I.N.K. slams poetry to end Sex Week 2015
At 7 p.m. on April 10, the Sexual Empowerment and Awareness at Tennessee (SEAT) administration hosted a poetry slam as the finale for Sex Week 2015. They invited Lane Shuler and Jonathan “Courageous” Clark, both of them performed at last year’s poetry slam, to come again this year to deliver some verses.
Adam Tindall//TNJN
At 7 p.m. on April 10, the Sexual Empowerment and Awareness at Tennessee (SEAT) administration hosted a poetry slam as the finale for Sex Week 2015. They invited Lane Shuler and Jonathan “Courageous” Clark, both of them performed at last year’s poetry slam, to come again this year to deliver some verses.
Shuler and Clark are a poetry duo known as “I.N.K.” They have a unique style of poetry recital and performed well alongside each other. Their poetry livened up the room frequently throughout the night.
Clark is an alumnus of University of Tennessee while Shuler is an alumnus of East Tennessee State University. Both are Tennesseans. Shuler hails from Townsend and Clark from Knoxville. Shuler and Clark met at the Knoxville Poetry Slam which Clark was hosting at the time.
“We’d been on the Knoxville Poetry Slam team a few times, and we traveled to different regions together,” Shuler said. “We went to nationals and finished sixth overall in the group competition with one of the pieces we’d written together … We had a TV show- TV One- wanted us to perform that piece.”
From there, the two realized their potential. Clark said, “They wanted us on TV. Then we must be almost good enough to go somewhere else other than TV. We got ourselves an agent. We got picked up, and we never looked back.”
Things were not always smooth sailing though.
“It took about a year where shows just picked up and started actually doing real work with poetry and actually being able to make some money out of it,” Clark explained. You can keep track of I.N.K.’s activity by following their Facebook page or Twitter.
Summer Awad, a UT senior and the co-chair of SEAT and the I.N.K. duo, said SEAT decided to host the poetry slam for a number of reasons.
“Part of it has to do with my own interest in poetry,” she said. “It’s just really something I wanted to bring as part of Sex Week. We try to cover all aspects of sex like the best sex toys for couples, sexuality and gender, and part of that is people expressing their sexuality, gender and relationship concerns through artistic means.”
She went on to mention that SEAT hosted the drag show and the poetry slam to let people be able to do that and that SEAT plans on hosting another poetry slam for next year’s Sex Week.
Overall, she said she thought Sex Week 2015 went pretty well.
“I think we had a lot of unique events and we really made an impact. Some of our attendance numbers were a little lower than we would have liked, but I think part of that has to do with the time of the year and the fact that we are not in the news a lot anymore. People are used to us being around.”
For anyone unaware, Sex Week initially stirred up some controversy when it first came into existence up which eventually provoked action from Tennessee’s legislature. As far as next year’s Sex Week event schedule, Awad said that SEAT would need to evaluate which events went well or did not this year as part of the planning process for next year’s Sex Week. You can follow up on future SEAT activity by following their Facebook page or Twitter.
