While not the most well-known poet in the world, Rudy Francisco stands as one of my favorite spoken word artists. I would like to spend time talking about his poems, and how he uses spoken word to paint vivid pictures of his experiences in life. Rudy Francisco is a 36-year-old African American who often writes about difficult moments in his life surrounding topics like love and tragedy. While these topics are certainly relatable, he pinpoints small, specific emotions and experiences during these moments to write about. In doing so, he usually puts words to a shared experience that readers can call upon in their own lives.
In some ways, it feels wrong to analyze his work, because it carries with it a craft and expertise that some college kid can only hope to navigate. Nevertheless, I’ll try my best to do so. Rudy writes about sexism and the ways men often treat women in his poem called Chameleon, saying, “They say you gotta peel a woman like a tangerine // And your job as a man is to chameleon your self into her trees // Bite a piece of her fruit and leave the rest hanging crooked and // confused.” It would be one thing to say that men often have to creatively find a way to be with a woman, as if it is some game or an act of trickery. Instead, Rudy uses a metaphor of a chameleon, an animal that literally changes the way it appears to describe how a man acts in today’s society. Further, he continues the metaphor when he says that a man bites “a piece of her fruit and leaves the rest hanging crooked.” Now, in this line specifically, I think it is important to remember that Rudy is talking about his own personal experiences and observations in life. He is not describing every man and woman on the planet, however, he is honing in on a specific regret or vulnerability he holds. By speaking to what he knows, Rudy connects better with those listening, as opposed to appealing to a wider range of experiences or struggles.
Across almost all of his poems, Rudy personifies objects in a rare fashion, giving meaning to his emotions in a way that traditional writing or structured writing simply cannot. In a love poem called My Favorite, he writes, “I bet the stars spend hours in the mirror // Getting pretty // Putting on extra sparkle // Hoping that she will notice them in the moonlight.” He takes “stars” phenomena we observe as untouchable, unreachable objects in the sky. When we go out at a night, we gaze up at the stars, knowing we will always be here on Earth. With this in mind, when Rudy personifies stars and says that they are worried about what a woman thinks of then, he indirectly places the woman above stars in the night sky. It’s as if the stars are trying to impress the woman. In other poems, Rudy breaks the rules of structured writing and uses his words as tools, rather than their normalized meaning. Without doing so, I feel as if his poetry would not stand out amongst other forms of writing, or even other poetry.