Spoken-Word Artists Bassey Ikpi and Giles Li Tell It Like It Is (Utne Reader)
Spoken-Word Artists Bassey Ikpi and Giles Li Tell It Like It Is
Katie Leo, Utne Reader
Now Li writes to express his views in the most authentic way possible, including all their complexity: “For me [the goal is] to accurately represent what’s inside of me. Everybody, what’s inside of them, it’s all kind of mixed up, and nobody really knows anything, and now [my goal is] nothing more than trying to accurately represent ‘I feel this way about it, I might have misgivings about it for this reason, or I might be fully behind it at this time.’”
“I can only write from what’s inside,” he explains. “All I can really do is just be honest and hope that the authentic feeling of what I’m saying will speak to people. I don’t even have electronic copies of a lot of my poems.”
“I feel like it’s a little more difficult now than when I was a teenager,” Li says. “Everything is so corporatized and everything is so official. People think that the only end to [spoken word] is getting to TV or commercials. That’s not why any of us started.”
“There was no that when we started,” Ikpi adds.
Tell ‘em B!
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