| My emotions I wanna express
tell them as fast as federal express
how do you make it clear
make you feel like you are near?
The poetry of teenage angst – you can’t beat it for that feeling of being alone in the world with a kind of pain no human has experienced before. And then there’s the imagery. As Sara Bynoe, host of this weekend’s Teen Angst Poetry Cabaret sees it, the true poetry of teen angst demands a solipsism only adolescence can provide.
"What really makes it interesting is how naive you have to be to write it and how twisted the metaphors are," she says. "They really make no sense."
For proof, just peruse some of the poems posted at Bynoe’s Web site, www.teenangstpoetry.com. Or you could follow Bynoe’s suggestion and listen to the words of an Alanis Morissette song since, as Bynoe points out, "her lyrics are pure teen angst." Clearly, you don’t have to be a teenager to wallow in this angst – you just have to lack self-awareness and worldly perspective.
Bynoe says teen angst has a way of dissipating "when you get over it and realize other people have problems, too."
That must be why Bynoe, who has penned hundreds of lines of genuine teen angst verse, now has trouble re-entering the angst-y headspace required for this particular type of poetic composition. A graduate of Mount Royal College’s theatre program, she’s currently continuing her theatre studies at Vancouver’s Studio 58. It’s from a theatrical point of view that she still loves teen angst for its poker-faced combination of melodramatic sincerity and unintended cringe humour.
Now she’s working on a fringe theatre show based on the Teen Angst Poetry Nights she started back in December 2000. The reluctance of audience members to join in with their own examples of soul-baring silliness meant that those readings and the seven others that followed – in both Calgary and Vancouver – ended up being nearly one-woman shows anyway.
Bynoe’s fringe show, planned for next summer, will connect examples of angst-ridden verse with the "back stories" behind the suffering. This Sunday’s cabaret is a fund-raiser for the fringe show.
But wait – isn’t there a cruel side to all this chuckling over the desperate confessions of young people who can’t help being deranged by the recurring social and hormonal earthquakes of adolescence? Bynoe responds that friendly humour is probably the best antidote to the sense of isolation in which angst festers best. After all, these are often her own poems from her teenage experiences that she’s holding up as a public spectacle. Nevertheless, a deadly humourlessness does sometimes accompany teen angst, and when it does, the results can be terrifying.
Bynoe hasn’t been immune to the shadow of the Columbine massacre. A school stabbing on the day she was interviewed for CBC Radio’s As It Happens prompted the network to drop her segment from that night’s program. There’s a heavy side to growing up North American that Bynoe doesn’t aim to make light of. Real problems just aren’t that funny – only an over-inflated sense of suffering makes for laughable angst.
Bynoe is sure about one thing: "If people would take themselves less seriously, the world would be a better place."
You can take both angst and poetry less seriously at the Teen Angst Poetry Cabaret on Sunday, August 10 at the Bamboo Tiki Room (1205 First St. S.W.). Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the show starts at 7. Sara Bynoe, Michelle Bjolverud and Erin Millar will read their tortured verse; as well, there will be spoken-word poetry by Shone Abet, and music courtesy of DJs Moonlips and Jon Bromero and acoustic guitarist marigold santos. |
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