Mason Granger
In this episode we connect with Mason Granger, the Deputy Director of Get Lit. Get Lit is an educational resource using poetry and spoken word poetry to inspire and increase literacy throughout schools in California. Mason shares how he first was introduced to the art of Spoken Word and Slam Poetry. The performance knocked him off his foundation and spoke in a voice that was as clear to him as a long lost language he had always been fluent in. We discuss how poetry and art in general enhances education curriculum to hit students at a human level, encouraging a search for purpose and connection to all who have humaned before.
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Guest
Mason Granger is the Deputy Director at Get Lit. Originally from Philadelphia by way of Willingboro, NJ, Mason is a poet with 19+ years of professional experience on stage & in classrooms across 49 states and six countries as part of the performance poetry trio, The Mayhem Poets. In 2014, he created SlamFind, a digital platform to connect fans of poetry videos with the poets & live poetry venues where these videos are born. Connecting the poetry community to itself and the rest of the world continues to be the foundation of his work to this day.
Between 2016-2018, Mason was the official videographer for Poetry Slam Inc., producing several iconic poetry videos that continue to garner millions of views across multiple platforms. In the spirit of his mission of always keeping the ‘live’ in ‘live poetry’, he also hosted the weekly PoetNY open mic at Bowery Poetry Club in NYC from 2017-2019 while also serving as Executive Director of Bowery Arts & Science through 2019.
Now as a Los Angeles resident in his fourth year with Get Lit, Mason continues to pursue creative projects while helping to shape the future of spoken word poetry education in the state of California and beyond.
"We have brains that are capable of more than just taking care of our survival, which comes first, but once you have that like, "All right, what's cool for you now that you are existing?" The exploration of that is what life is about."
Credits
Chapters is a multi-part series concerning the history and the lessons of civil rights violations or civil liberties injustices carried out against communities or populations—including civil rights violations or civil liberties injustices that are perpetrated on the basis of an individual’s race, national origin, immigration status, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.
This project was made possible with support from Chapman University and The California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library.
Guest: Mason Granger
Hosts: Jon-Barrett Ingels
Produced by: Past Forward
Transcription
[music]
[00:00:04] Mason Granger: I came to it later on and how it affected me was like, "Finally, this is the thing that my voice should sound like. Finally.” If you give that to kids in high school and middle school, there is no “finally” moment. It just becomes integrated in how you communicate. Yes, being this free and open with my thoughts and feelings and emotions is just an inherent part of who I am. That's such a great foundation to have moving forward. That's, I guess, the crux of Get Lit. Showing kids that this, "Hey, maybe this is your voice, whether you go on to be a poet and like this, you just discovered your life thing, or this is something that you did once and you had the experience of like really interrogating and crafting something. Wherever you are, like you're better for that experience."
[00:01:01] Host: Welcome to the fourth installment of the Chapters podcast series. I'm your host, Jon-Barrett Ingels. In our chapter series, we focus on stories surrounding the exclusion, forced removal, and internment of Japanese Americans, but with all that is happening in our country right now, in this historic moment ripe with the potential for change and growth, we are expanding our scope and amplifying the voices of organizations and individuals who are trying to make a difference, who are standing at the convergence of art, education, and social justice. With this series, we honor those who have struggled and suffered in the past and question, "How are we still here? How have we not come any further than this?"
In this episode, we connect with Mason Granger, the Deputy Director at Get Lit. Mason shares how poetry has infected him and how his work with Get Lit helps young people use poetry to have a deeper relationship with themselves and the world.
Tell us about the first time you remember being affected by poetry. Not just hearing it or reading it, but like, "Whoa. Okay."
[00:02:17] Mason: Oh, 100%. It's a very visceral-- like it's not one of those, "I don't know. I always just liked it." It's like, I went definitively from knowing zero about it to being like, "I want to do that." It was one of my classes at Rutgers University where I went to school, in New Jersey. It was an honors colloquium class, and which is basically like once a week, we go to one of just a various number of artistic events. One week it may be-- "Okay, everybody meet at the art museum and look at this gallery." Next week, "Oh, I got this speaker coming in to talk about this."
One of the weeks, it was a trip to the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York. It's like a long-standing poetry venue in the city. My professor of the colloquium class was like longtime friends with Miguel Algarín, who's a founder of the Nuyorican, and those folks, they set up a field trip. I did not-- I was not really interested in it. I only went on that particular-- We could pick and choose which ones we did, and so I only went on that one because the girl I had a crush on in the class was going. I was like, "Okay, I guess I'll go see some poems." [chuckles] This was in 2001, which I think is important to the story because it's before web video as we know it.
There was no way to know about this. If you didn't know where it was happening, you've never seen it or heard of it there. There's no media of what spoken word poetry/slam poetry is. I go, imagining it's going to be my preconceived notion of what spoken word poetry is, which is like old guys in like black shirts, black pants, snapping their fingers talking about, whatever. We go and it ends up being--
I remember the first person to get on the mic was this, like, squirrely looking dude, about like late 20s, early 30s. Scrawny, but you could tell that he's the one dude in the room you don't want to mess with because he's seen some stuff. [chuckles] He gets up on the mic and is like– I don't know if you've ever been to Nuyorican, it's very stripped down. What the stage was in those days was just like a brick background, black wooden box stage, one mic, lights, and black curtains. It couldn't be more like--
"Seeing this was like, it was the most real thing, which was acknowledging all your sides at once as a human being and as an artist. That made the message come across really extra authentic to me. It was the first time seeing that. Yes, I was like, 'I want to do that.'"
[00:04:59] Host: Almost like a comedy venue.
[00:05:02] Mason: Yes, exactly. You're just performing in a back alley or something. [chuckles] The dude gets up out there and he is like, "All right, just before I start, I just want everyone to know I'm not really this angry." [growls] He goes into the poem and he just turns incredible Hulk style into this furious diatribe. As I'm like watching it, I'm like, "Oh, clearly this man is capable of anger."
Listening to what he is saying, he knows– this is all written down and rehearsed and you can see the craft that went into the words that are coming out of his mouth and also laced within that are jokes and a subtle craft to the words that he's saying. How that came off to me is like, "Oh, despite whatever it is that he's ranting about right now, he still is capable of acknowledging the joy of being alive to have had this experience. That's how I took it.
Just after seeing that, and that was the first person of a procession of performers that night. Just seeing people get up and be, what I would say is the definition of keeping it real, which was also a catchphrase circa 01, which usually meant, keep it real was synonymous with like, doing something outlandishly brash, but like, "No, no, I keep it real. You step on my toe, I'm going to knock you out.” Like, "No, that's excessive." [chuckles]Seeing this was like, it was the most real thing, which was acknowledging all your sides at once as a human being and as an artist. That made the message come across really extra authentic to me. It was the first time seeing that. Yes, I was like, "I want to do that."
[00:07:17] Host: After that then, when do you start putting the pen to paper?
[00:07:22] Mason: Almost immediately. After that, serendipitously, in the school newspaper, there was an article about on campus poetry open mic that was happening and it was called Verbal Mayhem. I see that within one or two weeks of that trip. I see it in the school paper and was like, "Oh, that thing that I just saw in New York is happening here weekly and it's free. Dope, I'm going to go." I went and it was put together by some-- it was a student run thing. I was in the living room of one of the off-campus houses and I went and sat in the living room and just watched and I was like, "Yes, this is that, and it's right here." I started being a regular there from that day on.
[00:08:11] Host: You knew when you started writing, you were writing for performance?
[00:08:16] Mason: Yes. It was always writing with the intention of it being shared aloud to that particular audience, to the Verbal Mayhem audience, which I didn't-- None of this crossed my mind at the time, but it's all people of my general demographic at a public university in New Jersey. Most of the folks grew up in and around Jersey. The fact that you're going here of your own volition means you just like this art stuff and are creatively inclined.
It's just like this core group of people, again, pre-social media, which I think is super important to point out, of how a scene develops with insulation. It's like the same core group of 20 to 30 people. People swap in and out, but that core group all influencing each other, insulated from outside influences. There's no idea of, "Oh, this isn't what you're supposed to do with poetry. We're kind of just--" I don't know. I liked it. Gary liked it. We're doing it right. [chuckles] We just kept doing it.
"This was just like, 'No, we're rhyming SAT words, that's what we do here.'"
[00:09:34] Host: You talk about your perception before going to the show as a lot of people with the black shirt and snapping. That's beat poetry, right? That's where the beat poets came and it was connected to jazz music and the scene of the day. It really-- I'm not a poet and I'm not involved in those circles, but in my mind, it didn't really change as far as performance, until this slam poetry took hold. It's evolved and taken different shapes and forms but what role does hip-hop and rap music play in opening the door for accessibility of poetry? Also, that performance aspect and that connective tissue between what slam poetry became from that beat poetry, snapping, turtleneck, beret-wearing, jazz.
[00:10:38] Mason: I think that it definitely had a solid influence on the folks who I came up with and the scene at the time. It did rhyme a lot more and was more inherently connected to a presentation that was more like acapella hip-hop. Not to say that there weren't other things happening but a lot more folks performed with meter and rhyme and that. There were a handful of hip-hop artists at that time who we gravitated towards, one being Aesop Rock.
This guy, just really esoteric rhymes and rhyme schemes and rhyme subjective songs that really stood apart from the late '90s what was commercially rap in the late '90s with like Puff Daddy and Puff Daddy-esque things. This was just like, “No, we're rhyming SAT words, that's what we do here.” [laughs] I don't know, that's just what we gravitated towards. I think that overall, through the fast-forwarding of time, like any art form, what is the most popular isn't going to be the most-- obviously, artistic taste is different between people, you put it on a spectrum, but the most what I would say advanced hip-hop, isn't really-- it's niche because I'm niche. I like listening to something and I hear, I'm like, man, that dude wrote that for me. I don't care if it was only written for me and like a hundred other people like me. I love that. Then you put that next to what is most commercially viable. It was just crafted for a different purpose. It was crafted to flick the switch that all of us have that one switch that all of us have instead of flicking the 12 switches that only me and a couple dudes have. There's always going to be that hip-hop that's out there. Today, there is that hip-hop that's popular and then there's that hip-hop that is going to appeal to slam poetry kids. That's always going to be out there. I don't know if that answered the question.
[00:13:16] Host: Sure. Absolutely.
[00:13:17] Mason: That I connect.
[00:13:19] Host: I would just think, even as an art form, of young kids from different backgrounds being able to sit and try to create rhymes because that's what's popular. I don't even know if they're connecting the fact that they're writing poetry in that moment, but they're following this art form that's popular but they're also following this art form that's as old as literature by creating poetry.
[00:13:49] Mason: As time has gone on from when my first forays into it in the early thousands to the kids who we’re now mentoring at Get Lit, their poetry style has evolved differently than what ours was in the day. I said we tended to adhere more towards Meter and it was more an actual offshoot of hip-hop where now, it's more, I would say and similar to condensed Moth.
[00:14:29] Host: Storytelling.
[00:14:30] Mason: It's less metered, I can definitely say. Less metered for spoken word poetry. I'd say less metered and more willing to be maximum vulnerable, which I think is wonderful to see in high school kids.
[00:14:55] Host: Because you're talking about, you're in college when you first came to this. I was in college when I first read a poem that affected me and changed a lot of the way that I view the world. The work that you're doing with Get Lit is introducing this at that younger age, starting at that 13, 14 where you're just starting to discover yourself. I'd love for you to talk about Get Lit in general and how you came to start working with them.
[00:15:31] Mason: Even both. I don't want to lose this point that what you said reminded me of, I came to it later on. I was still like 19, so it was college and how it affected me was like, “Finally, this is the thing that my voice should sound like. Finally! but if you give that to kids in high school and middle school, there is no “finally” moment. It just becomes integrated in how you communicate.
“...the catchphrase is it's not a classic because it's old, it's a classic because it's great. There's those old-timey poems right next to Kendrick Lamar lyrics, and that's the classic.“
[00:16:05] Host: It's another way of communicating.
[00:16:07] Mason: Yes, being this free and open with my thoughts and feelings and emotions is just inherent part of who I am. That's such a great foundation to have moving forward. That's I guess the crux of Get Lit, it's like giving-- not giving that voice but just showing kids this, “Hey, maybe this is your voice.”
Whether you go on to be a poet and you just discovered your life thing or is this something that you did once and you had the experience of really interrogating and crafting something, whatever, wherever you are, like you're better for that experience. Everyone is better for having had that experience. How I personally went from Rutgers University to here at Get Lit after Rutgers, the two guys who founded Verbal Mayhem started a group called Mayhem Poets.
[00:17:05] I then joined up with them and we were a touring group. Wrote a show. We did theaters and middle schools, high schools, assemblies, all that, all over the country for a bunch of years. We were called Mayhem Poets. Meanwhile, Get Lit was founded in 2006 by Diane Luby Lane as basically taking that, but doing it here in LA. They developed a curriculum that is approved by the state of California for English credits but it's all based around spoken word poetry and specifically classic and contemporary spoken word poetry, always being connected. We all know when we were in school, how was poetry taught? It was read this poem by someone many moons ago and-
[00:18:01] Host: Here's an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem.
“It's always like, poetry isn't something that used to happen, it's happening now, all the time around us.”
[00:18:03] Mason: -now we're going to tell you why this is great. It's like, okay, cool. What Get Lit does is take, okay, there is an anthology of classic poems. A lot of them are Elizabethan Era and before and after, which is the important part of… all right, the catchphrase is it's not a classic because it's old, it's a classic because it's great. There's those old-timey poems right next to Kendrick Lamar lyrics, and that's the classic. Go into the classroom, kids can select whichever one of those classic poems they gravitate towards for whatever reason in the moment. Then step by step through the curriculum, they write and memorize their own response poem to that poem. Then every time they share the poem, it is always back-to-back classic with the response showing the, hey this is like the pinnacle of the art form up to here. Then you pass that through the mind of a young person today and here's the future of that lineage. It's always like, poetry isn't something that used to happen, it's happening now, all the time around us. Simultaneously, I'm doing that work as part of a touring group and Get Lit is doing that here.
I was living in New York at the time, I started hosting the open mic at Bowery Poetry Club, a weekly thing, and then moved up and was executive director at Bowery Poetry for a year in 2019. Then moved to Los Angeles and basically, I knew of Get Lit as the analogous organization out here. I just reached out and was like, "Hey, I'm moving. Maybe you got a job?" Then they were like, "Hey, one of our staff members is doing a study abroad in Africa for a year. How about you sit at this desk?" [chuckles] I just slid right in. That was January 2020, and then pandemic occurred and we've been here with Get Lit since.
[00:20:15] Host: Now, how did the pandemic affect the work that you do? Did everything just switch virtual?
[00:20:21] Mason: Everything switched virtual. We happened to be in a unique position because one of the guys on staff who was the head of our media department also went to film school, had a lot of video and live streaming experience as the video guy and the sound guy for a theater in LA called Dynasty Typewriter. He was their media tech dude. I also had years of video and live streaming and AV experience with the National Poetry Slam Inc.
I was their videographer for three years traveling around and covering all those events. When everyone is immediately stuck home and the only tools you have are whatever is within arm's reach that you know what to do with, we're sitting on professional live-streaming gear and all this know-how and experience. We were able to quick pivot to do high-quality stream stuff through Zoom and other platforms quicker or on the leading edge when everyone was figuring out-- [crosstalk]
[00:21:38] Host: How do we do this? [laughs]
[00:21:40] Mason: What's this camera? We're like, "Okay, you got to route that over to here. We got the switcher over here." Timing-wise, so that was what March of 2020. April, we have our annual classic slam that's usually at LATC. There's multiple theaters, black box, and other sizes. All the kids come there. It's a thousand kids doing simultaneous things.
Then the finals is a big production at the theater at the Ace Hotel, so then with six weeks heads up, we were able to pivot everyone to this online version of that classic slam that year, and we had a custom web portal built that had each one of the theaters was a Zoom room that was streaming into a different button and you could click the button and tune in to the different channels and then had all this-- It was a big to-do, but what else are we going to do? It went off well.
"We now have a platform called Universe that's a custom-built web platform that's essentially the virtual classroom version of the Get Lit curriculum. Right now, we're recording this today. Three days prior to this very day that I am speaking to you, we were approved from LAUSD to be able to use Universe classroom in the schools."
[00:22:41] Host: Did it open up new opportunities and expand the reach of Get Lit?
[00:22:46] Mason: It really accelerated something that was in the back of a few people's minds, which is spoken word poetry is, "Yes, there's videos." Cool, but the work that Get Lit had been doing up to this point is geographically limited to how far can our teaching artists go in a day to teach a residency and come back. You're limited to there, and even when I was on tour, like it's, "Where can I physically get to do this thing."
Really in order to achieve this goal where every young person would love to have first hand opportunity to engage with spoken word poetry. How do we get to the kids in rural Missouri or wherever? I was like, "Man, a platform is going to be necessary for that." Then COVID, really accelerated, put to the forefront in everyone's mind, funders included, the need right here in front of your face. This is something that is necessary. Then also everyone on earth got a crash course in how to do this and how to create experiences as the producer that are engaging virtually and how as a consumer of virtual things, just how to relate to this.
[00:24:16] Host: Normalized it.
[00:24:17] Mason: Perfect word. Normalized it. We now have a platform called Universe that's a custom-built web platform that's essentially the virtual classroom version of the Get Lit curriculum. Right now, we're recording this today. Three days prior to this very day that I am speaking to you, we were approved from LAUSD to be able to use Universe classroom in the schools. Obviously-
[00:24:50] Host: Dude, that's awesome.
[00:24:50] Mason: -with middle and high school kids in public education. There's a lot of security principles, there's so many things that have to be signed and sealed, and we had a dev team that pulled it off. We're really excited they're going to start with summer school this coming up and in the fall, we'll start that spread through all of California and beyond.
[00:25:17] Host: As a parent of about-to-be high school student who's trying to find her own voice, I love that this exists, and I love that it's here. This leads me into my next question or train of thought. I've been on this kick with a lot of these interviews, and the work you do with Get Lit, it makes me think about the role that art plays in filling in the gaps where traditional education miss or skip, and it's the human story.
It's that human experience that you talked about earlier. Whether it's visual art, or music, or poetry, or cinema, or literature, we connect to what's being shared. It's not just facts and numbers. It's not this many people died in this war and this year. It's, this is what war does to your soul. This is the human experience with all of the emotion, of fear, and loyalty, anger, love, hate, everything that's-- it personalizes it, and it's I think, necessary in education, especially for those young people.
[00:26:29] Mason: Agreed. It comes to a phrase-- I've heard a few different times, so I don't know who said it, probably some old Greek guy, but something along the lines of, "There's a lot of wonderment, in terms of how we are alive, and studying that. Then why are you alive is up to you.” What gets you going? There's the science of cells and this, that, and the other.
There's the fact that you have to eat food and get water. How do you do that? In this current economic system, you trade your work and your time, and your skills that you've learned in order to then get what you need to survive. You are now surviving, what next? We have brains that are capable of more than just taking care of our survival, which comes first, but once you have that like, "All right, what's cool for you now that you are existing?" The exploration of that is what life is about.
[00:27:43] Host: Also, just like the human experience throughout history, these people that you're reading, these people that you're studying about, this historical moment that happened 100 years ago. Art gives you that lived human experience of that.
[00:28:05] Mason: That's super true, and seeing how much of that translates-- How much you really do have in common with the thoughts and hopes, and feelings of people who lived in the year 600. How else are you going to know if you don't engage in what they produced at the time, which is they wrote stuff down and read those things. There was music produced, listen to those things. That's actually one form of time travel I would say you can actually peer into their thoughts. Then with that, I think it helps you better contextualize yourself and where you stand in the current world around us. I remember how much of what I consider to be me is just a product of the times that we live in. Or is it something that's just a human condition? You don't know until you engage with and speak to and listen to a wide variety of different humans across a wide variety of time periods.
Then you'd be like, "Oh, man, this really subtle feeling of how I felt when my eighth-grade classmates did and said this, but I didn't say anything because I don't see anybody else acknowledging that feeling." Then you open up some Shakespeare play and it's like, "Oh, he said it. That's all it felt. That connection is so dope.
"...so much of what I know about what it is to live as someone who is not me, I know from having attended poetry events and just hearing the words coming literally from the mouths of other people."
[00:29:46] Host: I think it also connects to your ethnic studies curriculum that Get Lit has started. In California, it's going to be a requirement in two years for graduating seniors to take a semester in ethnic studies. Having your curriculum available really opens the door to representation but also empathy and self-identity as well.
[00:30:15] Mason: Absolutely. I can speak from personal experience so much of what I know about what it is to live as someone who is not me, I know from having attended poetry events and just hearing the words coming literally from the mouths of other people. You could check off all the things of me. I'm a 6-foot-tall, native English-speaking Black man from the Northeast in this time period, da, da, da, da, da. My lived experience has been a certain sort of way. I don't know what it is having grown up in a small town in Montana, raised strict Catholic, and then you are now trans and having to navigate that.
I can sit here and imagine, but then at poetry events, I'm like, "Oh, I'm literally listening to this human being." Tell me what it's like. When you're around, you're both attuned to the craft of poetry that they're able to compress so much into a short poem, so much authenticity of an actual lived life into a short poem and share that, then I can tap into that. Then it's like a zip file that one poem comes into me and then expands into a whole being. Then I'm like, "Oh." Just like you said, that's where empathy comes into play, and like growing a capacity for empathy comes into play.
That's my one-person literal lived experience. Then like to translate that to an ethnic studies curriculum, the same point stands. If you were not raised a Black man in this time period, in this locale, you can hear straight, connect straight from that person, and they will tell you what that lived experience is like. That's the so, such a distilled foundation of what learning is. It's hard for me to even like-- [chuckles] How can I even create an argument rationalizing this thing that is so fundamental to learning about the world around you? It's made up of a bunch of people who are not you. How to learn about them is to listen to them, tell you about themselves, like it's so fundamental.
[00:32:55] Host: We want to thank Mason Granger and everyone at Get Lit. For more information, visit Getlit.org. Chapters podcast was produced by past, forward, and made possible with support from Chapman University and California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library. For more information, visit pastforward.org, chapman.edu, and library.ca.gov.
[00:33:34] [END OF AUDIO]
