Speaking Tongues

Poet Lucas Smiraldo might be one of the most ambitious artists in Tacoma (and he's also a nice guy).

It’s an Artwalk evening in late spring, and the Urban Orchestra is playing in the basement of Sanford & Son Antiques in downtown Tacoma. Located in an old industrial building, the subterranean space is cold, but the hipster crowd doesn’t seem to mind. They gather close to the stage, eager to hear the orchestra’s special guest — Lucas Smiraldo, a spoken-word artist known as “Vanilla Soul.”

Photography by Michael Smith

Forty-seven-year-old Smiraldo wears wire-rim glasses and a button-down shirt tucked neatly into tailored denims. His look is scholarly, yet Smiraldo radiates inner cool. A middle-aged man performing for bed-headed youths in skinny jeans and thrift-store sweaters, he appears as comfortable in the scene as he is in the thick-soled shoes on his feet.

The Urban Orchestra strikes up a chord and Smiraldo begins with a riff on the gritty infrastructure of the city, his improv a lush counterpoint to the formality of brass and strings: “We sing to you about God and concrete, sleet and snow. We embrace the potholes of our memory. We are all that urban orchestra — and we are going to compose ourselves!” He’s in the groove, closing his eyes as he feels the flow. The audience is mesmerized. “Tell it, Luke!” shouts a fan. Smiraldo transitions to his signature “Vanilla Soul.” He usually delivers it hip-hop style, but tonight he recites in a Masterpiece Theatre voice to suit the cello accompaniment.

If I am vanilla,
I am deep vanilla.
I am the only
ice cream cone
that loves you back
and licks you back.

If I am vanilla
I am so much this flavor
that my lips will send you
into a vanilla twist
surround you with
a sweet vanilla rise
that keeps cresting
like the perfect storm
in ten-story waves
carried along
by a vanilla wind.

If I live
by a vanilla law
it is a deep crystal code
sealed in the vat
of my beginnings.

I am not the apology
of artificial flavors;
I am not the
shame of
striving to please
another tongue . . .

A few weeks later, over the lunchtime clang of forks and knives at Galanga Thai, Smiraldo talks about another piece, entitled “Soon.” Based on the image of a train, it’s about overcoming the traumas of childhood and moving on. The words offer hope. But in contrast to the lighthearted material performed at Sanford & Son, the subject matter is heavy.

. . . Haunted
by soulful echoes

we are
something

we are
something
that moves,

we are more
than a single
stop.

We can pass
through
this station,
we can call out:

“I live!
I will matter.” . . .

Smiraldo describes himself as a “good Jewish boy,” but his work is about transcending the divisions around race and religion. “I read “Soon” to an African American congregation and a 70ish-year-old black woman came up to me afterwards and told me how much she appreciated it,” recalls Smiraldo. “Did I have her in mind when I wrote it? No! But when a piece connects with another person’s life and experience what more could you ask for?” He describes the “delicious silence” of an audience that is really listening. “That moment when you just know there’s a communication going on.”

Yet as satisfying as it is to connect, Smiraldo says his sense of accomplishment is always short lived. Once a project or performance is finished, it’s not long before he’s back in neurotic “Woody Allen” mode: doubting, questioning and wondering what’s next.

Though his interest in spoken word didn’t blossom until many years after he graduated from college, Smiraldo recalls that the seeds were planted there. As a creative-writing student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he heard the Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye read her workand was profoundly moved. He also developed a deep respect, and an enduring friendship, with professor Nellie McKay, coeditor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. He was the only white male enrolled in her class on black women writers. “Reading Alice Walker and Toni Morrison,” he says, “that kind of shook me up in the best possible way and has been helpful to me in continuing to question my own assumptions.”

Clearly this good Jewish boy has an ecumenical worldview: indeed, his approach to issues of race and gender identity is so open, so outside the boundaries of familiar definitions, that one is tempted to compare his work to that of Anna Deavere Smith. Like Smith, he wants nothing less than to mine the American psyche, channeling myriad voices and describing far-flung histories. Like Smith, he is both wildly ambitious and humble, driven by something like a higher calling.

In 2008 Smiraldo released a CD entitled Voice of the Americas. It’s a symphonic fusion of spoken word, sound design and music, created in collaboration with composer Wrick Wolff. Throughout the work Smiraldo channels, or addresses, figures as varied as Che Guevara, JFK, Martin Luther King and Colin Powell. He describes Voice of the Americas as, in part, an exploration of “the conflicts of duality in a nation that pushes people to discard their indigenous national and cultural identities.” It’s a work that’s not afraid to move from large to small and back again. There’s a dirge about 9/11 (“Twin Requiem”), as well as a piece about the challenges faced by the builders of civic structures (“Song of the Narrows Bridge Builder”). There are also tracks with enough powerful beats that it’s not hard to imagine them remixed for the dance floor.

Funded largely by a grant from the Tacoma Arts Commission, Voice of the Americas was performed on May 2, 2008, at Theatre on the Square. Smiraldo recalls the crowd’s enthusiasm. “The audience rushed the stage. People had so much to say!” In many ways, the project was an intersection of Smiraldo’s poetic and professional lives — by day he works as associate director for education and outreach at Broadway Center, a job that requires building dialogue with diverse communities. Yet, Smiraldo says, Americas haunts him. “I’d love to see it tour the country.”

Smiraldo is also a teaching artist with Washington State and estimates that he’s done more than twenty after-school residencies, including the production Slam-A-Way High at Spanaway Lake High School. “You had the Goths, the geeks, the quiet ones — and they all had to coalesce to perform their work. That’s one of the wonderful things that can happen with spoken word: cross-cultural, cross-class relationships.” He sees spoken word as a way to jump over barriers, to hear the voices of people we may have never listened to. He believes through such listening we can evolve and change, a notion explored in this excerpt from The Environment: Part II:

Nothing about us
is set in stone.

No matter what the nation says
or how our fathers
passed it on
or when our mothers
resisted less
or how our brothers
got convinced
or why our daughters
mixed the sand
and how our cousins
poured the gravel
and all things corporate
added water
with stories sent
to set the mold —
We are not meant for this.

You and I
are not
set in stone.

So how did Brooklyn-born Smiraldo end up in Tacoma? He describes the move west as a “geographical cure for a failing relationship.” Before Tacoma he lived in Chicago where he worked as a fundraiser for National People’s Action, and in Akron where he obtained a master’s in urban studies. In 1991, he landed in Seattle, but finding the rents prohibitive he headed south. He sold subscriptions for Tacoma Actors Guild until finding a grant manager position in the Bethel School District. When a school levy didn’t pass he was laid off, and he moved to Broadway Center. Outside of his day gigs, Smiraldo was busy writing one- and two-act plays, including works for the Pierce County Playwrights Festival.

After a decade as a playwright, he shifted gears, inspired, partly, by African American spoken-word legend Saul Williams in the 1998 film Slam. “That movie opened my eyes to the immediate and deeply personal nature of spoken word. I saw Williams do his spells, evocations and prayers and I wanted to do that, too.” Smiraldo immersed himself in the Seattle slam scene but was humbled by “amazingly talented artists — many of them younger than twenty.”

Nine years and many notebooks later, Smiraldo says he has built a solid foundation and is no longer trying to be the next Saul Williams. “My voice has its own parameters and cadence and content. I’m not saying this arrogantly, but there’s never going to be anyone like me again, nor should there be — and I can’t be like some of the poets I admire. Now, I just try to really feel what I am saying, connect to my material and let the rest take care of itself.” Does he ever get a case of the nerves? “Yeah, I do! Memorizing is not an easy thing for me. I am much more fearful about that than of improvising on the spot.”

Meeting again, this time at Shanghai Hourse, our ever-attentive wait staff provides source material for Smiraldo’s next work. As he relays the plot of a favorite Dr. Seuss story, yet another waitress appears, plucks his napkin from the table and makes a swift move toward his flatware. “Actually, we are still enjoying our meal,” Smiraldo explains calmly, and not for the first time. She nods and crumples Smiraldo’s napkin, her hand suspended in midair over his plate. Finally she leaves. “See, that’s the kind of thing I could write about,” says Smiraldo. “‘Crumpled Napkin Hovering . . . ’”

The next day he e-mails me the first stanza:

We are under siege
Our broccoli and chicken
In sight of the horde,
The egg drop bowls shuddering,
Our table is the border town
And every waiter
Is on horseback
Circling, circling
Waiting for an opening.

Will “Crumpled Napkin Hovering” turn up at the next Speak Your Soul, a monthly event cohosted by Smiraldo at Vinum Coffee & Wine Lounge? Maybe not. But the words offer a moment of lightness. As Vanilla Soul says: “Doing good work doesn’t necessarily mean making everyone comfortable, but you can’t enjoy five intense dishes when they’re all on the same plate.” •