Meet Epic

Oh, wow. Don’t you just love it when you’re exposed to something new and wonderful and totally unexpected?

So this morning we got up at the crack of dawn and hauled ourselves down to the Downtown Farmers’ Market for the Midland Authors’ Book Signing. It was cold (in the 40’s) and we were in the shade, and the response to my little table of books was about what it always is here in Midland, meaning we sat huddled up in everything I could dig out of the car down at a little table at the end of the parking lot by ourselves, shivering and grousing (one of us was grousing). Then, when the sun started shining across the way, I said to hell with staying out of the sun and dragged the table over to a bright spot where it was marginally warmer. I was still wondering why I was giving up 4 hours of a Saturday to sit out in the wind doing pretty much nothing (I tried to stitch, but my fingers were numb) when Teffani brought over a spoken word artist she wanted us to meet.

That would be Epic, or Daniel C. Ramos, who just blew us away. He’s been a finalist in the National Poetry Slam Competition twice, and the first piece he did for us was just amazing.

Daniel wasn’t interested in poetry until he was 18, when two of his teachers his senior year started a poetry group. That’s when he was first exposed to Derrick Brown. Before that, although he has been writing all his life, he’d been thinking mostly in terms of song lyrics for the band he was going to put together someday.

Poetry changed everything. The concrete defining moment was when he went to the National Poetry Slam Competition for the first time in 2005 in Albuquerque.

“It literally changed my life,” Daniel says. There were people of all ages, every imaginable demographic. Performances, workshops, people sharing everything.

He went home to Amarillo, he says, “to nothing.” No poetry, no poets, no tradition of spoken word beyond the old-time cowboy poets. So he started organizing things, getting groups and teams together, generating interest.

Now he’s in Midland, and Teffanie’s going to try to get him in the public schools, talking to kids about the importance of poems and stories and showing them that it’s not all stuffy old words in books.

I love it that he writes differently when he’s thinking primarily of textual poetry, to be read, and when he’s thinking primarily of spoken poetry, for a performance. Although he can perform the written pieces and write down the spoken ones, he thinks about them differently, thinking about the plays on words that are more apparent in text and the hand gestures that emphasize specific lines in spoken pieces. I love this—it reinforces some of the things Roz talked about in knowing how your mind works.

Here’s a video of the second poem he did for us. The audio isn’t so good---it was wickedly windy, and there’s traffic behind us. But that seems fitting for poetry that’s supposed to be performed in real life, for real audiences. Still, I wish you could hear him more clearly. And I wish you could hear his first poem, which was my favorite and just astounding.

You’ll notice he pauses, gets lost, starts again—he had to spontaneously edit that part because Teffanie’s son and daughter were listening. Nice save, though, don’t you agree?

Go to Daniel’s MySpace page to see more of his videos.