Spoken Word Poetry Research Articles

De dood van de podiumdichter?

Performance poetry poses a problem to traditionally objective and ‘text based’ literary studies: it seems to herald a curious return of the performing subject. This renewed emphasis on the maker or speaker in performance poetry manifests itself in a variety of ways: first of all, the author is physically present during a slam or performance; secondly, he or she is the primary focus of attention for literary critics; and finally, the position of the author is underlined by the texts or lyrics of many performance poets, since they explicitly postulate a strong subject position. Nonetheless, this return of the author is far from unproblematic, for there are quite a number of performance poets who attempt to undo such a strong subject position. As a result, it becomes possible to discern between two strains of spoken word poetry: on the one hand, there is the strain of recitation poetry [voordrachtspoezie], which is in line with the nineteenth century tradition of verse declamation; and on the other hand, there is a strain of performance poetry [performancepoezie], characterized by a continuous undermining of the position of the performing subject.

Writing in rhythm: spoken word poetry in urban classrooms

Writing in rhythm: spoken word poetry in urban classrooms

“Every City Has Soldiers”: The Role of Intergenerational Relationships in Participatory Literacy Communities

This article examines the role of intergenerational relationships in the lives of experienced poets and writers (“soldiers”) and emerging poets and writers in what the author terms Participatory Literacy Communities (PLCs). Drawing from Wenger’s (1998) concept of communities of practice, the author uses data from two examples of PLCs—Black bookstore author events and spoken-word poetry “open mics”—to complicate notions of reciprocity and mentoring in the out-ofschool literacy practices of people of African descent. Three soldiering traditions are discussed: soldiers as literacy activists and advocates, soldiers as practitioners of the craft, and soldiers as historians of the word.

El Mexorcist (A Performance)

In the past months, I’ve been writing, re-writing and testing in front of informal audiences of colleagues a series of spoken word performance texts. Some of these texts I found by digging through forgotten archives of my computer’s memory. I brought them back to life through obsessive re-writings, in dialogue with my colleague, City Lights editor Elaine Katzenberger. Others are transcripts of ad lib texts that spontaneously came to being during my solo performances. A few I wrote this year in direct response to political or pop cultural phenomena, exploring their effects on my views on art, activism, identity, sexuality and language. What these texts have in common is a tone - a kind of ironic and melancholic tone - and a unique form of vernacular philosophical inquiry that I feel are at the core of performance art and performance literature. Together they function as reflections on our millennial condition, as artists and cultural practitioners living in the US, a country that is undergoing an unprecedented cultural and political crisis. Some underlying questions are: Why do we continue doing what we are doing (in my case, writing and performing) against the backdrop of war, censorship, cultural paranoia and spiritual despair? What are the new roles that artists must undertake? Where are the new borders between the accepted and the forbidden? Is art still a pertinent form of inquiry and contestation? Is my audience really with me? Who are ‘we’ and who are ‘they’? Can I collaborate with my audience in the making of the performance? From whence do we draw the energy to continue? As a performance artist my job is precisely to ask questions in original ways. Like most of my performance literature, these hybrid texts suffer from an identity crisis. Are they spoken word poetry, performance ‘monologues’, pop philosophy, art theory, post-colonial thought, or Chicano stand-up comedy? I truly don’t know. It is actually better that I don’t know. Like most of my literature, they are ‘open texts’, works in permanent progress, which means that their publication merely preserves them in one phase of their ongoing development. Together, I see them as both a multi-purpose literary bank and a script in permanent progress; documents of sorts for crossing the border into the new century. The form of these texts on the page is merely a performative strategy. Though they are poetic prose pieces, I have structured them like poems or monologues, in short sentences per line. This way, it is easier for me to read them aloud and to play with language rhythms and textures. My colleagues are constantly asking me why I chose to return to my solo spoken word material. First and foremost because my audiences asked me to do so. As I have toured with my troupe over the last three years, everywhere we go audiences tell me they want to hear my voice again. They want to know my current opinions about art and politics. They insist on hearing my voice, alone on stage, without excess performance paraphernalia. They ask and I must acquiesce. Furthermore, I feel that the complexities and subtleties imbedded in the content and form of these pieces couldn’t possibly be conveyed through my troupe work, which tends to be more experiential and collaborative. I begin performing this solo material sometime in early 2006. Every performance will utilize a different combination of texts and performative strategies. There will always be a 15-20 percent margin for improvisation, for specificity to the site, the city and the audience.

Def Poetry's Public: Spoken Word Poetry and the Racial Politics of Going Mainstream

Susan B.A. Somers-Willett is a poet, performer, and scholar who has competed and coached at a number of National Poetry Slams. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Roam (Crab Orchard Award Series, 2006), and is the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is researching the impact of public poetry projects on American culture.

Black (Play) Is. .. Black Play (Ain't): The Gumbo of Theatrical Blackness

In Marlon Riggs's brilliant and under-heralded film, Black Is . . . Black Ain't (1995), Riggs narrates part of the work from his hospital bed, IV drip dangling. Houston Baker, Jr. has called Riggs a black hero for his performance and, ostensibly, for the craft of his final project. A meditation on what Riggs had contemplated throughout his too-short life as to what might be "black" and what might not be, Black Is . . .Black Ain't confronts the arts of performance (film, dance, theatre, spoken word poetry) which exhibit limited and narrow definitions of blackness. Blackness, Riggs asserts, is a creolization, a virtual gumbo where the multiple ingredients work in tandem much more tastily than when they are separate. (Riggs does indeed make a pot of gumbo in the film.) I am invoking Riggs's film work in the beginning of this essay on black theatre because I feel Riggs articulates a longing that I myself have felt. Is it possible in a theatre production to create a gumbo of theatrical blackness? By this, I mean: Has blackness on stage mixed up, played with, and disturbed what we, as a theatre-going audience, are comfortable with and expect of performed blackness? I am here speaking not exclusively of the lasting images of stereotyped blackness that we have cultivated on the American stage, particularly on the popular stage. Rather, I am thinking of how black actors and playwrights have, to continue with Riggs's gumbo metaphor, seasoned blackness on stage. The basic ingredients are the ways in which blackness has been played on the American stage—through stereotype, but, also, with innovation, playfulness, mastery. All are in the gumbo of theatrical blackness, palatable and challenging at the same time. I have had some exciting theatre experiences in the past few years. For the purposes of this essay, I have now been thinking of some as possible examples of 1) black plays, and 2) the playing of (and, I would like to add, with) black. I have chosen two widely divergent performances. The first example that came to my mind of playing with black was Gloria Foster's portrayal of Mama Younger in the Williamstown Theatre Festival's summer 1999 production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Foster fused her famed classically trained voice and body to Mama's Chicago/Up South worn-out body frame. It was quite the wonder: Mama Younger met Lady Macbeth through Foster, and together they clasped their hands and wondered about the struggle of life. The acting moment I remember most strongly was at the conclusion of act one, scene one. Foster as Mama Younger has just slapped her daughter, Beneatha, played by Kimberly Elise. The agnostic Beneatha tried to deny the power of God, and her mother, horrified, physically reprimands her with the slap. Then, Foster goes to the [End Page 608] window to water a tiny, sad-looking plant that has survived because of "spirit." She gives this short speech: "Well, I always wanted me a garden like I used to see sometimes at the back of the houses down home. This plant is close as I ever got to having one. Lord, ain't nothing as dreary as the view from this window on a dreary day, is there?"38 My memory of Gloria Foster's rendering of these lines is that she contradicted the "down home" language of Mama Younger with her precise diction and grand carriage. Foster as Mama Younger watering the plant, if I had held my hands over my ears, had the look of Lady Macbeth attempting to wash her hands of blood. The movement and cadence of Mama Younger was infused with Foster's classical training, and what emerged from Foster was a bizarre, resistant performance. Foster played the blackness of Mama Younger as a struggle with the simultaneous physicality of Western classical theatre training with the demands of...

From the Coffee House to the School House: The Promise and Potential of Spoken Word Poetry in School Contexts

From the Coffee House to the School House: The Promise and Potential of Spoken Word Poetry in School Contexts

Check it while I wreck it: black womanhood, hip hop culture, and the public sphere

Hip-hop culture began in the early 1970s as the creative and activist expressions - graffiti writing, dee-jaying, break dancing, and rap music - of black and Latino youth in the depressed South Bronx, and the movement has since grown into a worldwide cultural phenomenon that permeates almost every aspect of society, from speech to dress. While hip-hop has been assimilated and exploited in the mainstream, young black women who came of age during the hip-hop era are grappling with the gender politics of a predominately masculine space. In this provocative study, Gwendolyn D. Pough explores the complex relationship between black women, hip-hop, and feminism. Examining a wide range of genres, including rap music, novels, spoken word poetry, hip-hop cinema, and hip-hop soul music, she traces the rhetoric of black women bringing wreck. Pough demonstrates how influential women rappers such as Queen Latifah, Missy Elliot, and Lil' Kim are building on the legacy of earlier generations of women - from Sojourner Truth to sisters of the black power and civil rights movements - to disrupt and break into the dominant patriarchal public sphere. She discusses the ways in which today's young black women struggle against the stereotypical language of the past (castrating black mother, mammy, sapphire) and the present (bitch, ho, chickenhead), and shows how rap provides an avenue to tell their own life stories, to construct their identities, and to dismantle historical and contemporary negative representations of black womanhood. Pough also looks at the on-going public dialogue between male and female rappers about love and relationships, explaining how the denigrating rhetoric used by men has been appropriated by black women rappers as a means to empowerment in their own lyrics. The author concludes with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of rap music as well as of third wave and black feminism. This fresh and thought-provoking perspective on the complexities of hip-hop urges young black women to harness the energy, vitality, and activist roots of hip-hop culture and rap music to claim a public voice for themselves and to bring wreck on sexism and misogyny in mainstream society.

“The Song Is Unfinished”

In this article, the author builds on McHenry and Heath’s study of the “literate” and the “literary” and McHenry’s research on “forgotten readers” by examining the often undocumented literacy traditions and practices of men and women of African descent. First, the author traces the legacy of blended traditions of both written and spoken words in African American writing and activism. Continuing with an examination of Black literary and social movements, the author asserts that the recent renaissance of activities around literacy, such as spoken word poetry events as well as writing collectives, contributes to a historical continuum. Ultimately, the author shows the importance of the inextricable link between history, literacy studies, and the teaching of language arts.

Feeling the Rhythm of the Critically Conscious Mind

A former middle school and high school teacher argues that using hip-hop music and spoken word poetry can help urban students engage in the study of literary terms. She describes how she used these forms of popular culture in a poetry unit and offers resources for teachers interested in adapting and extending her lessons.

Open Mics and Open Minds: Spoken Word Poetry in African Diaspora Participatory Literacy Communities

In this article, Maisha T. Fisher explores the resurgence of spoken word and poetry venues in the Black community and their salience as venues for cultural identity development and literacy practice. Calling them African Diaspora Participatory Literacy Communities (ADPLCs), Fisher describes two open mic poetry settings that recall the feeling and communal centrality of jazz clubs and literary circles of the Harlem Renaissance. These ADPLCs are predominantly created and supported by people of African descent who actively participate in literacy-centered events outside of school and work settings. Through ethnographic research, Fisher explores how these venues function as literacy centers in two communities. Fisher discusses the cultural practices that underlie the organization and orchestration of these events, explores what inspires and motivates participants, and examines how these venues operate as sites for multiple literacies.

Faces in the Crowds: A Tokyo International Anthology (review)

Faces in the Crowds is a hyperkinetic grab bag that gathers the Tokyo spoken-word poetry scene and the city's writing groups under one roof. The publisher, locally owned and cooperatively operated Printed Matter Press, has managed to survive and thrive in Tokyo for thirty years. Every so often, new editors take the helm and morph the journal into a reflection of the zeitgeist.

Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets

Before the Caribbean-inflected spoken-word poetry of the 1990s, epitomized by poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in Manhattan, there was reggae. In the past thirty years, most Caribbean poetry written in English has come to the shores of the United States on waves of music, in the lyrics of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Burning Spear. Kwame Dawes, himself a musician and poet, is not surprised by this phenomenon. The region's political and cultural awakening of the 1970s was fueled by a growing African consciousness, often in competition with the multiple traditions European, Indian, Chinese that have permeated many Caribbean nations for centuries. The influence of reggae has produced a poetry that is quite different from earlier work from the Caribbean, but this is only one more chapter in a tradition characterized by continuing tension with a diverse heritage.The interviews in Talk Yuh Talk reflect a range of Caribbean voices from several generations, from those poets influenced by a dynamic interplay between the popular culture of reggae, calypso, folk music, and yard theater to those whose work is closer to classical forms of literature and oral narrative. Kwame Dawes talks with many of the most important poets to have emerged from the Caribbean who are still writing today. The poets discuss their techniques, their situations as poets, and the challenges they face in the profession and in their craft. Well-known figures like Lorna Goodison, Grace Nichols, Kamau Brathwaite, Fred D'Aguiar, and Martin Carter share space with such lesser-known but equally important poets as Mervyn Morris and Kendel Hippolyte.In a specific introduction to each poet, Dawes offers a sense of what is important or meaningful about the poet's work. He explores detachment with Mervyn Morris, intellectual rigor with David Dabydeen, the struggles of obscurity with Cyril Dabydeen, the poetics of surprise and the erotic with Grace Nichols, the reggae escape motif with Lillian Allen, ambivalence about Africa with James Berry, and more, talking with eighteen poets in all. By allowing them to speak in their own voices and by directing the questions along the lines of creative process and aesthetics, Dawes makes a compelling case for the strength of Caribbean poetry while offering a lively source of inspiration and information for practicing poets as well as critics.

The Laugh of the Medusa

I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement. The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative. Since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the point of being discovered, they necessarily bear the mark of our time-a time during which the new breaks away from the old, and, more precisely, the (feminine) new from the old (la nouvelle de l'ancien). Thus, as there are no grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project. I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say "woman," I'm speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses

‘Mic Check. Can You Hear Me?’ Suheir Hammad and the Politics of Spoken Word Poetry

“Mic check? One-two. One-two. Can you hear me?” asks spoken-word artist and poet Suheir Hammad onstage (Lathan, 2007). Make no mistake about this question; it is not part of the sound check, nor is it part of a rehearsal. This is her poem. The audience can obviously hear her, but the question is not as straightforward as it appears. Here, Hammad blends the art of emcee-ing (one of the four main elements of hip-hop culture), with the typical language of a sound check and her experience of being racially profiled in, presumably, an American airport. In this vein, “mic” is not only short for microphone, but also the name of the United States’ Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer, named “Mike”, who searches her bags. The question, “Can you hear me?”, is directed not only at the audience, but also at “Mike”. Hammad’s double speak continues throughout the poem, “Mic Check”, where she mobilizes the language of hip-hop to promulgate a stringent critique of the links between the United States’ historical relationship to imperialism and racial profiling targeted toward Arabs and those who supposedly appear Arab.