#greg bee

Greg Bee, poet

Cambridge, Mass., August 14, 2013

I've been catching up on the backlog of poets I never have time to read or listen to. And I'm loving them so much, I have to share. So I'm starting an occasional series of posts on poets who make poetry better. Poets who are just doing their thing, and their thing is to make good poems and good people.

I'm starting with Greg Bee. Greg doesn't seem to get out much (as the internet goes), but here's a quick sample:

I would call Greg one of my favorite Seattle poets, but there are about a dozen people on my list of favorite Seattle poets. What I love about Greg is not just the way he writes, but the way he performs. Greg is a brilliant writer, don't get me wrong. He's the kind of poet who takes incredible care in constructing his poem, but the final product looks effortless. Greg is a slam poet, but he will almost always take an open mic over a slam. He's more interested in saying what he needs to say than winning. And that's why I want to grow up to be like Greg.

Greg is also a phenomenally approachable poet. When you see him on stage, he exudes confidence, but not arrogance. He strikes me as someone who is completely comfortable with who he is, and even more, someone who is completely comfortable with who you are. Whoever you are.

If you can track down a copy of Greg Bee's poem "Mango Tree," I recommend it. I first heard that poem at a time when I was feeling completely jaded about slam, and that poem rooted me back in what I love about slam poetry. I don't even like dogs (the subject of the poem) and I loved that poem.

Fat. I'm so tired of being fat. I know, you're thinking he's not fat, dude, you're not fat, you're just big boned, just husky, just stout, like a big teddy bear.

I'm not taking anything from the ones with real problems here; the mostly girls who look at their skinny bodies and see fat where it ain't so they just don't eat, or purge what they do. That shit's fucked up and is the extreme version of what I can't seem to shake, but they're related you know?

Fat. It's what I see when I see myself. And I know it's not just me, it's you too. It's the fat among us and the medium among us and the thin among us, who all look and see fat. Unattractive, unhealthy, unmanageable, fat. It's advertising and models and television and movies and porn. It's doctors and gyms and the 11 o'clock news and the tofu & yoga people. It's all that shit wrapped up together telling me, telling us, that until we're all thin and muscly, we're not shit.

So what do we do about all this insecurity? Why apparently, we eat! We eat McDonald's hamburgers, and Krispy Kreme donuts, and if we can slather it in melted cheese it's perfect, and God if we can dip it in a deep fryer it's heaven, and while we're shoveling it in faster and faster, a tear squeezes out the corner of one eye and traces slowly across our plump shiny cheek because we know we're killing ourselves.

So what are we hungry for? Fat saturated burritos, nugget-shaped animal byproducts and 52 different kinds of hot pockets! Those handy little bundles of crust and cheese and meat seem yummy-healthy until you read all that pesky fine print about sodium and fat and carbs and a zillion percent of the acceptable level of toxins for a nuclear meltdown, yeah until then.

Some scientists are recommending longer injection needles because intramuscular injections aren't delivering enough medicine due to excess tissue surrounding the muscle. Translation: Needles aren't long enough to get through our big, fat, asses anymore. So clearly the answer is longer needles! On the day of the three foot hypodermic needle, we'll look around and wonder how we got there.

You pity me a little, I know. You think I've let my self-esteem get all wrapped up in a false media image and you hope I can learn to see myself as normal, learn to be happy, and to learn to you know, love myself and stuff or whatever. And I've done it! I've listened to the subliminal tapes and watched the infomercials. I've done NutriSystem, and Atkins, and South Beach, I've gone to the gym, I've bicycled, I've run until my knees throbbed from the abuse and still, both my reward for success and my consolation for failure is pizza and ice cream.

So you pity my poor broken self esteem? Well fuck that because it's not self esteem, it's fat! And it's lulling me and you and the rest of the country into believing that food is love.

But you know that cookies and milk won't heal a skinned knee, and I know that a whole pepperoni pizza in front of the TV isn't quality "me" time, and we all know that the real cure for a broken heart doesn't have cream cheese frosting on it.

But love is lacking and no amount of internet porn is filling the void, so instead we worship at grocery stores, drool over food shows and look for love across the edge of a spoon.