diVERSES reKINDLED: In Conversation With Penda Smith

Just as I find the more I teach communication, the more I learn about poetry, Penda Smith has found a similar truth at the intersection of improv and poetry.

I was fortunate to have Penda, a fellow Cave Canem fellow, lead a workshop on improv techniques that help poets, which even allowed poets to dabble with creating their own improv scenes with each other. One of the tips that quickly emerged was the benefit of specificity in allowing a skit to expand and flow.

Whether poets, language learners, or people in general, the struggle with specificity is real. It is easy to settle with the first word that comes to mind. It is easy to use an adjective instead of describe the objective truths that led to the adjective (compare a good movie to a movie where even the dialogue at the beginning of the film had relevance at the end and the characters’ motives were realistic).

At Callaloo Vievee Francis introduced one of my favorite exercises to combat this tendency to stick with broad. She had us create a 10 x 5 grid and asked us to fill in every cell with a description of a color. It’s a challenging exercise—the first ten or twenty words to show red are simple enough (apple, ruby). By number 45, the work becomes stranger but also more evocative (the blister form the shovel handle)

Specificity is not the engine of a scene, but the gasoline that keeps the pistons firing when energy fades. Removing expected language allows us to keep interest as we take others on a journey that, even if they have already seen all the landmarks, they no longer recognize they have been here before.

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Full conversation with poet Penda Smith and poet Geoff Anderson: https://youtu.be/IUgxobeXDMs