Buddy Wakefield: travelling preacher

Buddy Wakefield is one of the leading figures in slam poetry, a form of performance poetry or spoken word performance. A combination of troubadour, writer, and motivational guru, he travels the countryside bedazzling appreciative audiences his inventive symbols and uplifting message. He won the individual World Poetry Slam Championships in 2004 and 2005, and has had success in team events. Wakefield is an entrancing performer, jerkily full of energy, casually dressed with a shaven head, jumping up and down in rhythm, contorting his face, and using his arms held out down in front of him for punctuation. He has recorded for Strange Famous Records, founded by rapper and poetry slam performer Sage Francis, and for folk singer Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe label.

Wakefield was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1974, and worked as an executive assistant in Gig Harbor, Washington. Then in 2001, according to legend, he sold all his possessions except for a Honda Civic and began to travel the USA performing poetry and meeting people, sleeping on couches or in his car. This mode of life goes back in myth to the Provencal minstrels of the middle ages, but more recently is associated with folk singers like Woody Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Willy Mason.

Convenience Stores (YouTube) is one of his simpler pieces, about a conversation with a woman in a store at an isolated truck stop, in which he speculates about her loneliness before she reveals her dream of escape. There's a certain quality of tourism to much of his work, as he travels the world encountering sad people, and moralises a bit. His work is also full of exhortations to live life and experience reality; coupled with frequent religious references, his work has an oddly upbeat, self-help, chicken-soup quality that is suited to the emotional atmosphere of a live show but resembles an evangelical church.

His didacticism is shown in another tale of the road, Information Man (YouTube), which describes an encounter between the narrator and someone staffing an information booth at a rest area. There are some customarily great Wakefield images: "I am standing like shoe polish on an overstocked shelf hoping that one day somebody will pick me to make things better". But soon it becomes clear this is a poem with a message:

If you've never been rocked back by the presence of purpose
this poem is too soon for you
return to your mediocrity
plug it into an amplifier
and rethink yourself
some of us are on fire for the answer

It continues to explain:

I talk a whole bunch but I really only know a few things...
I know our shoes were stitched from songs about highways
The best songs are the ones about Georgia even though I've never been there
Cause it's the only place that still believes in Jesus
I know whatever it is you believe in you've got to spare yourself the futility of making fun of God
Because that guy hasn't even talked in like - ever.
...
You are the centre of the universe
If you weren't you wouldn't be here.

Jean Heath (YouTube) is about a funeral, in the genre of moralising tale that condemns the shallowness and insincerity of those who encounter suffering or death (Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich rules this tradition). It gets the audience onside by letting them share in the condemnation of people who - shockingly - eat and talk about themselves at funerals.

Flockprinter (YouTube; text) is about flock wallpaper and God, and shows his ability to wrest a metaphor out of the most ordinary sight:

Flockprinting is an aggressive electrostatic action
using severe heat to force finely chopped fibers
onto patterns of fabric
ultimately resulting in
soft touch.

There is a tension between observation and moralising, because the one requires an openness and the other a firm point of view. Similarly, there is a paradox in travelling the world to learn about it, because all your encounters will be in a certain sense trivial, at convenience stores and rest areas, and much of life will remain behind closed doors. But his imagery is inventive, his messages underlaid with wit, and to watch him perform is astonishing.