Buddy Pt 1

 

A professional photographer snapped this promo for TedxBozeman 2017

A few years ago, I gave a TedTalk. Well, a TedxTalk which is like the localized version of Ted Talk. And I played guitar; sang a couple songs that I had written while wandering the world. I wanted to make my ten minutes and thirty seconds the most revelatory part of the five hour event at the Great Commons church in Four Corners, Montana. I had seen so many Ted Talks that absolutely blew my mind; incredibly intelligent people calmly explaining their ingenious ideas for the world on a big stage in front of an audience of eggheads who would take those ideas and run with them, making the world a better place right away. 

I so desperately wanted to be part of that legacy. My performance was okay; there was nothing groundbreaking about it, but I said my piece and enjoyed being a part of the event. 

In the months leading up to the TedTalk, I spent many hours on the internet rabbit hole. It was there that I found Buddy Wakefield, a spoken word poet who spent nineteen minutes selling free air to the audience of the Utah State University TedxTalk in 2012. It wasn’t his fairly obvious political beliefs or his hilarious facial expressions that struck me so much as the way his poetry flowed. It cascaded like a mountain river, with cadence and rhyme, washing away his emotional struggles from a very difficult younger life. It was inspiring to see someone use vocabulary so fluently, to make words imitate the natural rhythms of life, like heartbeats and rainfall. I was immediately smitten by spoken word poetry.

I don’t usually listen to spoken word poetry for the themes or the message of the particular poems. Often, the themes are quite sad, tortured, lonely, lost; the kinds of emotions that inspire people to write dramatically and intensely. I am usually listening to the rhythm, the combination of hundreds of words, the creative slant rhymes and syncopation. I love hip hop and rap music for the same reason. I don’t really care about the lifestyles that I don’t understand and will never experience; mostly I listen for the beautiful flow of syllables, the metaphors and personifications that are just so ingenious. The best compositions are an English teacher’s fantasy. This is top notch grammar set to music. Buddy Wakefield is the one who opened my eyes to this genre. 

I started researching Buddy and found his website and looked at his tour schedule, hoping to see him perform nearby. But alas, he now travels the world, from Portugal to Vietnam, telling his story and sharing his poetry. Small town Montana isn’t on the calendar and probably will never be. But he does have an ingenious way of sharing his work with people who can’t see him live. For five dollars a month, he will send you a daily text every Wednesday through Sunday. Every morning at eight am, my phone buzzes and a few sentences of wisdom from Buddy Wakefield shine out into my world. 

The daily text is never the same. He actually composes them each day. One day he forgot while flying across the Atlantic and the next day there were two and an apology. You can’t reply to the texts; they are just little words of wisdom. What an ingenious way for a poet to share his work and for fans to support their favorite artists. 

Anyway, some of my favorites include “everything is out there. That’s why they call it everything.” Or, “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” Or “After getting gargled and spanked and spit out by God, I wanna know that I don’t have to fall every time the sky opens up like a coin return to change me.” There are hundreds more, some more mind blowing than others. It’s not always what the words say as what they represent to me. I am seeing an artist in the creative process, chewing on ideas and spitting them out at the audience. Every morning I get reminded about the importance of working every day on creative ideas. Usually, the text finds me at my computer, composing my daily writings. But some days, I am loitering, procrastinating or trying to convince myself that it is a waste of time. And then Buddy Wakefield comes shooting into the room like a lightning bolt with a line like “turn off your miserable inner critic and finally start practicing. The continuity of practice is the secret to success.” He might as well have handed me my guitar in person. So off I go this morning, to practice. I used to call it going to work. Now I just call it practice. Thanks Buddy.