“broke(n)hunger” poetry installation feeds ArtPrize 9 conversation

Food insecurity and poetry take center stage with Kyd Kane Poetry’s large-scale installation at UICA’s ArtPrize exhibition, “Cultivate.”

Ericka Thompson, aka Kyd Kane Poetry, is here to work. And if the doors don’t open, she’s ready to knock down walls and build new ones.

“Two years ago,” she says, standing by her two-story exhibit at the foot of the the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA)’s basement stairwell, “I did my first performance in this space, in front of someone else’s installation. And I said, ‘You know, I’m going to have my own exhibit here.’ I put that intention out there.

“And now here I am, two years later, and I’m going to be performing here in front of my own work,” she says, referring to her “broke(n)hunger” installation, an entry into this year’s ArtPrize 9.

“It’s really cool.”

Poets rarely take the stage in traditional modern art settings, which tend to favor more visual works by nature. And while tales of full-time professional installation artists like SiTE:LAB’s award-winning Julie Schenkleberg or Kate Gilmore abound, “full-time poet” isn’t a phrase that makes its way into the arts community’s vocabulary.

That’s not really a thing…or, at least, it hasn’t been.

It’s a tough bit, financially speaking, for artists of any genre to support themselves with their work. Poets tend to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

On the academic track, print poetry publications rarely publish more than $100 per one-off publication, and small publishers (who are more accessible to new writers) offer less than five figures per book deal. Teaching is a way of supplementing income for many poets. On the spoken word track, winning traveling slam competitions is the beat and scoring the occasional music label collaboration — like Warsan Shire, whose works were used in Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” — is the score.

If I ever had two minutes with Beyoncé, that’s the question I would ask. How much money did Warsan Shire make from “Lemonade?”

If anyone from Grand Rapids is likely to find out, I’d bet on Ericka Thompson.

Connection is always at the center of her work.

“Everybody has experienced hunger,” she says, explaining her inspiration for the work. “Even if you’ve never had problems paying the bills, you can relate to that.”

Thompson’s goal, she says, was to take that common experience — hunger — and turn it into a point of connection which catalyzes action.

“Hunger affects you mentally, emotionally, physically. We’ve got people having to decide between eating healthy food and skipping the utility bill, or eating processed food and keeping the lights on,” she says.

“The issue of people living in hunger is broken, but it doesn’t have to be.”

I think something’s broken just not being spoken about: / hearts, homes, and consciousness. / Where’s this country’s common sense?

laments the poem’s 9th stanza.

Like her other works, it balances its raw emotional drive with precise control over assonance, internal rhyme, and meter, resulting in a subtle lyricism which becomes roaringly evident upon Thompson’s live delivery. Passive voice, that unwitting bane of so many aspiring writers’ vocabularies, is virtually absent from the work. Her noun and adjective choices are both intentional and grounded.

Perhaps most importantly to Thompson herself, and again mirroring her other words, “broke(n)hunger” is not without a call to action — one in which anyone can participate. Anyone who’s willing to listen can keep the conversation going.

“broke(n)hunger” is the third piece of Thompson’s work which has been commissioned by the UICA. Earlier work for UICA included her Color Consciousness work during last year’s Pantone Color of the Year exhibit:

Before landing formal gallery gigs and since, Thompson has been on the spoken word track for years, having performed and lead artist workshops at a variety of venues across the country. She’s also done album intros, like local Grand Rapids artist Callab’s “Nocturnal Notez (feat. Kyd Kane Poetry).”

“broke(n)hunger” is, as Thompson points out, a “poem within a poem.” A small sampling of red words stand out from within the sea of black text, forming its own succinct Williams Carlos Williams-esque poem.

The full poem, which clocks in just over two minutes when Thompson performs it aloud, takes up the entire two-story wall facing the basement stairwell, upon which the first floor gallery overlooks. The “red poem,” along with being embedded within the wall text, is presented separately in the same space.

“Elevating those words with visuals made me freeze,” Thompson says, describing the process of developing “broke(n)hunger.” She developed the content of the poem and the physical form it would take within the exhibit simultaneously.

“It was a humbling experience for me as an artist. It definitely changed me as a person,” she says.

The tone of the poem, as she points out, reflects how different pieces of the poem came together separately. The red poem was worked in last, which is evident in its cohesive, succinct theme.

no balance / and hopeless handouts / think about / consciousness / this common / catastrophe

a portion of the red poem reads.

“It moves from a very emotional place to a very analytical one,” she says, “but it was nothing but an emotional journey. It broke me a little bit. But it made me stronger. I’m proud of it.”

ArtPrize awards aside, Thompson’s inertia as an artist is buoyed by her exhibit at the UICA, which is the first in a series of larger steps she has planned for her work.

In addition to working additional album gigs and planning more physical installations and multi-media expressions of her work, Thompson will be self-publishing a book of poetry in early 2018, titled “Sh*t Kyd Said.”

“I’m thinking, I’m capable of everything,” Thompson says. “We’re making a living on our words.”

In addition to broke(n)hunger at the UICA, Thompson’s work is featured in two other ArtPrize 9 entries: Heartside Community Meal, and A Walk in a Park in America.

Thompson will be doing two officially scheduled performances on September 23 at 1pm, as well as a number of impromptu performances throughout ArtPrize. When not performing live, a looped video of Thompson’s performance will play on the wall beside the text.