Dis poetry is like a riddim dat drops
De tongue fires a riddim that shoots like shots
Dis poetry is designed fe rantin
Dance hall style, Big Mouth chanting,
Dis poetry nar put yu to sleep
Preaching follow me
Like yu is blind sheep,
Dis poetry is not Party Political
Not designed fe dose who are critical …
I’ve tried Shakespeare, respect due dere
But dis is de stuff I like.
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH, “Dis Poetry”
Book chapters and academic essays, like this one, are a far less public form than open-mike readings and poetry slams, my subject here; so I’m operating in a different register of intimacy and disclosure from the poets and performers I’m writing about. I’m writing for an audience, but that audience comprises individual readers rather than a gathered crowd ready for aural pleasure (unless some book club or poetry seminar gathers to read this critical work aloud—now there’s an unlikely experiment for you). In a more personalized vein of one-to-one interlocution, I offer the following vignettes of close and productive, if uncomfortable, mislistenings:
When I telephoned the sister of an important but neglected Beat poet about whom I was doing some research, she responded with some suspicion. I had heard that the now-dead poet’s family of origin regarded him ambivalently-the “proverbial black sheep,” as another aficionado of this poet put it, though she, like the poet and his family, was African American—so I tried to present my credentials. I was a scholar, I explained, writing a book on her brother as well as some others—“several different twentieth-century American poets” was my soon-to-be-revealed-as-unfortunate phrasing. “Did you say different, or dissident?” the sister queried icily. On a tip from a friendlier sister of the poet, I had called her at a hotel where her husband was being honored for service to the local diocese for administering nursing homes. “Because my brother was not dissident, you know.” End of interview. I, the chastened white girl stopped in my tracks from projecting my noble-savage/resistant-organic-intellectual fantasies onto the son of a middle-class black Catholic family who grew up in a city where middle-class black Catholics were the (very respectable) majority, withdrew to lick my narcissistic wounds and to ponder (to theorize without letting too much shame get in the way) once again my role in trying to bring the methodological and ideological gains of cultural studies to bear on studies of American poetry: It’s my role to valorize dissidence—isn’t it? Not as if I didn’t no one else would—but there is so little scholarly attention to social dissidence in poetry. There’s plenty of attention paid to an exclusionary Oedipal dissidence made famous by Harold Bloom—how up-and-coming white male poets create traditions counter to that of their forefathers, how the Beats rebelled against the New Critics/ Agrarians, who were in turn reacting against what they saw as unseemly politicization of literature that could only lead to aesthetic Stalinism, etc. There’s lots on the rap controversy, whether it is or isn’t “poetry” and what’s at stake in the question; far less on poetry that is intended as poetry, but is also intended to stay outside the parameters of text-dependent institutions …1
But dis is de stuff I like.
Several years later, at a party I was hosting, I put on a tape of music from the Solomon Islands collected by my father the itinerant head-measurer, a.k.a. the physical anthropologist. Though to my ears the pan-pipe and percussion orchestra was lovely, familiar, and evocative, a friend winced and asked to change the tape. “It’s kinda … dissident,” she said. My wounded ego took refuge in passive-aggressive academicism. “You mean dissonant, don’t you?” She winced again, this time from having been publicly corrected.
These anecdotes are intended to throw into relief, perhaps through negative example, the significance of close listening and its relevance to the public arts of contemporary poetry. The intimacy implied by this book’s title invites us to hear “dissident” and “dissonant” in “different,” while preserving their nuances of difference/dissidence/dissonance; that is, we don’t confuse the three words (and however many others there may be) but let them orbit around each other; we try on the range of misprisions available to us looking for the ones that unfold into the greatest creative and intellectual possibilities. The respect implied by this book’s title permits us to hold all semantic/sonic resonant possibilities concurrently, our attentive apparatus flickering between them all with such lucid intensity as to create a kinetic web of energy that is its own possibility, its own “becoming-poetry.” While the public arts I address here—slams, open mike readings—have been accused of sanctioning mediocrity—that is, doggerel: poetry which, for academicians like Northrop Frye are slighted as “incomplete” or, in Deleuzian terms, valorized as “becoming,” they (open readings, slams) offer an important venue for grassroots poetic activity that rewrites the privatistic lyric scene into a site for public discourse.2 “Intimacy,” “respect” and “close listening” are precisely what, according to traditional academic critics (such as Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and so forth), is missing from populistoriented performance poetry. But they’re responding from a narrow conception of what poetry is: the highly crafted, aesthetic transmutation of private emotions into lapidary objects a select audience can, with much specialized training, learn to appreciate. (I must admit that other than Northrop Frye, the critics specifically named above have not addressed this issue formally, so far does it lie beyond the purview of what is considered appropriate matter for serious academic analysis; I use them as emblems of a certain critical hegemony and I hereby apologize for any disservice this does to their views, inviting them to take up the matter in future work to set the record straight.) It is assumed, both in traditional critical circles and also among the experimentalists I will turn to in more detail below, that poetry that reaches for a wider field of conversants or emphasizes values other than craft and subjectivity necessarily suffers a diminution in subtlety and sophistication—the “lowest common denominator” theory of mass-culture critique. However, this is a faulty assumption: professional poetry aficionados need to be retrained to listen differently (dissidently, dissonantly).
Nick Piombino writes eloquently in his essay in this volume of the close listening a psychotherapist/poet/critic needs to perform on elliptical texts: quiet or halting, self-effacing utterances in which silence or circumlocution bespeak shyness or fear, the erasure of trauma or the protection of its memory. I would like to claim the same level of attention for modes of expression generally stereotyped as public, “loud,” or unsubtle. The “public sphere” (Jürgen Habermas’s term), in which citizens congregate as putative equals in debate and discussion to develop public policy and ideas (again putatively) beneficial for an undifferentiated public good, is fraught with dissonant, dissident nuances. As the essays in Bruce Robbins’s volume The Phantom Public Sphere amply demonstrate, the notion of putative equality in public debate where there is no economic or social equality is extremely problematic, as is the concept of THE (monolithic, unitary) public sphere.3 The condescending gesture of bonhomie inscribed in the granting of “free speech” rights to disenfranchised groups by power blocs operates as a palliative to ward off, rather than enact, serious social change. As Walter Benjamin has pointed out, freedom of expression for the “masses” without political rights and economic justice—“aestheticizing politics”—is a characteristic of fascism.4 If everyone’s voice really got an equal hearing—that is, if the permission for free expression were truly accompanied by social and economic equality as well—the (multiple) public spheres would be “the” Public’s fear. The world of poetry slams and open-mike readings, while not directly politically interventionist, perhaps, creates a public sphere that is healthily contestatory. Moreover, the phrase in my title, “public spear,” refers to the possibility of poetry as what Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire would call a set of “miraculous weapons” in a guerrilla war for equality, freedom, and joy; it refers also to Spearhead, the name of a hip-hop/Spoken Word/funk band headed by Michael Franti, formerly of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, whose lyrics urge their hearers to a wider social consciousness that includes celebration of intimate human relations, cultural specificity, movement, and sound.
The following, then, to put the matter in a somewhat crudely dialectical framework, are the two major critiques of “people’s poetry” venues—slams, open-mike readings, the “spoken word” movement that includes rap and other highly vernacular verbal forms: from the “right,” it’s not “really poetry” because it is too public and aims too aggressively for mass appeal; from the “left,” it’s not public enough because it is merely poetry, a cultural expression everyone knows to be effete, impotent, and elitist. (One letter responding to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s article in The New Yorker, on Spoken Word arts meeting rap, took the author to task for even suggesting that poetry might have emancipatory potential; the form, the respondent claimed, is a priori corrupted by its “high art” origins and connotations.)5 Another, more seriously analytic critique from the “Left” is a paraphrase of Walter Benjamin’s point—to repeat: populist/democratic venues are mere palliatives whose flamboyance and surface-level engagement threaten to divert us from the fact that most of the lives celebrated in this work (workingclass, marginal, ethnically other, etc) are getting harder and harder, even while it becomes trendier and trendier to celebrate them. Far from pointing beyond themselves toward activism for just economic or social solutions, these expressions’ existence is mistaken for a meaningful solution in and of itself. This critique draws a distinction between a cultural politics and cultural politics, the former being effective and the latter being diversionary, and may place slams/open mike on the latter side of the binary.
A third critique, which shares some elements of both camps (corresponding most nearly to what a Frankfurt school, Adornian critique of populist-poetry-as-mass-culture might look like), emerges from the perspective of the radical, “languages”-oriented avant-garde, which has been described as the contemporary poetic movement that most directly confronts language as ideology. Its critique of these populist venues could be summarized in this way: since these developments in public poetry must perforce appeal to a low common denominator, public poetry tends toward a utilitarian, semantically overdetermined “message,” in which language is commodified, subordinated, and consumed as either spectacle or propaganda (“false consciousness”), both of which are considered to be epiphenomenal to “real poetry.” Since any true social revolution must include a revolution in how language is conceived of and engaged (language must be liberated from a strictly utilitarian role in public social life), these public events ultimately enact a reactionary populism rather than the emancipation of the People’s Words that their proponents claim. This pessimistic reading of populist poetics shares with academic criticism a belief that (“THE”) people, vulnerable to brainwashing by the commercial messages everywhere embedded in mass culture, don’t know what’s best for them: that, for example, “Fuck tha Police” is a less politically (because less syntactically) radical phrase than, say, “Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe” because the former echoes “Buy Guess Jeans,” “Join the Army,” or “Eat Your Spinach”.6 While it is quite true that populism is not necessarily progressive (musicologist Simon Frith has an essay wonderfully subtitled, “Defending Popular Culture from the Populists,” in which he argues for taking seriously the category of the aesthetic—with the understanding that will mean different things to different consumers, producers, and creators—in popular culture studies), it is also true that the populace involved in slams and open-mike readings is, for the most part, not the populace involved in the Posse Comitatus or the Aryan Brotherhood.7 On the contrary, if one can generalize, it tends to be a multiethnic crowd that covers the class spectrum and espouses a progressive, leftist view although it is not “party political”; the declaimed poetry tends to reflect these social locations, vernacular traditions, and ideological positions in gestural and vocal styles consonant therewith. The dismal forecast of political cooptation is not a logically inevitable outcome of the slam/open-mike phenomenon; at its best, the spirit of these open venues has more in common with Gran Fury/ACT UP’s pragmatic and interventionist aesthetics than with unimaginative sloganeering.8
Moreover, in practical terms, a possible “language”-oriented critique seems to rely on a conception of “quality” that, while differing in criteria from those of traditional formalists, is no less narrow, in that it does not take seriously the criteria of the slammers themselves, which seem to be, tout court, a skilled congruence of content, performance, and performer. The general stereotype of the slam performance as promoting an in-your-face, bullying theatricalism, and of the slam poem as delivering a simplistic personal or political message, can certainly be validated by superficial observation, but it can also be countered by a broader and simultaneously closer attention to the same evidence. The following anecdote illustrates this phenomenon: when the Nuyorican Poets’ Café tour came to Minneapolis in 1993, slams were held all over the Twin Cities for a month beforehand. By the time the big “slam open” took place (a semifinal before the “slam shut,” at which winners would be chosen to perform with the Nuyoricans at the grand finale), a certain number of slam poets were already familiar to anyone who’d been following the events: among them were Pony Tail, who fared well at smaller slams but whose adulatory imitations of Miles Davis et al. cut no mustard with a more savvy crowd; Blac Q, a brilliant nineteen-year-old freshman at MacAlester College whose paeans to the ‘hood rhymed “drama” and “bomber” (and it worked!); and Spam, a hard-edged working-class poet whose work addressed with sardonic humor his sordid and picturesque childhood in Austin, Minnesota, a blue-collar town dominated in every way by the Hormel Foods Spam factory. On that charged semifinal night, however, a man who runs a neighborhood drop-in center brought a group of hitherto unknowns that included some adolescents and a variety of adults, several of whom placed in the finals. One of these, a woman who seemed unused to reading for an audience, and certainly not used to the high theater that slam poetry can be, read a heavily rhymed, anapestic tetrameter poem—a prayer, more accurately—about living with alcoholism and codependency. The poem was honest, and the delivery unaffected, genuine, confident but not showy; her voice was unassuming but tenacious, and there was no body movement to speak of, no “acting out” of the content. It was a dignified if understated performance. A silence reigned for a short while after she read, then loud applause; she scored very high. However, at the finals, the “slam shut,” she produced a poem approximating the slam stereotype—theatrical imitations of bullets from assault weapons, complaints about the condition of her neighborhood delivered with speed and anger that sounded (to my ears) pro forma—it was awkward, as if she were forcing herself to do something she felt was required of her. The piece sounded hastily written, under the pressure of meeting hitherto unexperienced expectations; it sounded, in fact, like the work of Blac Q, Pony Tail, and Spam, and of the man from the drop-in center who’d brought her (who had also participated in the competition). This time she didn’t score high at all. While the newcomer had been inducted into something one could term a “slam culture” with a normative sound, the audience itself acted as corrective: “No, no, we like you for who you are, not for who you think we want you to be.” Vague as it may sound, the criterion for slam success seems to be some kind of “realness”—authenticity at the physical/sonic and metaphysical/emotional-intellectual-spiritual levels. This is why close listening is crucial; you’re not just listening for technique, or “original imagery,” or raw emotion, but for some transmission/recognition of resonant difference (dissonant sameness? dissident affirmation? that old “defamiliarization” which depends on its relationship to the familiar?), a gestalt that effects a “felt change of consciousness” on the part of the listener.9
This “felt change” does not have to be occasioned only through radical alterity of syntax or style, which criterion, like any other, can itself become inflexible: when I showed a video of the woman reading the prayer about living with alcoholism at a poetics conference in Albany, the irritation and skepticism of the audience, largely comprised of students of the American avant-garde (the Charles Olson-Black Mountain legacy), was palpable. They couldn’t, it seemed, enter into a world where terms like “codependency” and rhymes like “grace”/“place” (pace T. J. Jackson Lears) were taken seriously as poem-making material; the line between banality and profundity was absolute, and it was obvious to them which side of the line they were on, and which side the poet in question was on. The literary text, however, is only a small part of the picture of evaluating a poetic performance (and by performance I mean process in the larger sense; not just the event that takes place on stage, but the way poetry and poem-making performs in people’s everyday lives). One of my favorite instances in which the seemingly banal is rendered profound is a scene in Elaine Holiman’s documentary film Chicks in White Satin. Two female lovers, both upper-middle-class Jewish women, plan a traditional Jewish wedding in the face of parental consternation and misgiving. In the film’s climax, the wedding itself, one bride gives the other a Hallmark card that, she avows, perfectly expresses her feelings. Weeping with joy, she reads the text aloud; it is a sentence to the effect that meeting you was like giving myself the present I always wanted. But the context and the sincerity of emotion dignify the trite lines and complicate the high camp that the film could be; the moment is both comical and moving. While the codependency poem was not comical, it was not bathetic either, as the audience response in Albany suggested.
Thus I would repeat to all critics, “right,” “left” and “avant-garde,” listen more closely—not only with more analytic vigilance, though that too—with more openness, respect for context, and intimacy, perhaps with what therapists-in-training are taught as “soft focusing listening,” in which the overtones and undercurrents of the purported narrative can come to the fore. Listen more completely, not to this text but to the hypothetical CD that in spirit accompanies this printed volume.
Charles Bernstein has posed another issue, that of prosody and its relation to the politics of slam performance, thus: “The very oldtime iambic beat of rap and much slam poetry [is] inflected with a regularity that … has the same problem as the most hidebound metrical poetry that some would argue … is antithetical to poetic music.”10 Iambic and other tetrameters are generally considered to be balladic rhythm, and the ballad a populist form with premodern folk and vernacular roots. Some contemporary poets who experiment with vernacular have contrasted the hard-driving four-stressed-beat line with the more upwardly mobile and circumspect iambic pentameter, which has become established as the normative rhythm of the Anglophone lyric, and whose five-stressed-beat slows down and domesticates the brash insistence of tetrameter.11 So the question is, “Whose poetic music?” Contemporary “spoken word” poet Reg E. Gaines’s “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans,” delivered in (roughly) anapestic tetrameter, combines traditional elements of ballad—social commentary tending toward the moralistic, heavy adherence to rhyme and meter, and a fairly straightforward narration of dramatic event; like many contemporary “authored” poems, though, it uses the first person rather than the third, often to great effect. In Gaines’s poem, the first-person narrative of one boy who shoots another for his expensive and fashionable sneakers conveys eerily the dissociated consciousness of kids so socially traumatized that they cannot feel the emotions that would seem to fit their behavior.12 By drawing on a prosodic convention traditionally associated with the “people,” with public declamation, and with the expression of public opinion, Gaines uses verbal weapons from the populist arsenal to excoriate publicly, rather than, for example, an elegiac lyric to mourn privately, from a safe, top-down linguistic distance, the commercialism that leads kids to kill each other for the sake of fashion. His image for cultural and ethical undernourishment is, significantly, the valorizing of a silent spectacularization over auditory recognition: “I’m style / N smile / N lookin real mean // Cuz it ain’t about be / N heard just be / N seen” (Gaines, liner notes); suggesting that being “heard,” or listened to closely as a subject, would more authentically meet a kid’s need for acknowledgment than would being gazed at as an object. His scathing dedication also uses simple rhyme to indict African American cultural icons who could be models for oppositional self-empowerment but who instead fall prey themselves to commercialism: “I’d like to kick this poem to Spike, and Mike, and to all the Black kids who have been killed over these $200 sneakers”13 (both Spike Lee and Michael Jordan have appeared in advertisements for these products). As Bernstein has suggested, “the heavily-stressed poetic rhythm creates the ‘public’ space in which the social work can take place.”14 The social work is the critique of the capitalist practice of killing black kids for profit; the poem is, in fact, a rather Adornian critique of mass culture, though it uses extremely simple, accessible language and the structure of a well-told, suspenseful narrative. What Gaines accomplishes aesthetically is to combine a public form with a “private” voice (the poem is an internal monologue, a sort of minimalist psychological profile), to render that private voice almost autistic in its lack of affect (thus eviscerating the “lyric I” of its traditional power to communicate individual emotion), and yet by doing so to accuse not the narrator of the poem but the system that has cornered him.
Thus, open readings and their more highly orchestrated cousins poetry slams continue, at least in theory, a tradition of a public poetics oriented more toward direct intervention in and commentary on public affairs than toward the relatively recent (i.e., post-Romantic) inner-directed lyric tradition. Though the content of poems read at slams and open-mike readings can be just as privatistic as poems primarily produced for consumption through silent, individual readings-on-the-page, the fact of their public declamation in relatively democratized spaces—bars, clubs, etc.—suggests that they participate in poetic activity with roots in a collectivity not conventionally recognized as a prime origin of literary—particularly poetic—production. This public poetics deserves a “close listening” that differs from, on the one hand, the close reading we have been taught (since the 1940s at least) to associate with a proper reception of poetry, and on the other hand, from the “generalized” or master-narrativizing (instrumentalist) listening that current cultural studies—which is sympathetic to the popular registers of culture slams purport to reach, but not to poetry itself—brings to such phenomena. The dearth of scholarly literature on slams, open-mike readings, and the new “spoken word” recordings (a marketing term coined to dispel anxieties about “poetry”) compared to the plethora of articles, books and chapters on rap, pop stars like Madonna, and MTV points to an absence I hope to redress.
“Open-mike readings” (sometimes spelled “mic,” a contraction of “microphone”) have been a familiar genre in American literary bohemian circles at least since the 1950s—the Beat era—and perhaps—in different forms—extending back to the Greenwich Village days of the 1930s when a lively leftist scene overlapped with intellectual and artistic circles. One important early paradigm, for example, was “Blabbermouth Night” at The Place, a club in San Francisco, in the late 1950s: one night a week anyone could take the floor and declaim not only “poetry” but any imaginative verbal display—but had to be willing to withstand the heckling and other spontaneous, unpolished feedback from a range of highly opinionated, poetryliterate, politically (anarcho-socialist, mainly) sophisticated, and expressively forthcoming audience members. It was intended to be a highly interactive, democratic scene, while still maintaining a rough—and temporary—distinction between the designated speaker, who took the stage, and “his” (usually) audience, who sat at the bar or at the club’s tables with their drinks.15
Contemporary open-mike readings take place in bars, nightclubs, coffeehouses, high school gyms, college lounges, auditoriums, and other public spaces traditionally designated for combinations of entertainment and informal, relatively unstructured community formation. In general there is a sign-up period before the reading; a finite number of people are permitted to read for a short period of time (five to ten minutes, depending on how many poets are to be featured), one to three poems max. Sometimes a venue will host a “featured poet” whose performance will be followed by an open reading; this format preserves a hierarchic distinction while still allowing “lesser known voices” their minutes in the limelight. The atmosphere is often celebratory and casual; the audience usually comprises a mixture of venue-habitués, friends of the readers, and a sprinkling of poetry aficionados. If the venue is particularly well known, such as the Nuyorican Poets’ Café in Manhattan, which has an international reputation for presenting lively, multiethnic, high-quality performance poetry and poets, the quota of poetry fans may, of course, be higher. In the last five years or so, in response to the popularity of the “spoken word” movement, many cafés and bars in major cities now feature a once-a-month open reading. Quality and enthusiasm vary: at one such event in Minneapolis, a group of my undergraduate students attended only because part of the course work required their attendance at one “poetry event” during the quarter; there were so few readers signed up that, fearing they wouldn’t be able to fulfill the assignment, they (having—coincidentally?—brought along their own work) took over and performed for each other. They loved it, and felt powerfully and communally connected to a previously distant, private art.
According to legend and common lore, “slams” as they’ve come to be institutionalized originated at the Green Mill bar in mid-1980s Chicago, a city traditionally known for its rought-and-ready, industrial-era (and strength) working-class spirit with a confrontational, no-frills edge to its cultural vibe: steak, lumber, gangsters, blues, with Carl Sandburg sprinkled on top singing hog-butchers of the world unite.16 The poetry slam partakes of this atmosphere: it is a mock competition that structures and theatricalizes a noncompetitive, free-for-allish open reading into a combination of the gong show and Olympic gymnastic competitions. Like spelling bees or ballgame seasons, slams are long events since they work by process of elimination; in spite of their now institutionalized format (earlier this year, a national slam committee voted to enforce the strict three-minute rule; the one holdout for flexibility on this issue was Bob Holman of the Nuyorican Poets’ Café in Manhattan), slams tend to have an amorphous feeling similar to open mike readings. Slams, however, were purposefully structured to counteract aggressively the atomized and apathetic ambience that infected the grassroots poetry scene. They marshall audience participation, ensuring the poets that there will be an audience right through to the end of the reading (often open-mike readings are attended only by the reading poets and their friends; in the words of Marc Smith, “If you were the last poet signed up, you read to yourself,” because each poet and his/her entourage of friends would leave directly after his/her three minutes was up).17 Subject matter, performance style, poetic form and so forth vary widely (in theory, at least) from poet to poet within a single night’s competition.
And while slams have inaugurated some folks into a recent understanding of poetry as a competitive sport (a concept which makes traditionalists uneasy, in spite of the arguably more cutthroat competition for publication opportunities, admission to M.F.A. programs, and university teaching positions that poisons the mainstream “creative writing” community), verbal competition has a respectable history in many oral traditions; most famous in the United States is the “dozens,” an African American game of one-upmanship (literally: it is a male social activity) in which wittily insulting repartees (usually targeting the interlocutor’s mother) fly fast and furious. The winner is the one who delivers the line that stumps the opponent. It is a public sport, intended for an audience’s delight, and there are unspoken but understood rules of etiquette about crossing the line from humor to inappropriate invective. A related form of public pseudo-competition is the jazz musicians’ “cutting contest,” in which a group of musicians gather to take turns delivering bravura solo performances aimed at establishing the soloist as the “king of the cats.” The competitive aspect of the enterprise, though “real” to the degree that it inspires high standards and puts the pressure on, is not accompanied by personal rancor and there is no serious shame attached to “losing”—participation, rather than victory, is the key element, though victory is not a negligible pay-off.
Black arts and artists are not afraid of contention, and an audience can learn much about community values and engagement with difference through participating in/witnessing contentious or competitive moments. In a recent review of the 1994 National Black Arts Festival, David Henderson sums up a public argument between Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka thus: “Neither wanted to be held in a polite respect thing … This was nothing new to them. They thoroughly enjoyed it,”18 and notes that “one of the rare times [poet/critic Calvin Hernton] smiled at a literary event was when Baraka, [Playthell] Benjamin, then Amina Baraka and Barbara Christian had a good old-fashioned, intellectual, emotional shout-out” (Henderson, 147; his emphasis). In other words, strongly worded public disagreement, battles of wit and argumentation, are purposefully spectacular, on display as opportunities for community formation, education, entertainment, intellectual and artistic expression. Dissidence, dissonance, and difference are not punished but rather studied, celebrated, performed, and challenged in discursively productive ways.
Familiar also by now in mainstream popular culture is the bragging that is as integral a part of rap versifying as invocations to the muse or envois used to be in European epic and lyric traditions: in rap, the speaker boasts of both sexual and rhyming prowess with a glamorous air of outlawry (“I’m the lyrical Jesse James,” says Hammer in my favorite example of street claims for lyrical machismo)19 in ways that so to speak embed these two expressive economies in each other; the convention shrugs off, with admirably theatrical nonchalance, the Euro-inflicted yoke of the mind/body split (or the word/body split) under which much page-based poetry labors. Poetic competition, moreover, is a typical feature of oral societies, from the legendary “contest of bards” in pre-literate Great Britain to contemporary gatherings of Ethiopian intelligensia (which is highly literate as well as oral): Amhariclanguage poet Solomon Deressa writes of his farewell feast in 1972, when the left the Ethiopian Broadcast Service for the University of Iowa’s International Writers’ Workshop—the high point of the evening was the competitive, improvised or delivered-from-memory poetic lines offered by the celebrants and set to music/sung by the paid musicians in attendance: “a poetry jam session, no less.”20
Other traditions that have been subsumed into Euro-American culture also make good cases for the importance of public readings as foundational community events. In 1988, Daniel Boyarin delivered a talk (or the preferred academic term, “paper,” which preference underscores that institution’s penchant for the written over the spoken) on the traditional meanings of the term “reading” in Judaic culture. Haranguing an academic conference audience quite unused to such a style, Boyarin declaimed and enacted for us the notion that “to read,” in Biblical times through the Rabbinic period, meant to publicly harangue, to read aloud for an audience—there was originally no association of the term “to read” with a private act of silent communication between a single reader and a page of text.21 These public reading events, moreover, did not encompass the performance of the reader’s private or individual “feelings,” though those may have colored the delivery; the text was usually a document that combined religious and civic directives, or interpreted those issued in other tracts. Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger had also written of the way in which, during the Rabbinic period, religious scholars/community leaders distinguished between serious (Biblical) texts suitable for “public study,” and texts they held in low esteem, like personal letters and the Apocrypha, which were more fit for the trivial pastime of private consumption.22 Public utterance, in other words, indicated seriousness of purpose.
Interestingly, one of the groups of texts deemed unfit for serious (i.e., public) study and/or declamation by the rabbis was that set of epics known as the Homeric texts, which were of course themselves performance pieces. The fact of their being deemed unworthy as such by the Judaic rabbinate says more about how these religious leaders viewed them (as artifacts of a pantheistic Hellenism inhospitable to Hebraism) than it does about their actual function; that function, as Gregory Nagy has exhaustively demonstrated, was precisely a public, performative one that bound together, through a rapport established by skilled delivery, the oral poet/reciter with a clued-in and responsive audience, who, because of their familiarity with song culture, in turn authorized the singer’s (“author” ‘s) performance.23 The Homeric poets, and later, the troubadours of Mediterranean Europe, performed variations not on a set, written text considered the “original,” but of songs which came into being through these improvised, demotic variants (Nagy, 10).24 In other words, the written text was the last step, rather than the first one, in the process of song-making or poem-making, a process whose essence was movement (“mouvance” is the term he borrows from Paul Zumthor’s study of oral poetry) and process itself.25 Like the many versions of African American urban, rural, or prison ballads about the Signifying Monkey, the freaks’ ball, or Staggerlee (Stackolee), these variants did not strive to match a prior ideal but provided the means for public display of invention and constant reinvention within convention. This performance-based poem-making process characterized oral cultures and demotic (vernacular) languages; as these cultures became print-based, the concept of a static text authored by one individual—text as private property for private consumption—came to have more prestige and to command more formal respect than the oral.
Modern(ist) glosses, however, provide a contrary set of values, with publicness indicating frivolousness—at best “raw energy” but qualitatively inferior work is assumed. One “covers up” the “weakness” of a poem or verbal artifact by a performance style; public reading is the surface that must be brushed aside for a more weighty “expert” assessment of a work’s “true,” i.e. “deep,” value. As print culture’s dominance abates in the swirling complexity of postmodernity, there has been a resurgence of serious attention to oral and performative literatures, with a concommitant imaginative refiguring of communities.26
This perhaps pedantic race through pre-print-capitalist history is ultimately not necessary to justify the continued presence of the demotic, of oral culture, of the reemergence, through technology such as television, video, and audio taping, radio, and the like—and the populist uses thereof, such as local public-access TV stations, the rapid dissemination of “pirated” audio-cassettes throughout low-income neighborhoods and populations, etc.—of a dynamic insistence on presence itself, and the waning hegemony of the written as mediator for the Great Unknowable that reveals Itself only in private, one-on-one séances.
Dis poetry is not afraid of going ina book
But dis poetry need ears fe hear an eyes fe hav a look
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH, “Dis Poetry”
The question of whether to publish arises for slammers and oral poets. Like Nagy’s medieval trouvères (“discoverers”) their work ends when something is definitively cast in print; and there’s a reasonable desire to forestall closure on a creative process: invention and reinvention, improvisation, performance, competition, and other interactive modes. However, a substantial number of eminent slammers have published chapbooks or trade books, though they haven’t gone through the traditional route of amassing a respectable roster of appearances in journals, submitting completed manuscripts for prizes or publication with small literary presses, etc. Paul Beatty’s Big Bank Take Little Bank27 came about because he won a slam: the prize on this particular occasion was publication of a book, rather than an honorific title. Tracie Morris and Edwin Torres, both brilliant performers, have self-published chapbooks apiece; Dana Bryant, Cyn Salach, and Marc Smith (the “founding father of Chicago slam”) have each, after ten years of high-profile slam and performance activity, recently published one book of poems.28 Morris felt that self-publication allowed her complete control over every aspect of production, from choosing paper and type design to commissioning cover art; it also demystified the publishing process for her, so that she’s less likely to be bullied in later encounters with professional publishers; it was an important educational project for her.29
This attitude of self-empowerment through experience contrasts sharply and admirably with what I’ve seen in mainstream or academic “creative writing” circles, where self-publication is taken to be a kind of shameful last resort in a business in which success depends on recognizable badges of social approval bestowed from on high, such as having been one of three writers selected from a pool of hundreds by, for example, Coffee House Press or Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A do-it-yourself orientation also brings this poetry into further resonance (though “differently”) with small presses, alternative poetry movements, and ‘zines that may not be slam-based; many “experimental” artists and writers now securely employed in universities and assured of well-known and well-funded publishers spent the greater part of their poetic careers years publishing themselves and each other in similarly autonomous/anonymous circumstances. (Slammers and open mikers are now undergoing the same kind of pick-up from the mainstream; Paul Beatty’s second book of poems came out from Viking/Penguin, and his novel from Houghton Mifflin.)30 Tia Chucha Press, founded and operated by Chicago slammer Luis Rodriguez, publishes work from its own milieu, including an anthology, Stray Bullets: A Celebration of Chicago Saloon Poetry,31 and books by individual slammers.
Moreover, some slammers, like Bryant and Morris (who has been active in the Black Rock Coalition), have recorded their work with music, and consider this medium at least as significant as print (contrast this to the mainstream poetry world: recently I was asked to delete a section on “Recorded Work” from a bibliography for an encyclopedia article on Allen Ginsberg, though oral performance has been one of Ginsberg’s signature contributions to postwar American poetry). Willie Perdomo’s book, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, comes with a CD, and Maggie Estep and Reg E. Gaines have both issued wildly popular “spoken word” CDs before coming out with books.32 And there are more published and recorded anthologies every day.33
Book publication represents a different venue, a different economy, a different audience from the dynamic, interactive immediacy of the bar or café scene. Publishing a book is not generally regarded either as a sell-out nor as a crowning achievement. The challenge of creating a poem that “works on the page as well as the stage” is considered a worthy one, though it is not fetishized as a way of proving that a poem “can stand on its own”—another reliquary phrase that still sometimes haunts the literary world from the other side of’68. (A recent, fairly insipid reading by a poet who experiments daringly with the visual possibilities of the page prompts me to wonder why the corresponding observation is not more frequently made: “It looks so good on the page, but it sure doesn’t hold up in a live reading.”) A useful way to think of the discrepancy between text and performance in the case of slam poets is to think of the text as a score for the performance; it points beyond itself to its embodiment in the poet’s person: voice, body, animating gestural presence. Tracie Morris’s “The Spot,” which excoriates “superficial people everywhere” for wearing X-ornamented fashion accessories without truly understanding the depth of Malcolm’s message and martyrdom (Morris, 40), or her “Project Princess,” which celebrates in exuberant portraiture (“Multidimensional shrimp earrings / frame her cinnamon face / Crimson with a compliment if a / comment hits the right place” [Morris, 13]) young girls in the Brooklyn housing projects where she herself grew up, are both reasonably rich page-reading experiences. But the live performance is breathtaking, as Morris sings, imitates with startling accuracy the “scratch” effect of hip-hop music, gestures, repeats phrases many times over with different syllabic accentuation, and otherwise defamiliarizes through vocal pyrotechnics not only normative American English but her own already highly vernacular written text. In this way, a poetic performance becomes a “total experience” in the way we are used to thinking of drama, film, or live jazz, rather than a secondary-to-the-private-reading-act event by which we ascertain what a page-famous poet looks or sounds like.
Part of the desire to publish is, I would conjecture, a desire to not be perceived in limited and limiting ways as primitives, entertainers, or simply “hip-hop” artists. While the debt to black and other dissident/marginalized popular cultures is acknowledged wholeheartedly, poets like Paul Beatty and Tracie Morris feel ambivalent about being labeled, respectively, the “premier bard of hip-hop” and the “reigning queen of hip-hop poetry,” as this kind of pigeonholing is, like all categorizing, confining and in the long run diminishing to a poet’s own growth and her/his reception by others. Morris, for example, works in a jazz idiom as much as in a more contemporary/ mass cultural hip-hop/rap idiom; significantly, she credits Carmen McRae as a primary influence. Beatty took an M.F.A. in creative writing at Brooklyn College, where he studied under Allen Ginsberg (this is his second M.A.: his first was in psychology at Boston College). His bios on book covers deliberately specify that he is from “West Los Angeles,” not to disown a connection with black working-class expressive cultures, but to challenge the stereotypical perception that all African American writers who use the vernacular idiom come from “inner city” areas like South Central. Li-Young Lee, now well-known in the mainstream lyric poetry world and not considered primarily a performance poet, appears in Stray Bullets, where his contributor’s bio enumerates his poetry awards (Lamont and NYU’s Delmore Schwartz Memorial). Hannah Weiner, a relatively reclusive poet who writes directly from clairvoyant experience, and who has ties to both “New York school” and “language” poets, has been a slam winner at the Nuyorican Poets’ Café.
Likewise, while arguing for the literary seriousness of slam and openmike activity, it is important to not romanticize or fetishize a kind of oral purity over a corrupt mainstream or a precious, solipsistic avant-garde. The boundaries, if they exist at all, are permeable. It is perhaps useful here to invoke Antonio Gramsci’s formulation of “the organic intellectual” to argue that these poetries and this poetic activity merit not only a telos-driven exemplification of nonacademic literary activity but the closest possible listening at all registers of poetic reception. The “organic intellectual” is not only a working-class person with an intuitive gift for understanding his/her class situation and social circumstance, but a trained, professional intellectual who uses his/her learning for the benefit of the people. As we have seen, many of the poets discussed here are both, and as public intellectuals their persons and their poetic activity enact the erasure of the barrier between the street and the page, the workshop and the stage.
Dis is de stuff I like.
For this essay’s formation, thanks are due to Charles Bernstein, who patiently edited, argued, and clarified, as well as to Bob Holman, Bob Gale, Kurt Heinz, Joseph Zitt, Carolyn Holbrook, members of the Poetrix list for random commentary, and Joanna O’Connell for common reading. The two epigraphs in this essay are taken from Benjamin Zephaniah, “Dis Poetry,” City Psalms (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992), p. 12.
1. For more on the “rap controversy” (this rap controversy is not the matter of obscenity v. ethnic oral traditions, or the celebration of gang warfare and violence but that of rap’s status as “poetry”), see Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan/New England University Press, 1994), in which Rose makes the point that rap is a technology and that to call it poetry is to diminish and sequester it; Tim Brennan, “Off the Gangsta Tip: A Rap Appreciation, or Forgetting about Los Angeles,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 20 (summer 1994), pp. 663-93, which makes an appeal for “rap appreciation” at the aesthetic level (its political content having been, he claims, done to death) and includes a close reading of a rap lyric (683); Richard Shusterman and Tim Brennan, “Critical Response,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 22 (autumn 1995), pp. 15061, in which Richard Shusterman argues that Brennan misread his work on rap and Brennan responds; Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Sudden Def,” The New Yorker, June 14, 1995, pp. 34-42, which treats the “rap meets spoken word” phenomenon at the S.O.B. nightclub in Manhattan, and which presupposes that rap and poetry/spoken word are somehow different though resonant forms (distant cousins perhaps), whose meeting is to be met with a certain bemused if affectionate eyebrow-raising.
2. See Lucy B. Palache, “Doggerel,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p, 301, for Frye’s formulation concerning the “unfinished creative process.”
3. Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). See especially Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” pp. 1-32; and George Yudice, “For a Practical Aesthetics,” pp. 209–33.
4. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 241–42.
5. Ian Belcher, letter, The New Yorker, July 31, 1995, p. 9.
6. N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude), “——Tha Police,” Straight outta Compton (Priority Records, 1988). Tan Lin, Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1996).
7. Simon Frith, “The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent: Defending Popular Culture from the Populists,” Diacritics, vol. 21, no. 4 (1991), pp. 102–55. Though primarily concerned with popular music, this article has much to offer the student of popular poetries and other literatures.
8. For good analyses of Gran Fury’s artistic, pragmatic, interventionist sophistication, see the final chapter in Walter Kalaidjian, American Culture between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 252–63, and Yudice.
9. The criterion of the “felt change of consciousness” for determining the poeticity of a verbal artifact comes from Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 48.
10. Charles Bernstein, email to author, July 16, 1996, p. 3. This is not Bernstein’s position, but one he was paraphrasing for the sake of analysis.
11. Kamau Brathwaite, in his collected essays, Roots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), contrasts the poetic possibilities of standard English with those of the more African-inflected Caribbean vernacular (p. 265), for which he has coined the term “Nation Language,” and speaks of calypso’s ability to “break down the pentameter” (p. 271); Charles Bernstein has suggested the contrast with tetrameter’s more populist history (email to author, 11 August 1996).
12. Reg E. Gaines, “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans,” on Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans (Polygram Records, 1994). For a similar discussion of contemporary uses of the ballad form to tell of young people’s urban horrors, see Maria Damon, “Tell Them about Us,” in The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 101; see also newspaper and electronic media coverage of the trials of the “Central Park jogger” ‘s assailants, which dwelled on their seeming indifference to the proceedings—they were judged to be indifferent because they were expressionless.
13. The dedication does not appear on the CD but is extemporized in Gaines’s performance of the poem on MTVs Spoken Word Unplugged (MTV, 1993).
14. Charles Bernstein, email to author, August 11, 1996, p. 3.
15. For descriptions of Blabbermouth Night and of the Place, see Kevin Killian and Lew Ellingham, Poet, Be Like God: A Biography of Jack Spicer (forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press); and John D’Emilio, “The Movement and the Subculture Converge: San Francisco during the Early 1960s,” in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 176-95.
16. For a good history of slams, their Chicago origins, their spread across the country to San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Boston and die ganze weldt, see Kurt Heinz, “An Incomplete History of Slam.” http://www.tezcat.com/~malachit/slam (1996).
17. Marc Smith, poetry performance, Bryant-Lake Bowl and Theatre, Minneapolis, August 14, 1996. See also Bob Gale, “A Man, a Plan, a Slam: Interview with Michael Brown,” Shout: Community Arts Newspaper for Poets, Storytellers and Performance Artists, May 1, 1995 (http.//www.bitstream.net/london/may96/brown.html); and, for general interest, Slam! The International Performance Poetry Newsletter (available from 24 Arlington St., Medford, Mass. 02155).
18. David Henderson, “The National Black Arts Festival Review,” A Gathering of the Tribes (winter/spring 1995-1996), p. 145.
19. D. Benites et al., “The Power,” BMG Ariola Muenchen GmbH, 1990. Also produced by Snap (single version: Arista Cassette CAS-2013) from the forthcoming album World Power.
20. Solomon Deressa, “The Poem and Its Matrix,” in Silence Is Not Golden, ed. Taddesse Adera and Ali Jimale Ahmed (Lawrenceville, N.J.: Red Sea Press, 1995), p. 181. This poem/essay explores the sense in which poetry, an important cultural and civic activity, is bound up with one’s sense of national/ethnic identity, and the trauma (to the poem, to the poet, to poetry) suffered when that sense of identity is obliterated.
21. Daniel Boyarin, Literature and Anthropology Panel, MLA Convention, New Orleans, La., December 1988.
22. Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger, Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Jewish History (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, Inc. with Yeshiva University Press, 1977), p. 14.
23. Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 19.
24. Nagy quotes Bernard Cerquiglini to eloquent effect: “[M]edieval writing does not produce variants; it is variance.”
25. Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction, tr. Kathryn Murphy-Judy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). He uses the word mouvance in connection with performance on pp. 51, 203, and 205. Nagy discusses Zumthor’s coinage on p. 11 of Poetry as Performance.
26. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983; New York: Verso, 1991) posits a link between the rise of print capitalism and the emergence of the nationstate (the imagined community for which people give their lives), and the concommitant value of “nationalism.”
27. Paul Beatty, Big Bank Take Little Bank (New York: Nuyorican Poets’ Café Press, 1991).
28. Tracie Morris, Chap-t-her Won: Some Poems by Tracie Morris (Brooklyn: TM Ink, 1993); Edwin Torres, I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said (New York: Edwin Torres, 1991); Dana Bryant, Song of the Siren (New York: Boulevard Books, 1995); Cyn Salach, Looking for a Soft Place to Land: Poems (Chicago: Tia Chucha Press, 1996); Marc Smith, Crowdpleaser (Chicago: Collage Press), 1996.
29. Tracie Morris, conversation with author, December 1993.
30. Paul Beatty, Joker Joker Deuce (New York: Penguin Books, 1994); The White Boy Shuffle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).
31. Ida Therese Jablanovec, Susan James, and José Chavez, eds., Stray Bullets: A Celebration of Chicago Saloon Poetry (Chicago: Tia Chucha Press, 1991).
32. Willie Perdomo, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (New York: Norton, 1996); Maggie Estep, No More Mr. Nice Girl (Imago/NuYo Records, 1994).
33. A selective sampling: in addition to Stray Bullets, see Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, ed. Bob Holman and Miguel Algarin (New York: Henry Holt, 1994); Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapalooza, ed. Juliette Torrez, Liz Belile, Mud Baron, and Jennifer Joseph (San Francisco: Manic D Press, 1995); and Nuyorican Symphony (Imago/NuYo Records, 1994).