Reflections on a Night in London with Buddy Wakefield

On a Wednesday night we took the tube to the East side of London, a district called Bethnal Green.

Buddy Wakefield at The Gallery Cafe in London, September 5, 2012

The East side is the side that we always hear about, where everyone comes from. Londoners tell us we are lucky to be living near The British Museum; everyone wants to be there, but no one can afford to. We are the most privileged of American twenty-somethings. No one lives where we live. People we run into are only visiting, passing through. Unlooking.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that on the East side we instantly felt more at ease, like here there might exist a kind of home.  But here we were only visitors.

We were only coming to stay briefly, for the words of a slam poet named Buddy Wakefield.

Some of us were accustomed to slam poetry. Some of us weren’t. For those of us who weren’t, Buddy Wakefield offered something severely lacking from our lives. He was a voice of reason, but not a preacher. In the short time that he stood on stage, he became a friend we’ve always needed, who would pull that scared, suffocating, self-deprecating adolescent that still fed and fostered our feelings of worthlessness and insecurity out from the depths of our hearts and into the air where it could finally be free to fly away.

Buddy Wakefield is an emancipator.

When he came up on stage, he was humbled and confused by the glowing introduction that preceded him. He began as a conversator. While asking us to let go, he slipped into poetry when we weren’t looking.
“Poets, let’s turn our wrists so far backwards/the razor blades in our pencil tips/can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.”

There in Bethnal Green, in the cozy confines of The Gallery Cafe, we stopped and listened. We, the most privileged of American twenty-somethings, basked in the security of our new home town and the moment of our new beginning.