Jill Krutick, “Ray of Sunshine.” Oil on canvas, 40″ x 30″
After more than 20 years in the corporate world as an investment analyst and media executive, Jill Krutick W’84 was ready for a change. Why not, she thought, give “full-time artist” a try?
Krutick had been painting since childhood, initially copying the old masters —Van Gogh, Monet—but over time evolving her own style. She kept painting through business school and the jobs that followed, returning to her art during maternity leave or “whenever my job allowed a little extra time.”
Over the years, her work transformed from “geometric” to a “much more free-form” style, she says. “I’d describe my work as abstract expressionism, but each piece is different from the last. Depending on how the light, color and texture interplay, my paintings can range from fairly representational to truly abstract.”
Krutick now spends most days painting inside her bright Scarsdale home studio—or, when time permits, traveling the world to “collect colors.”
Jill Krutick, “Stairway to Heaven.” Oil on canvas, 36″ x 24″
“If we’re out on a family vacation to Antarctica, for example, I’ll be looking at the way the icebergs reflect the sun and each other and the water and the mountains,” she says. “All of that will be seared into my mind, and when I come home, I try to capture a lot of that feeling on canvas.”
She’s had several solo and group shows over the last few years, and was named a “trending artist” last year by the art gallery website Artsicle. “Of course, the ultimate dream is to have my paintings hanging in the Museum of Modern Art,” she says. “That is a lofty goal, but one I’d definitely love to achieve over time. I really want to develop this craft and this art, continue to grow as an artist and continue to broaden the public who enjoy following my work.”
This Friday, Saturday and Sunday (May 10-12, 2013), Krutick will open up her home studio to present a solo exhibit of nearly 100 works. “I see it as an opportunity to share my passion with the community and generate more interest and excitement,” she says. You can find more on that open house here.
Jill Krutick, “Field of Dreams.” Oil on canvas, 36″ x 36″
Jill Krutick, “Lady Liberty.” Oil on canvas, 30″ x 24″
John Carroll C’05 created a website that’s been entertaining us for the last few months. Now we’re sharing it with you: Poetry, by Google Voice.
Here’s how it works: People call a Google Voice phone number and read an actual poem. Google Voice transcribes that reading, mishearing much of it and spitting out what is essentially a brand-new poem. Carroll then posts the new Google Voice-ified version of the poem, along with a link to the original work, on his website.
A Penn English major and former assistant director of development at the Kelly Writers House, Carroll answered a few questions for us via email about his site and the poems it’s produced so far.
I love this idea of having Google Voice make its own weird poems out of actual poems. It’s a great twist on the Google-Voice-transcriptions-as-poetry concept. How did you come up with this?
Well, I’ll tell the unnecessarily LONG version so I provide the proper context. I started a Google Voice account when the service started years ago. I didn’t know if it’d be something I used, but it was intriguing enough that I figured I should get a local number and just hold onto it. And I didn’t use it much at all, but it was still linked with my email. So I occasionally got weird messages and voicemails from it — typically spam, trying to tell me I’d won a free iPad or something.
But in December, I received a hilarious voicemail from a couple that had tried to dial 215-821-4761, which I only know because they left a message where they discovered their error, talked about it, tried to figure out how to delete a message, then finally hung up. And the only thing more delightful than the message itself was Google’s attempt at a transcript: “Over. Over. Okay bye. So I just want to put the tanks flooring and I found very racist. 643-4764, that’s 7 network, Okay bye. Not. I need that we do call. We races. Your. Sorry order, Yeah, well at ever. It is proper response option. Yeah.”
I posted it to my Twitter account since I found it so funny, and Lily Applebaum C’12 —who works at Kelly Writers House — sent a reply that said: “That’s the best poem I’ve read all day!” And her reply reminded me that Google Voice “Poetry” is something that exists — so I thought I’d submit it to that site. That’s how it existed in my head: there’s a site out there that posts Google Voice transcripts that are particularly funny. But when I searched for it, I found that there were dozens of sites that did it.
And it’s such a minor thing, but it bothered me! Poetry can be difficult, but I think it’s too often dismissed as abstract — or weird for the sake of weird — by people who just don’t want to take the time to read it closely. And while I don’t mind people not reading poetry, I guess I did mind all of these sites that were copying one another. So I wanted to try something different.
The site was ultimately born from the idea that poetry is not awful and random, but that I could take this popular idea (bad transcription = poem!) and apply it to poems themselves. It reminded me of something I could have done in a Penn class I took with Kenneth Goldsmith called Uncreative Writing. Let me produce a new piece of writing by using something that already exists.
From there, it just continued to grow. I called to start it. Then I asked friends to call. Then I started using the vast PennSound archives to play readings to Google Voice. And then I started to recall shows and movies that featured poems. It started as something that I thought might be fun for a few days and became something that I’d like to maintain for a while.
The poem is important to me. You can find it excerpted on the dedication plaque inside the Kelly Writers House, which was an important place for me both as its student, employee and alum. I don’t think I’d be interested in poetry without that place and its people, or without being ushered to Emily and her work. So it just seemed like a natural place to start. Her importance also helped establish that nothing was off-limits. I wasn’t creating this blog to make fun of bad poems. I wanted to feed anything and everything to Google Voice to see what came out on the other side.
Which has been your favorite Google Voice-ified poem so far?
“Ontology” just struck me as both hilarious as a translation and perfect for the goals of the site: its shape and formatting guide your reading, so it’s exactly the type of work someone might dismiss as too abstract for them. And Google Voice just couldn’t make any sense of it, because it’s built to transcribe simple messages between people. So “Eng” becomes “And” and the poem just mutates into this big, indecipherable mess. I was laughing the entire time I was formatting it for the site.
Is there one that you’ve felt turned out better than the original?
Just today I posted a translation of the poem that Julia Stiles reads in the movie 10 Things I Hate About You. The poem is a pretty simple, rhyming piece: the kind of thing you’d expect someone who’s never read much poetry to write. Is the translation better? Maybe, maybe not. But what I like about it is how it gets a lot of the content right, but strips all of the format and musicality. It’s what I’d expect Julia Stiles to read in the movie if she was wearing a beret and didn’t love the guy. So maybe it’s not better, but it equals the trashiness of the original, and that’s probably the best work Google Voice has done so far.
If you want to read a poem for Carroll’s site and see what Google Voice comes up with, here’s the process:
1. Dial (215) 821-7461.
2. Leave your full name when prompted.
3. State the poem’s title and author.
4. Read the poem. (A note from Carroll: Google Voice has a 3-minute limit on voicemail, so you either have to be brief or call a few times!)
Greg Dunn, Cerebellar Lobe (2012) 22K gold, dye, and enamel on aluminized panel Depicts the cerebellum, a region of the brain required for movement and motor memory.
Though he came to Penn as a Ph.D student in neuroscience, Greg Dunn Gr’11 always had a strong artistic bent. First his fascination was with music, then graphic design, then paintings from the Edo period in Japan. “I always needed a creative outlet,” he says, and he found his latest muse right there in the University labs.
As a neuroscience student, “you’re just looking at these gorgeous images of neurons all day,” Dunn notes. As he examined gold-leaf-stained neuron slices, “I just instantly thought of classic Chinese and Japanese art. It was such beautiful source material.”
He began painting based on what he saw under the microscope, and by graduation, he’d produced numerous works that now hang in universities, medical centers and private homes. “I don’t consider what I do to necessarily be ‘science art,’” he says. “I’m painting something that scientists happen to be studying, but painting a landscape of the brain is no different than painting a forest.”
While the people buying his work are “mostly academics” — neuroscientists, neurologists, doctors — Dunn says people with neurodegenerative diseases have also shown interest. “I think it helps them to see something good about something they’ve been so frustrated with,” he adds.
Cortex in Metallic Pastels (2009) 21K gold, palladium, enamel, mica, and dye on aluminized panel Layered structure of the cerebral cortex, where processing of sensory and motor information occur.
When he’s not working on his art, Dunn meditates inside the sensory deprivation tank he bought himself as a graduation present. He says the darkness and quiet inside the tank can “really aid in reaching deeper states of meditation…things become very calm and you’re starkly alone with your thoughts. A lot of times ideas for my art will come to me while I’m in the tank. Without question, I always paint better after I’ve meditated.”
Is there any chance he’ll leave the artist’s life behind and go back to the lab someday? “No way. Absolutely no chance,” he says. “But I really love the scientific process, and it’s something that I try to bring into my art in various ways. And I wouldn’t be doing this in the first place without my background in neuroscience.”
With Dunn’s permission, here are some of the paintings he’s created, starting with Glomerulus, which hangs on campus inside the John Morgan Building’s Barchi Library (click any image to see the full gallery):
Come Sunday evening, we may or may not see Brave win an academy award for Best Animated Feature Film.
What we will almost certainly see, during whichever clip rolls on-screen at the ceremony, is the work of more than half a dozen alumni, all graduates of Penn’s Digital Media Design (DMD) program. Through their work at Pixar, Paul Kanyuk EAS’05, Ariela Nurko EAS’09, Nathan Zeichner EAS’11 GEng’12, Emily Weihrich EAS’10, Samantha Raja EAS’10 GEng’10 and Nadim Sinno GEng’10 all helped bring Brave to fruition.
Paul Kanyuk EAS’05 / Image: Pixar
We spoke with Kanyuk earlier this week about his role as the “crowds technical lead” for Brave — and first found out exactly what that title means.
“Normally, a professional animator can take weeks to animate a single character,” he says. “When you have hundreds on screen, you can’t just do things the same old way. I was in charge of overseeing the technical aspects of how to animate and render those crowd shots.”
Once you start looking for them, you’ll find crowds everywhere in Brave. In fact, nearly one in five shots in the 2012 film featured a crowd, according to Kanyuk. This short trailer includes one of his major crowd-animation scenes:
As does this one:
So in Pixar-world, what constitutes a crowd? “My joke is, ‘Three is a crowd,’” Kanyuk says with a chuckle. “All our software and techniques tend to be built toward small personal moments and as a result, a crowd can be as small as three — but usually they’ll kick it my way when it’s 10 or more. It’s the 10 to 50 range that’s most challenging. You can’t get away with the same tricks you can for bigger groups, like reusing the same characters in multiple places.”
While they may not garner the same attention as a main character, crowds boost an animated film’s realism, Kanyuk says. “With computer animation, you have to build everything. You have to create an environment, but unless it’s inhabited, you’ll notice it’s fake instantly. Part of the role of crowds is not to be noticed and to make things look alive. At the same time, the stakes are very high.”
Paul Kanyuk EAS’05
Kanyuk’s work at Pixar dates back to 2004, when he interned there and created “chipped paint, rust and dust” for Cars. He returned for a full-time job directly after graduation and has been working there ever since. Over the years, he’s developed crowd scenes for several Best Animated Feature Oscar-winners, including Ratatouille (2007), WALL*E (2008)and Up (2009).
“Ratatouille was one of the first times I got to work on group pack movement,” he says. “It was very fun. We made little brains for the rats and then had a program that told them what to do based on information in their environment.” The film also resulted in one of Kanyuk’s favorite crowd shots: a colony of rats falling through an elderly woman’s ceiling. (We couldn’t find a video online, but trust us — it’s a memorable moment.)
After spending two-and-a-half years creating Brave’s crowds— his small team of six included fellow alumni Zeichner and Weihrich — Kanyuk began work on Monsters University, due out this summer. (Crowd scenes in the trailer below start around 0:37.)
So will he be watching this weekend to see if Brave wins the Oscar? “Absolutely.” And so will crowds across the country.
As curator of poetry at Harvard University, Christina Davis C’93 G’93 spends every day surrounded by others’ poems; then she goes home and writes her own.
She’s currently preparing for the publication of her second collection of poems, An Ethic (Nightboat Books, 2013), which is dedicated to her late father — and fellow Penn alum — John H. Davis GrE’70.
“When my father died [in 2006], the only way I knew to encounter his death was to use my poems to ask questions,” Davis says of her new collection. “I did not want to write an elegy. I find elegies troubling because it’s hard to make someone mourn another human being. I decided instead to honor him by being curious, which is what he was. I gathered all of my questions and honed them down to the one thing I knew — that he was in the ground — and then built An Ethic poem by poem based on that.”
Davis describes her poetry as “minimalist and compressed…but it’s simultaneously very lyrical. My interest is in this intense condensery and the ways in which one word catalyzes another,” she adds. “I strive to reduce something down to its raw essence, devoid of any shells or protective layers.”
With Davis’s permission, here is the first poem from her new collection. It originally appeared in Tuesday: An Art Project.
AN ETHIC
There is no this or that world.
One is not more or less
admitted. Into the entirety
one is invited
and to the entirety
one comes.
There is no this or that world,
only the long illusion we are landlord,
the never-ending study
of anotherness, the ark of ilks and kinds.
It is a later wilderness
in which we find ourselves,
it is an Our thought
if we but find our selves,
we will find that we dwell on the one earth.
I hope we are found
to have lived
on no this or that earth.
Davis also sent along this recording of herself reading the poem:
She says her interest in the form arrived early, right around age 5. She wrote poems throughout her childhood and teenage years, but didn’t fully realize her fascination with the written word until enrolling in Rebecca Bushnell’s Shakespeare course at Penn. She recalls: “I was taking it because I wanted to become an actress. Our first assignment was to look at the Oxford English Dictionary — which I’d never heard of before — and follow the life of one word through all of King Lear. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t even known that words evolved. I’d been terrified of the dictionary because I thought it was a law, and something deep in me resisted it. I was in the Rosengarten Library basement reference area and when I opened the OED the word I fell upon was ‘zero.’ The fact that a word could have such dynamism and uncertainty — and that I didn’t have to believe in its law because it changes — was so thrilling to me and so liberating. Shortly thereafter, I changed my major to English with a concentration in creative writing.”
When she’s not writing her own poems, Davis works as curator of poetry at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. She’s been there for nearly five years now, running programs including an oral history series, and says she often looks to Penn for inspiration. “I revere the work that Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein have done at the Kelly Writers House, and that certainly has guided me,” she says. “I have apprenticed myself to their template. It’s such a generous template.” As a result, “I feel like Penn is still guiding me, it’s still very much a part of my life and work.”
Here’s a look at one of those oral history events, as introduced by Davis herself:
Yesterday wasn’t just any drizzly winter Wednesday. Here at Penn, it was the day John Legend C’99 came to Irvine Auditorium and delivered the 12th Annual Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture in Social Justice.
The evening started with a violin performance of “Ordinary People” by English Ph.D. student Melanie Hill. Here’s a snippet:
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Following an introduction by President Amy Gutmann, Legend — a singer, songwriter, Grammy winner, philanthropist, activist and Counterparts alumnus — sat down with Camille Charles, director of Penn’s Center for Africana Studies, for a wide-ranging discussion of his work and life.
Growing up in Ohio, Legend was mainly home-schooled and skipped three grades, eventually entering Penn as a 16-year-old freshman. He said he discovered a host of musical influences while living in Philadelphia — including the Roots and Common — and noted that, “no one says, ‘Go to Penn so you can break into the music business’…but it actually was very helpful to me in becoming a recording artist.”
After reflecting on his early days in the industry, Legend discussed his lifelong interest in social justice. It began at home, he said. His family always stressed the importance of giving back, taking in foster children and, at one point, an entire family. “If you’re living a life that means anything,” he added, “you’re fighting for social justice.”
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation — and Kanye West’s now-infamous statement that President George W. Bush “doesn’t care about black people” — Legend got to thinking about the neglect communities around the world have suffered. He launched the Show Me Campaign a few years later, using his 2007 song of the same title as a model:
More specifically, the Show Me Campaign aims to “break the cycle of poverty using solutions that have been proven to improve people’s lives and to give them the opportunities to survive, thrive and succeed,” according to its website.
The conversation in Irvine Auditorium then turned to Legend’s connection with the 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman. Here’s what he said about that:
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And here’s the song he wrote for the film:
The evening ended with a question-and-answer session, during which Legend predicted that we will soon see more socially focused music.
You may remember our “best of” (i.e. most-viewed) blog post countdown from last year. We’re back with another for 2012, only this time with a twist: We decided that only posts written this year would be included.
Before we get into our countdown, ever wonder where people are reading this blog?
It seems the answer is “all over the place.” This past year, we had visitors from Zimbabwe, Argentina, Australia, Thailand and 90 other countries. (Long-distance readers: please say hello sometime in the comments!)
Now, without further ado, here are our five most popular posts from 2012:
The holiday season is upon us, and sometimes the greatest gift is time to relax, unwind and not think about the holiday season being upon us. For those who are looking forward to some days off in the coming weeks — or will at least have a free hour or two — here are a few Penn-arts-related offerings for a long read, a quick watch and a new listen:
READthis interview with Erik Larson C’76 from Creative Nonfiction. (He even mentions his time at Penn: “I studied history at the University of Pennsylvania, but that’s because the history professors were some of the best. I got lured into Russian history, in particular, by a fantastic professor. I got so drawn into Russian history by this guy that it changed my whole college plan. Suddenly I was Russian history, Russian language, Russian literature.”) For more on Larson, you can see his summer reading suggestions from this blog post or read the Gazette’s most recent review of his work.
LISTEN to music from aspiring rapper/hip-hop artist — and Wharton sophomore — Taylor McLendon, a.k.a. “Ivy Sole.” More than 30 tracks are available on her SoundCloud stream. McLendon spoke to the Daily Pennsylvanian last month about her work, describing her main goal as an artist: “If I can make a song that 50 years from now can send you back to that time but still be relevant, I think that would be the greatest thing ever.”
WATCHThe Simpsons writer and executive producer — and former Gazette student columnist — Matt Selman C’93 discuss some of his favorite moments from working on the show, video below. (You can also read about how Selman helped the Button make an appearance on The Simpsons in this 2008 Gazette story and see an excerpt from one of his student columns here.)
Last week, over on “What’s Alan Watching?,” Alan Sepinwall C’96 reviewed the latest episodes of 30 Rock, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Last Resort, Suburgatory, The Mindy Project, New Girl, Parenthood, How I Met Your Mother, Treme, Homeland, The Walking Dead and Boardwalk Empire.
He says it was “something of a slow week.”
During peak TV season, he’ll write up to twice as many reviews in a given week. Somehow, amid all that writing, Sepinwall also found time to pen a new book, which was released last month. We caught up with him to learn more about it and hear his take on the current crop of TV shows.
How did you come to write The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever? I wrote a book years ago called Stop Being a Hater and Learn to Love The O.C., which was a quickie cash-in book of the kind that are made about any instant pop-culture phenomenon. It was a fun book, but I always wanted to write something more serious, and more permanent, about all the great television shows I had gotten to cover in my career. A literary agent reached out to me about the idea of doing a book and got me thinking again, and then I was at a party at the San Diego Comic-Con standing next to Ted Griffin, who had created a show I loved called Terriers — which was quickly canceled in part because it was called Terriers — and mentioned the idea, and he not only prodded me to do it, but gave me the title I ultimately used. And when the man who comes up with the name Terriers gives you a title, you use it.
Your book looks at the TV dramas that “ushered in a new golden age of television that made people take the medium more seriously than ever before.” Which show would you consider the most important to that transformation? I would say the three most important shows were Oz, The Sopranos and The Shield. Oz was the first drama HBO made, in a very relaxed atmosphere where there were almost no rules of any kind, and it was very good and enough of a success that HBO decided to continue in that direction. The Sopranos was great, and also a surprising crossover hit, which led other people to start experimenting. And The Shield was the show that proved you could make an HBO-style show away from HBO, which only made the golden age more wide-reaching and long-lasting.
What’s your all-time favorite show?
Going into the writing of the book, I would have said The Wire without question. After re-watching large chunks of the shows to refresh my memory on certain things, I found myself falling for The Sopranos in a big way again, to where those two shows would be 1 and 1A — The Wire more consistent, Sopranos maybe more daring — and where I’m not sure which is ahead on any given day. So I’ll wimp out and say The Simpsons.
What do you consider the best show on TV right now?
The two AMC shows in the book, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, are both pretty incredible, and Mad Men had the ever-so-slightly better recent season, so I’ll pick that.
How about the best show that no one’s watching — or at least not enough people? Parks and Recreation on NBC. It’s from a bunch of the people responsible for The Office, and it’s better in almost every way than The Office was at its best: smart and warm and just wickedly funny, at times almost feeling like a live-action version of The Simpsons.
What’s the worst show that ever made it to air?
Oh, God. With any luck, it’s something I never even watched. In recent years, I’ve largely stopped watching unscripted TV, so I’m sure I’d be horrified by Toddlers & Tiaras and the like. But my favorite bad title (attached to a bad show) of all time is probably UPN’s Homeboys in Outer Space. This was a real show.
Caroline Rothstein C’06, the same Caroline Rothstein for whom an annual poetry program at the Kelly Writers House is named, created a video that recently caught Lady Gaga’s attention — and, by extension, the attention of Gaga’s 53 million Facebook fans and 30 million Twitter followers.
Rothstein is a writer and performer who specializes in spoken-word poetry. (Recent grads may have seen her on stage with The Excelano Project, which she directed her junior and senior years at Penn.) She has performed her oral poetry at colleges, schools and other venues around the country, and is also a longtime eating-disorder recovery activist who hosts a Body Empowerment series on YouTube.
Her spoken-word and eating-disorder activism often overlap, as they did with the video Gaga discovered and shared with fans. “Fat”’s powerful message begins immediately, surging from its first three lines: “I am not fat. It took me 22 years to purge words onto a page the same way I purged my body into stomach ulcers, popped eye blood vessels and missing tooth enamel. Twenty-two years to tell the tale of my bulimic, anorexic, and disordered-eating hell.”
Rothstein spoke with us about writing “Fat” as a senior at Penn and about the video’s recent spread. She also discussed some of her other work, including an award-winning one-woman play based on her own experience with and recovery from an eating disorder.
Lady Gaga revealed her own eating-disorder struggles shortly before sharing your video. Do you have any idea how she found “Fat”?
[Last month,] a friend posted an article on my Facebook wall about how Lady Gaga had come out saying she has a history of an eating disorder and then announced, ‘Let’s start a Body Revolution; everyone share your story.’ I went to [Gaga's website] littlemonsters.com, which I had never heard of before that evening, to see what was going on. By the minute, thousands of people were posting their stories and saying things like, ‘I had anorexia.’ ‘I had bulimia.’ ‘I cut myself.’ ‘This is a picture of my stomach.’ It was so powerful and amazing and I thought, You know what? I’m going to join in. So I posted a link to the video of my poem “Fat” and in the caption I wrote, ‘I’m eight years recovered from a decade-long eating disorder and really grateful to Lady Gaga for being so brave and spearheading this movement.’
I went to sleep. I figured maybe a few fans would see it. Then the next day, I saw all these tweets from Lady Gaga fans saying, ‘We love you. The whole world knows who you are.’ I went and checked [Gaga’s] Twitter page and sure enough, she had tweeted the link. The part I know is that I posted it; the speculation is how, amidst the thousands and thousands of posts, she or whomever came across mine. That’s the part I don’t know.
What sort of response did you experience from people discovering your video?
It’s been amazing. I have all these new fans and followers and supporters, and on [littlemonsters.com] I received hundreds and hundreds of incredible comments. I am so moved and grateful…. I feel awkward just listing all the accolades I was getting, [but] more importantly, a lot of people shared their stories, too, and that’s why I do what I do. That’s why my art is personal and political and that’s why I believe the personal is political. My hope is that we all eliminate the shame surrounding whatever our stories are so that in our honesty we heal ourselves and we heal each other.
“Fat” is such a compelling piece. Can you tell me about the process and experience of writing it?
I wrote it at Penn when I was a second-semester senior. I was 22 years old at the time. While I had been a writer and performer my whole life and I had been publicly speaking about my experience for years, it was so hard to articulate it succinctly. At that point, I was about a year and a half into recovery and I was finally able to concisely articulate my experience in a way that felt manageable, authentic and honest to the severity of the illness and also to the reality of recovery being possible.
[The piece] went through a lot of edits. I vacillated between words and lines for weeks, I remember. I can picture myself actually sitting in Qdoba at the counter window looking out onto Superblock and editing word by word. I wanted it to be accessible, and that’s what this whole Lady Gaga thing has proven to me — that it is the accessible piece I hoped it would be.
At what point did you realize how powerful spoken-word poetry could be for you?
I didn’t know spoken-word existed until I was at Penn. Carlos Andres Gomez had just started The Excelano Project and I saw him perform. I was a freshman and I thought, ‘Now there’s an art form that exists where I can be a writer, performer and activist all at once instead of separately.’ My whole life I’d been a theater kid and a poet and now I had a way to do it all at once. I tried out for Excelano, made it and I was in the group for the rest of Penn.
Spoken-word is so personal and expository. How do you prepare yourself to go on stage and share such intimate thoughts and moments with an audience?
That’s actually always the easiest part for me. Even before spoken word I was publicly speaking about my eating disorder and writing very confessional poetry about depression and bulimia and sexual abuse. To me it feels inherent in who I am as an artist. I don’t know any other way to do it. That’s not a roadblock for me. The roadblock is, Do I have this memorized? That’s always the biggest challenge for me.
And how do you memorize everything?
Everyone has their own thing. I use a lot of old acting techniques. One is lying on my back and breathing each word so I get it in my body. Another is reading it over and over so I have it visually memorized.
Are there things that work well with spoken-word poetry that wouldn’t work as well in written-on-the-page poetry, and vice versa?
Absolutely. I think that’s why there are a lot of poets who struggle on the page who are incredible on-stage and vice versa. Performing gives you an opportunity to let go of grammar and structure, but I personally like to make sure my stuff works on the page before I bring it to the stage. If you read every spoken-word poet’s stuff it all looks different. Some people are like me and take care of how it looks, some just throw it in a paragraph and somehow get the cadence.
I’m in a really big repetition phase right now. I’m working a lot with repeating words and lines and motifs and performance lends itself better to that than the page does.
Tell me about your one-woman play, faith.
I developed it with the support of a director and production company. It debuted in the Culture Project’s Women Center Stage Festival in April here in New York. I did a two-night run and then I did a one-night benefit performance in another social-justice theater festival in New York in June. From there it won Outstanding Production of a Solo Show, so now it’s officially award-winning, which is really exciting for all of us. My producer and director and I are looking into some really incredible opportunities for moving forward with it, so this is really the beginning of its life, I hope.
What else are you working on now?
I tour and perform spoken word at colleges and universities and schools. I also facilitate workshops in writing, performance and empowerment in different schools. I have a Body Empowerment series on YouTube, which I’ve been doing for four years. Any day I’m wearing 50 different hats and multitasking and juggling to crazy degrees. Right now, I’m just working on loads of different projects and also traveling and performing all the time in New York and around the country.
What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in spoken word since you discovered the art form 10 years ago?
When I started spoken word it was a very adult art form. Very few youths had access to it and it was just starting to pick up in the college world. Now it’s starting in elementary school. That’s the biggest difference — you can grow up wanting to be a spoken-word poet.
Click here to read the full text of “Fat.” You can also see more of Caroline’s work on her YouTube channel, including this recent poem about her brother’s death:
Krutick had been painting since childhood, initially copying the old masters —Van Gogh, Monet—but over time evolving her own style. She kept painting through business school and the jobs that followed, returning to her art during maternity leave or “whenever my job allowed a little extra time.”
