Poetry Slam Research Articles

Smudge by Mahogany L. Browne

Reviewed by: Smudge by Mahogany L. Browne Sean Morrissey Mahogany L. Browne. Smudge. Button Poetry, 2015. With her 2015 chapbook collection Smudge (Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press), poet, activist, and performance poetry champion Mahogany Browne explores the cruel complexity of inter-racial discrimination, familial strain, and anxiety within the African-American community. The “you,” to whom so many of these poems are addressed, might just as well be written back to another knowing reader who, too, has been the victim of bullied insults and ever-present reminders of a socio-cultural “ideal”: light-skinned, “good” hair, perfect curves. Consider, for example, the following passage from the collection’s opening poem, You brown dirty dark black blackest night midnight bluebl___k girl y o u soblk somehow you forgot your name. The full use of “black” and “blackest” are weaponized. They become two words within a string of abusive descriptors and quick alliterative pacing that read more like fisted jabs. One feels pummeled and picked apart, reduced to abbreviated shorthand (“blk”) or in pieces, incomplete (“bl___k”) as the speaker laments her unrequited “desire to be wanted.” Even the physical layout itself (Smudge is set in landscape, not a traditional portrait style) can be said to represent the speaker’s own sense of self, uniquely different and apart from the common shape of her contemporaries. It also provides ample room for Browne’s ranging, spatial forms to flow across the page, as in this excerpt from “When 12 Play Was on Repeat”: When you are a deep amber & your jheri curl is a distant memory & your shape is swollen in the perfect places & the boys remember your name & your first and last crush sings to you come here with a lilt in his walk & his tongue wags you towards him with its pale pink and you smile because you remember the sun wrinkles your darkness— Here, the page-spanning lines and foregone punctuation pull our eyes from left to right, building suspense and anxiety with each new detail. The scene comes together as memory itself, an associative collage of indelible detail and emotionality that feels absolutely present. The intimacy of the poem is further enhanced by its narrative structure, using interior monologue to reveal the speaker’s inner voice. “When 12 Play Was on Repeat” reels [End Page 24] in the sexual anxiety of adolescence, of first loves and wanting “a story for the cold tiles when there are only bra straps & lip gloss & hair brushes and smiles,” to be more than—quoting the speaker—a “blk girl mistake.” Browne’s poetry is a kick in the chest, immediate and natural as the spoken word. With five LPs, countless performance awards, and a longstanding role as the Friday Night Slam poetry program director at the Nuyorican Poets Café in the Lower East Side, Browne’s spoken word bona fides are stone set. And where poems written for the page make use of stanzaic structure, enjambed line breaks, and literary forms to greater effect, spoken word is ethereal by design. The audience must be made to see and feel every beat of the piece in real time. There is no room for pretense or encumbered prose to overwhelm the listener; rather, it highlights the unique emotional resonance of lyric storytelling. With Smudge, Mahogany Browne underscores the full range of her artistic power in poems that feel equally at home on the mic as they do on the page. Consider, for example, the opening stanza of this untitled poem: Cause you ain’t seen none of them praying/whenThey crack/baby skull/open wide/on the side-Walk/call it jump in/like a black child need toKnow/how destructive a leap can be/like hisBlack skin know what “in” mean/in the firstDamn place/they say family and gang/ beThe same/so it ain’t mean nothing different/ It is impossible to ignore the aural quality of these lines, from the speaker’s vernacular to Browne’s phrasal pacing. The piece nearly reads like something found, a moment of living poetry overheard and fused with all the nuance of written verse. The repeating trochees and Browne’s...

CACAphonie: Humor, the Ludic, and Motherhood in the Words of Slam Poet, RiM

From adult stand-up comedy to performing scatological children's puns, humor has shaped the creative output of slam poet Amélie Picq-Grumbach (b. 1979), known onstage as RiM. RiM's poetic style emphasizes the ludic as a creative practice that engages with the plurality of voices of women slam performers and assigns agency to domestic gender roles. Through an analysis of two of her early published poems (2007), this article presents the polyphonic playful style of the slam artist by reading through the lens of Sara Ahmed's feminist snap (2017) and Hélène Cixous's feminine bodily pulsions in writing.

Read This Book Out Loud: A Review of Young Adult Works by Artists from the Poetry Slam Community

Read This Book Out Loud: A Review of Young Adult Works by Artists from the Poetry Slam Community

Performing poetry slam and listening closely to slam poetry

The article addresses poetry slam as an example of an oral turn captured in contemporary poetry practices that seems to extend the landscape of literary arts (Gioia, 2003). We investigate poetry slam as a phenomenon that mediates between at least two quite different (audio) language cultures – namely the contemporary Western literary poetry reading and a literary network, on the one side, and, on the other side, the rap battle connected to hip hop culture (other genres, such as e.g. stand-up comedy, could also have been drawn into the discussion, but in order to clarify our argument we have chosen to keep focus on the two mentioned). The article builds on a generalised perspective negotiating poetry slam as an aesthetic and cul- tural phenomenon in between hip hop culture and literary culture, but it also includes a close reading/listening aspect deriving from a speci c example, namely a performance by the 2012 poetry slam world champion Harry Baker. Positioning poetry slam in between literary culture and more popular cultural forms has previously been addressed by for instance Jeremy Kaye (2006) discussing the relationship between academic and popular aspects of poetry slam, Helen Gregory (2009) studying poetry slam in terms of interactions between avant-garde and established art worlds and Kathleen Crown (2001) pointing to poetry slams as subscribing to both popular and literary/poetry-based cultural influences.

In and out of Flow! improvisatory decision-making in dance and spoken word

Abstract Flow! is an open-stage performance event that sees dancers in close conversation with spoken word artists. From its roots in the United States, slam poetry has become a cultural phenomenon, touching the hearts and minds of those involved in the hip hop genre and that of modern literature. Over the years, the lines between this form of performance and other arts have begun to blur. Flow! takes this a step further, allowing the spoken word to entwine itself with the human body. This event sees a succession of duets and group performances, teaming up poets with dancers to showcase their art forms collaboratively. Each pair locks, pops, spits and rhymes their way through a spontaneous set. Using the experience of previous Flow! artists and workshop participants, and examples of other projects and research into improvisatory practices and dance/spoken word collaboration across the United Kingdom, we look at elements of divided attention for the artists and the audience. We expand this to include the time lapse that can occur when one art form responds to another in order to inform a discussion around a dancer’s improvisatory decision-making process. To do this, we analyse the concepts used in Flow! as three separate voices, offering differing perspectives on how the dancer’s mind responds to new spoken word stimuli.

Burrowing and becoming: teaching writing in uncertain times

ABSTRACTWhat happens when teachers perceive a growing rift between their pedagogical practice and their students’ lived experiences? How do teachers respond to the uncertainty that such a “relevance gap” can create? In a climate in which literacy research is often pressed to address the achievement gap and to contribute to a sense of certainty, this study explored the relevance gap experienced by teachers in their teaching of writing and the ways that teaching with uncertainty contributed to their practice. Situated in theories of curriculum as currere, local knowledge of practice, and pedagogy as assemblage, the article focuses on the theory and practice of four educators who teach writing in very different and diverse contexts. The rhizo-textual analysis of the data inspired a process of making assemblages to explore context, positionality, and power in teachers’ identities as writers and teachers of writing. Two such assemblages are described, one exploring struggle and the other possibility. In the struggles and uncertainties they experienced, each teacher found new possibilities in different places: in the land, in slam poetry, in story, and in film. Our mappings and analyses suggest that teachers can create new pedagogies of becoming for them and their students by burrowing into uncertainty, process, and social critique.

Can post-religious France exist? Abd Al Malik, Frenchness and Islam

This article explores the work of the writer, rapper and slam poet Abd Al Malik, who shook up the music world with his message of religious tolerance in the midst of the suburb riots in France in 2005 and the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015. It shows how he builds on his religious conversions and revelations to pose challenging questions about Islam, its interpretations, and its relationship with French society. In his essays and novel, he challenges the readiness of France to accept Muslim culture in its national and cultural identity. In his last novel, he tells the story of a converted Muslim frontrunner in a national presidential election and his reception by the French population. Malik campaigns in favour of a post-religious France through his music and through his literary works. He dismantles the idea that Islam is a religion of people of colour and insists on its multi-ethnicity. His ideal post-religious France would be based on acceptability and inclusivity, love and universalism. Malik insists that Islam is not radicalism. According to him the Islamist message that he denounces is based on a narrow and ‘ignorant’ interpretation of Islam, which negates both modernity and the Western world. Malik, as a Sufi Muslim, suggests that Islam actually enables religious practices that embrace deep French values and promote the aspiration to ‘vivre ensemble’.

Slam ô Féminin’s Collective Relationship to Print, the Spoken Word, and Marginalia

This article looks at the relationship between print and spoken poetry in the writing philosophy and written contributions made by the slam poetry association Slam ô féminin in its 2009 anthology. Part of Slam ô féminin’s philosophy derives from making use of the miscellaneous tidbits of our everyday life and engaging with them in a process called marginalia. For this reason, the journalistic fait divers serves as a productive symbol of their writing philosophy. The engagement between textuality and orality provides a collective agency that counteracts a feeling of marginalization.

Slam Poetry: An Artistic Resistance Toward Identity, Agency, and Activism

ABSTRACTIn this essay, the authors present experiences as writers (poets), thinkers, and activists to explicate the literary genre of slam poetry and its affordances as an artistic resistance toward the end of identity, agency, and activism. These areas of development are critical for youth because they are beginning to be navigated and established during adolescence. As youth engage in individual identity formation and define their values in relation to the world around them, slam has the potential to act as a vehicle for that exploration. Through the sharing of a dialogic exchange about slam poetry, the authors discuss the purpose and power of language and provide considerations for ways in which this out-of-school literacy act can be transferred into classroom spaces with youth. This work is timely; the need for youth to make sense of their worlds is an urgent compulsion and English language arts instruction needs a major shift to focus on criticality as much as schools currently focus on skills and proficiencies.

»ein Kreis auf meinem Arbeitstisch«: Die Schnipselpoesie Lydia Dahers

After successfully completing her literary apprenticeship with 3rd place at the 2005 German International Poetry Slam, Lydia Daher has continually sought new and often experimental platforms for showcasing the potential of language. Among her major projects, she has published several volumes of poetry, a number of music albums, and most recently Daher applied an innovative method of ‘sampling,’ reminiscent of HipHop producers such as DJ Shadow or The Avalanches to produce a volume of text and picture collages entitled Und auch nun, gegenuber dem Ganzen – dies (2014). Each collage relies on the textual (and pictorial) material of just one literary review taken from the literary supplement of the most recent edition of a German weekly newspaper. Although Daher is aware of each text as the most recent part of sequence that stretches back through the literary review, the reviewed novel, and the novelist’s source material, she recognises that this structure is mere illusion. To describe the completed collage, I invoke the theoretical framework of the palimpsest, for the collage is less a succession of parts than it is a structure of co-existence. Like the influential cut-up artist, William S. Burroughs, Lydia Daher further recognises that the surface structure closely mirrors the palimpsest of human perception.

City Profile: Wellington: Where Words Are Waiting

WORLDLIT.ORG 7 Like a beautiful, moody lover, Wellington doesn’t need to treat you kindly. Friends may sometimes wonder what you see in it, but when the city is good to you with its days of almost painful gorgeousness and clarity, you can forgive its bluster, its temper tantrums and cold shoulder. You may be clutching a lamppost, but at least you know you’re alive. – Kate Camp Wellington has been named “the coolest little capital of the world” and one of the top ten places to escape to. Affectionately known as Wellywood, New Zealand’s hipster capital is a city of film, sculpture, and creatives. Yet its literary credentials extend far beyond Tolkien. Katherine Mansfield casts a long shadow . In stories such as “Prelude,” “The Garden Party,” and “At the Bay.” In the restored Katherine Mansfield House and Garden where she spent her early years. In Woman of Words, the three-meter-high sculpture laser-cut with her words and phrases, depicting her striding along Lambton Quay. In her featured words, among those of twenty-three writers on the Wellington Writers Walk. From the landmark Wellington Central Library with its nikau palm columns, walk through Civic Square over the sculptural city to Sea Bridge. Scattered along the waterfront, often in the most unexpected places, lie concrete and metal inlaid quotations from some of New Zealand’s bestknown writers. Everywhere good words are waiting to be found. In independent bookstores with their helpful, knowledgeable staff: Unity, with its excellent range of intelligent New Zealand and international titles, its launches and readings; Kelburn’s Vic Books and Ekor with their superb coffee and food; Thorndon’s Millwood Gallery, which also sells artwork; Marsden in Karori; and the Children’s Bookshop in Kilbirnie. In secondhand bookstores: Arty Bees, with over one hundred thousand books; Pegasus, with its great readings; and The Ferret. But hide your books as you pass nearby Cuba Mall’s quirky bucket fountain. It’s designed to splash. The International Institute of Modern Letters organizes lunchtime Writers on Mondays at the national museum, Te Papa, and produces the online Best New Zealand Poems and literary journal Turbine. Wellington ’s many literary journals include two of the country’s best—Sport and the only one exclusively dedicated to reviewing the nation’s books, New Zealand Books. Bursting with literary activity, Wellington hosts the internationally star-studded biennial New Zealand Writers and Readers Week, the hugely popular LitCrawl, National Poetry Day events, poetry slams, and monthly poetry readings in the inner city and up the coast. What’s not to love in the world’s windiest city? Find a sheltered spot with a craft beer or one of the world’s best flat whites. Look out at the hills, the harbor, the sea. The city opens like a well-loved book. Alison Wong’s historical novel, As the Earth Turns Silver, is set in Wellington. To read a story and poem by Alison Wong, turn to page 28. Her Wellington reading list appears in the Takeaway at the end of this issue. photo : flickr . com / people / feefoxfotos Notebook city profile Wellington Where Words Are Waiting by Alison Wong ...

Reading Poetry Slam:

Poetry slams have recently received critical attention in relation with troubadour tradition, beat generation and Harlem Renaissance. A few studies have analyzed some poems of poetry slams and most of them have set apart script from performance. However we have to pay attention to the performance which is mainly paralinguistic expressions to understand a slam poem comprehensively. A performed poem is distributed not as a written text but as a movie clip that contains the performer’s paralanguage expressions as well as linguistic contents of the poem. The key questions in this respect are: 1) what kind of factors do we consider here and 2) how are multi-sensory poetic words organizedand how can we analyze these works academically. To amplify on the first question, the theater semiotics of Anne Ubersfeld will be partially applied. For the second question, this paper will discuss Andrea Gibson’s “I do” performances based on an analysis of details selected according to the answers of the first question.

The Hermeneutics of Poetry Slam: Play, Festival and Symbol

The Hermeneutics of Poetry Slam: Play, Festival and Symbol

(Re-)Locating Prestige: Poetry Readings, Poetry Slams, and Poetry Jam Sessions in Contemporary Spain

Spanish contemporary poetry is enjoying extraordinary vitality. One of its more noteworthy manifestations is witnessed in poetry recitals, poetry slams, and jam poetry sessions. These events — performed in alternative venues outside official or prestigious literary circles such as cafés, bars, or clubs — take place without any form of support from official cultural institutions but manage to attract a high number of poets and audience members. Their great popularity signals a key feature in Spanish literary circles: a new and non-traditional generation of literary consumers — and producers — has emerged. This article analyses said cultural shift: the new spaces poetry has infiltrated, and scholars’ reluctance to adapt their concept of poetry to meet these recent developments. Performance poetry generates a great traffic of ideas and cultural exchanges, and this article explores its cultural value and calls for a redistribution and relocation of prestige within new economies of aesthetic value that can legitimize this poetry as a worthy form of cultural production.

The Hermeneutics of Poetry Slam: Play, Festival and Symbol

The Hermeneutics of Poetry Slam: Play, Festival and Symbol

Reflecting on Ea

Reflecting on Ea Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada (bio) I was parked at the Kapi‘olani Community College farmer’s market, of all places, and my mind kept flashing back to the words I had heard two weeks before, from a speech given in 1871. I sat in my minivan, looking up toward the mountains. A warm June wind blew through my window. Manuokū danced around the tops of the trees. To my right, the dark blue of the ocean moved imperceptibly below the lighter blue of the sky. I knew that I was seeing ea all around me. For Hawaiians, ea means a number of different things: rising, life, breath, sovereignty. In the speech, reprinted in the August 12, 1871, issue of Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, a man named David Kahalemaile talks about the importance of ea, describing it as something vital that we cannot live without. Ke ea o ka i‘a, he wai. The ea of fish is water. Ke ea o ke kanaka, he makani. The ea of the person is wind. Ke ea o ka honua, he kanaka. The ea of the earth is the person. Ke ea o ka moku, he hoeuli. The ea of the ship is the steering paddle. ‘O ke ea o ko Hawai‘i Pae ‘Ā ina, And the ea of the Hawaiian Islands is our ‘o ia nō ka noho aupuni ‘ana. independent governance. With those words in mind, relayed by my friend Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua to a group of us who had come together to learn about the Hawaiian Kingdom holiday Lā Ho‘iho‘i Ea, I was moved to write this poem. I had never written a poem before, but I had been assisting another friend, Lyz Soto, and the team of four women (three high schoolers and one college freshman) she was coaching for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival, and being around these smart, generous, courageous, and hilarious women had kindled a strong desire in me to write. But like most creative impulses I have had, I mostly put it out of my mind. The more I was around inspiring people in the community, however, the more I realized I was drawing ea from them, getting breath to speak. It had taken years for me to realize this, but this loud voice of mine had been given to me as a tool of reciprocity. It wasn’t just for [End Page 577] me to speak my own desires. My voice was for me to pass on what I had been taught and give back to people who had inspired me. A few days before I was sitting in that parking lot, I had attended the first Department of Interior hearing about proposed rulemaking for federal recognition. It was perhaps one of the first times in recent memory that the federal government thought to get the Hawaiian community’s feedback on moving toward a so-called government-to-government relationship between the federal government and Hawaiians along the lines of recognized Native American tribes, a relationship that, needless to say, has had a long history fraught with controversy. I was moved by how many Hawaiians had shown up at that meeting and the subsequent meetings to call for justice for what had been done by the United States to our people, and these calls very often included independence for Hawaiians. Almost as much as Kahalemaile’s words stuck with me, so too did the impassioned, articulate, and often elegant two-minute testimonies of our community. Yet in the media coverage and even the response from some of the Hawaiian civic clubs, all we heard about was the “embarrassment” caused by these ignorant, loud and angry Hawaiians. Normally I would just let my own anger at the way we view our own people fester inside me, helped sometimes by the healing balm of talking with friends, but this time, the expressions of ea that were around me, coming from the people around me, coming from the land around me, coming even from the sea around me, were giving me breath to say something. That anger, and at times despair, that we have so often as Hawaiians is...

Read This Book Out Loud: A Critical Analysis of Young Adult Works by Artists from the Poetry Slam Community

This article examines the efforts of notable authors from the poetry slam community who have published Young Adult works intended for the classroom. Numerous secondary educators have embraced spoken word poetry as an engaging art form for teenagers yet often express difficulty in finding age‐appropriate material to share in school settings. This literature review hopes to serve as an introductory reference for secondary educators and researchers, and differs from slam‐themed reviews in that it specifically highlights artists from the slam circuit who have transitioned into YA publishing. Since the featured authors hail from backgrounds in theatre and performance, the works discussed often incorporate characteristics of oral verse that seemingly transcend the print medium. Also examined is the inherent barrier between oppositional, profane narratives embraced by youth, and the expectations of educational institutions who use censorship to sterilize places of learning. Written by an educator and academic who has been a part of the slam community for over a decade, this article offers an insider’s perspective for secondary educators, researchers, and fans of spoken word poetry who wish to know more about integrating the works of prominent ‘slammers’ into their classroom curricula.

Remediated verse: Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee and Patience Agbabi’s ‘Unfinished Business’

This essay obliquely recalls the mirroring structure of the poem printed on the previous page, ‘Unfinished Business,’ Patience Agbabi’s engagement with Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee in her one-round poetry slam, Telling Tales (Cannongate, 2014). Our essay is organized by keywords common to both poems. Each section devotes a paragraph or two to Chaucer’s Melibee and then turns to Agbabi’s ‘Unfinished Business.’ By repeating essential keywords at the beginning and ending of each section (or linking a keyword at the end of one section to the beginning of another) our analysis suggests the recursive chain inherent in the poem’s mirroring structure, as well as in the poem’s reformulation of Chaucer’s prose tale.

Author as a Medium: Strategies of Embodiment of Text in Poetry Slam

Author as a Medium: Strategies of Embodiment of Text in Poetry Slam

‘Orality is my reality’: the identity stakes of the ‘oral’ creation in Libreville hip-hop practices

Based on an ethnographic study in Libreville, this presentation examines the political and identity issues contained in the inscription in the register of orality for Gabonese hip-hop artists, mainly in rap music and slam poetry. It describes the history of these two genres’ appropriation in Libreville, then analyses how the claim for orality is deeply shaped for Gabonese youth with a dynamic of identity construction and of reafricanization, manifested in three different ways: the creation of a peer language (toli bangando), the use of a traditional Fang epic (mvet), and the staging of religious initiation societies. It finally discusses how this identity construction coincides with postcolonial issues and with connections with the black diaspora.