FROM THE GROUND WE RIZE, POETING AZ PRACTICE
RootFolkz / the OctoGenarian Poetz Tour
poetry no born in ivory tower.
poetry ryzup frum red klay, frum sweatz funk
frum mama humming shelling peaz,
frum drumz-tung & windz-breath,
frum hush that kum before the word.
poeting iz the people’s first language —
the way we remember our self when
the world forgetz our naym.
sound be itz ink. silence be itz teacher.
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Before the academy. Before the anthologies. Before the ink.
There was breath. There was drum. There was the people.
Poetry — or poeting, as we call it — didn’t start in books; it began in our bodies.
In the hum between heartbeats, in the moan that rose when words were too small to hold grief or joy, our Ancestors called that sound prayer. Or song. Dance or just living.
From the ground up, poetry is a root-language, up from the bottom where the people live. The Root Tongue of Being.
It’s how the folk make meaning out of sound. How we listen to the earth, to each other, and to what memory still carries in our bones.
RootFolkz holds that poeting ain’t performance — it’s praxis.
It’s doing, re-membering, remembering forward. Poeting is the practice of liberation.
A calling that demands rhythm, humility, and the courage to sound the truth even when saying nothing is safer.
poetry az the root language of being
Before books or Poetz, there was rhythm — breath breathing cadence, heartbeat, footsteps, rainfall, chant, and call-and-response.
From the ground up, poetry is the first grammar of consciousness — the way human beings learned to make meaning aloud through vibration, pattern, and repetition.
It rizes from the tongue and the drum long before it’s written.
To poet is to remember that sound is spirit — that the world was sung into being.
poetry az communal memory
At bottom, poeting is the people’s voice articulating.
The folk, the deli, the blues singer, the cadence caller on the chain gang, the storyteller at the fire circle — those who held memory when the written word was denied. Poeting preserves what colonizing power tries to erase.
It encodes survival, resistance, and truth into form — traveling mouth-to-ear across generations.
Poetry is the oral archive of our people refusing to forget.
poetry az resistance & re-creation
Poetry emerges from living pressure — from the body of those who must re-imagine language to tell truths the canon cannot hold. It is grass growing through concrete, Thelonious Monk’s angular chord insisting feeling instilling knowledge. It’s the crossroad where language becomes tool, weapon, medicine, mirror — all at once.
To poet is to heal what empire fractures. To name what colonization renders nameless. Poetry builds the bridge between survival and self-definition, between thinking and doing, between doing and being.
poetry az praxis
From the ground up, poetry ain’t product; it’s a practice — a way of aligning with earth’s sacred rhythm, with the hueman heart’s pulse, with the what that is.
To poet is to listen — to be silent within silence, to hear the Ancestors call, to ride the wind carrying their message to their progeny. Poeting is a craft of attention and relation — a bottom-up knowing of the world through its textures, not its abstractions. Poeting is poetry’s outgrowth from innerstanding.
in essence
From a bottom-up perspective, poeting is the people’s science of spirit and sound manifest —
a language of liberation, survival’s resistance, and becoming. It grows not from privilege but from necessity — not from theorizing but from doing.
It rizes from the need to say, sing, shout what must be said in that moment.
rootfolkz closing
We poet because we be on assignment from the Ancestors.
Because silence is never neutral.
Because every breath is another chance to tune the world back to balance.
In this circle, poeting is how we practice freedom.
It’s how we make the highest good audible.
—RootFolkz Poetz Press