,000 people to become teachers. A student-run Bowdoin organization, "1,000 Teachers," founded by Tasha Graff '07 and Alex Lamb '07, is sponsoring the event.
Mali called slam poetry "a way of listening to poetry that is competitive."
It is "loud, in your face, hip-hop-inspired poetry," he said.
It puts an emphasis on writing and performance, encouraging poets to focus not only on what they're saying, but how they say it. In poetry slam competitions, poets perform their work and are judged by members of a panel and the audience. Mali was inspired by his father, who was also a poet.
"I knew from an early age that words had power," Mali said.
He has been writing poems since age five and is considered to be one of the most successful slam poets since the art's emergence in 1984. Mali also led six of his seven teams to the National Poetry Slam Championship finals, holding the record with four wins. However, he no longer competes and now refers to his work as "spoken word?poetry written with the specific intent that the first time that it is ever experienced is when it is read aloud."
Mali added, "I still want to write poems that people get. The people who come to Kresge next Thursday will not encounter a poet who takes himself so seriously that you can't understand a word that he's saying."
Mali graduated from Bowdoin with a degree in English and from Kansas State University with an M.A. in English and creative writing. He was a teacher for nine years and said he "wanted to teach students who were younger, to catch them before it's too late."
In 2000, he "said goodbye to my last sixth-grade homeroom class" and has since lectured and performed for audiences all over the world and in all but five states.
"I think that between being a professional poet and being a teacher, the poet is the road less traveled. I feel like teaching will wait for me when I'm ready to go back to it. There may never be a time to hit the road and be a poet, so I'm striking while the iron is hot," he said.
He added, "I still feel like I'm teaching in a way. Teaching and poetry have similar roles of instructing and entertaining."
He believes that he's doing "more for the teaching profession out of the classroom than inside it" and that his goal is "to excite people with the power of language," in addition to using poetry to convert 1,000 people to teaching. Mali believes teaching is an "incredibly noble" profession.
As Graff said, Mali wants to get "1,000 people into the classroom through the power of his words."
Nearly 15 percent of Bowdoin graduates enter the teaching profession, second only to business, which is why Graff and Lamb started the Bowdoin chapter of "1,000 Teachers" in honor of Mali and his goal.
Graff said that the group aims to "connect people who are interested in teaching, but not necessarily in the program," and "serves as a network because there are so many Bowdoin grads who are teachers."
Mali's poems also provide a kind of network to inspire would-be teachers. The poem "Miracle Worker," for example, reads, "Education is a miracle, I'm just the worker. But I'm a teacher. And that's what we do."
Another poem, "What Teachers Make," is a response to a question that someone asked Mali: "I make kids wonder, I make them question. I make them criticize. I make them apologize and mean it. I make them write, write, write. And then I make them read," and "Let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true: I make a goddamn difference! What about you?"
Mali will perform Thursday at 8 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium. Admission is free. He performed at Bowdoin's 2003 homecoming, but Graff said that Thursday will be his "first full-fledged performance" on campus.
He will conduct two workshops; one for students interested in becoming teachers, and the other will be a poetry workshop for "anybody who's interested in writing," Mali said. E-mail Tasha Graff (tgraff@bowdoin.edu) for a spot; space is limited. The Bowdoin Bookstore has also put together a Taylor Mali display so students can buy his book and CDs. Visit www.taylormali.com for more information about Mali and his work.