I am an open-minded fellow. But when I heard I was going to be interviewing an 18-year-old high school student who had organized poetry readings at Mudhouse and was now hosting events at Live Arts, certain unpleasant associations crowded my head, despite my best efforts to banish them. I knew poets in high school—they wore berets, dressed in black and smoked cloves. One did not want to interview them, however enterprising they were.
I was way off base. Tucker Duncan is a bit scruffy, but that’s where the resemblance to the poet of my nightmares leaves off. He’s enthusiastic about his very interesting projects, but he manages to be so without wearing the scarf of sincerity too tightly around his neck. He’s a poet, and surprisingly, kind of cool.
The poetry readings Duncan spent much of last year hosting weekly at Mudhouse were not the poetry readings of my experience, either. They were “poetry slams,” a kind of competitive, performance poetry Duncan describes as “the sport of the spoken word.” Rules are simple: The work must be original. The reading must be completed in three minutes or less. And there are no props. “It’s just you and the microphone,” he says. The influence of and connections to hip-hop are obvious—Duncan, for instance, refers to the rapper Nasir Smith as one of his favorite poets.
Duncan, however, was not content to poetry slam forever. Recently, he and Live Arts regular Todd Ristau have begun to hold “poetry lounges” in the Live Arts LAB space. It is open mic with a live jazz band, which poets may use as accompaniment if they wish. Naturally for a poet still too young to drink alcohol and barely old enough to vote, Duncan’s view of his art is evolving.
“I’d just gotten to this point in my life where I realized that there is so much more to poetry than being judged,” he says. At the poetry lounge, he says, the goal is not winning, but something more fundamental and inclusive: “We want to create a home for poets.”
Duncan’s interest in poetry dates back to one moment that should inspire pride in the hearts of high school English teachers everywhere. He was in ninth grade when a teacher played a recording of Saul Williams, the “spoken-word artist” featured in the 1998 film SLAM. “He just spit out this poem and it just blew me away,” Duncan says.
While his interest in poetry was henceforth a constant, much else in his life was variable after that. Duncan, for reasons he says had something to do with disciplinary issues and something to do with the curriculum, spent the next four years in boarding schools from Utah and Idaho to North Carolina. He would get back from one, he says, “and it just seemed like the right thing to do to try another one.”
Nowadays, still a couple credits shy of graduation, Duncan is finishing up high school from the online Keystone National High School, which gives him the flexibility to get through high school while devoting himself to poetry.
And he’s been more than a little successful on the latter front. He’s been published in two anthologies, and, with typical entrepreneurial drive, has self-published two other books. Another collection of his poetry, When I was a Shorty, is due to be published by Ristau, in connection with Mary Baldwin College.
The big question is whether this restless youth will make Charlottesville his stomping grounds forever. Change is coming, he says, but he’s not sure what it will be. College is definitely not a given, he says.
“If I go, it will be to learn,” he says.
Whatever he chooses, it’s liable to be an interesting path. He is not content just to let things happen to him. Minutes after he concluded our interview, for instance, Duncan called me to make sure I understood the main point about his poetry lounges.
“It’s about giving poetry back to the people,” he says.