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SLAM, a showcase of some of the best poems submitted to Alloy poetry contests as well as well-known poems by Emily Dickinson and W.H Auden, slam superstars Saul Williams and Beau Sia, and lyrics from songwriters Macy Gray, Ani DiFranco and Tom Waits. Lyricists such as Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 and Missy Elliott offer up advice on freeing your mind and expressing yourself. The foreword is written by Tori Amos, with a portion of proceeds going towards Tori's non-profit group RAINN, which stands for Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.
"If we could express ourselves another way, we wouldn't be writers. I think we write songs or poems because we don't express ourselves exactly the way we want to in our everyday lives.
When you write, you can be anybody or anything. Nobody controls what your relationship is in a song or who you are. And nobody owns it.
There are things in daily living that hide behind everybody's heart, and that's always fascinated me. I'm always trying to go behind the heart, to that place where the unconscious lives. I don't think it lives in the brain; I think it is behind the heart.
For me, when the songs start to come, they show me different ways of feeling and expressing, often in ways that surprise me. My music always comes in my darkest hour, and the music is always so giving. I have this picture of an endless well somewhere, I don't know where it is- in the star systems out there. And the more that I'm open to the music, the more that it keeps coming.
Sometimes, if you expose your writing to other people, some of them will try to dilute you- give your words or your music a nose job or a little bow tie. But I'm a small vineyard. And I'm not willing to sacrifice the way I make the wine to get into the supermarket. You know what I mean?"
Tori Amos
July 2000
"The real gold has always been the individual spirit..."
-- Tori Amos
(p. 92)
"I don't need much to keep me warm
Got a cloud sleeping on my tongue
he goes
then it goes
and kiss the violet's as they're waking up"
(from Cloud On My Tongue, p. 133)
"Tori Amos began singing and playing in her church choir. At the age of thirteen she gave up scholarship to study the piano at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory so she could perform her own material in Washington, D.C. clubs. With the release of her 1992 debut album, Little Earthquakes, Amos built an intense and loyal following that continues to grow to this day."
(p. 148)
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