Andrea Gibson will perform on Nov. 12 at UNB.

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Kyle Mullin

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Speak Up

Andrea Gibson pens poetry to lift it off the page, to shout it out as a gift for everyone within earshot, to truly bring it to life.

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Andrea Gibson’s latest spoken word release is entitled Yellowbird.

"Maya Angelou says an unspoken poem is an unfinished poem," said Gibson, a renowned slam poet from Colorado who will be belting out each stanza at UNB this week as part of her latest college tour. "I've always loved being able to look in a poet's eyes as opposed to looking at a page. There is an honesty - an intimacy - that comes with that shared moment. There's also an energy to performance poetry that resonates with the part of me that wants to bust the walls down. For all the ways we've been hushed and quieted - it's a necessary rupture."

Although it's barely been a year since a collection of her poems were first officially published under the title Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns, Gibson has scrawled down enough material to fill four spoken word albums since 2003, including this year's Yellowbird.

That album includes searing violins, shimmering piano melodies and bongo beats to accompany her verses. Gibson has often said she always writes to music, but this is the first time any instrument other than her voice has adorned one of her CDs. Yet her relentless touring and the lyrical rhythms of her rhyme schemes have always stood as proof of her love of performance poetry.

That's more than apparent in her earlier renditions of Blue Blanket (from her 2004 album Swarm), where she rhymes off the stanzas about a guilt riddled rape victim in sharp breathless rasps, as if the words don't speak for themselves:

"I remember the way love

used to glow like glitter on my skin

before he made his way in

now every touch feels like a sin

that could crucify medusa kali oshun mary..."

And while much of her work focuses on women's rights and lesbian issues, many fans favour her more universal poems like Photograph, about coming to terms with love lost.

"I could write a love poem everyday for the rest of my life and still feel as if I haven't begun to speak all that is in my heart," Gibson said of her more personal work. "What else breaks us so completely - and puts us back together - so completely. I would shatter over and over for the gift of it. And so the writing of it has always come easily - and with very few reservations."

While she touches on such intricate woes with gusto in Photograph, Gibson also used the poem to draw on the simplest of muses, like the most obvious aspects of autumn:

"I wish you were here

autumn is the hardest season

the leaves are all falling

and they're falling like they're falling in love with the ground and the trees are naked and lonely I keep trying to tell them new leaves will come around in the spring but you can't tell trees those things they're like me they just stand there and don't listen I wish you were here..."

"There are very few things that don't inspire me to write," Gibson said of that stanza. "Our kindness, our light, our revival, our sacred rage - all of it is worthy of the telling, of the writing down and recording. I am inspired by the sidewalk, the lamp post, the satellite, the bulldozer, the basement floor, the hinge on the back door. The miracle that is the everyday of our trembling hearts.

"There is nothing like grief to busts the walls down - to open us up to whatever muse is signing true that day."

Andrea Gibson will perform in the ballroom of UNB's Student Union Building on Thursday Nov. 12.