"Poetry itself is
revolutionary. To write a poem, even to read a poem, to take
on all that language can give you is to become an
activist." -- Bob Holman
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The Revolution Will
Be
the Academics have much to
fear
and they will not die
without a dirty fight.
-Charles Bukowski
Faced with the surging
popularity of spoken-word and the poetry slam, The
Academy of American Poets, long known for its gala
reading series, was forced in 1995 to reevaluate its
approach to their mission of creating a wider audience for
contemporary poetry. "[We] certainly could no longer
claim to be an innovator in this regard," says William
Wadsworth, executive director of the Academy. "Looking at
how much emphasis was being put on the performance aspect of
poetry, I came to feel that it was the Academy's proper
role, as an institution, to do whatever it could to
reinforce the book of poems."
After a year of planning, the Academy launched National
Poetry Month in April of 1996. The event rolled into
bookstores, all aglow with its mission to "foster an
appreciation" for poetry among the masses. In this, its
fourth year, bouyed by a media blitz bigger than ever,
National Poetry Month claims over 90 sponsoring
organizations and promotional tie-ins that include
everything from the distribution of 40,000 books of poetry
by Volkswagen to this special issue of Poets &
Writers Magazine.*
A noble mission, no doubt, but there are many that look
on with a smirk and wonder, What took them so long to
realize the need for something new?
Fifteen years ago at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago,
Marc Smith,
construction worker by day, poet by night, decided he'd had
enough of the status quo. He'd grown tired of the stale
politeness of the academic poetry reading, where the poet
was placed on a pedestal and had no obligations to his
audience other than to show up and read poems. His solution:
Empower the audience - take poetry down from the tower and
not only make it available to the so-called masses, but make
it answer to them. Thus was born the poetry slam, a
grassroots vehicle for fostering an appreciation for poetry
year-round. In the years since, despite often harsh
criticism from the academic world, poetry slams have sprung
up in nearly every major city and several smaller ones, both
here and abroad.
This revolution against the establishment is not unique
in the history of poetry. "When Ezra Pound and TS Eliot came
along," says Wadsworth, "there were a lot of poets who
thought the world had gone to hell. The values changed. A
new generation came along and really changed things. That's
always the case. I'm sure there were poets who were upset
when people started writing in English instead of in
Latin."
Since the advent of slams, the spoken-word movement has
offended the sensibilities of the establishment on several
fronts, not the least of which has been its insistent
democratization of the art form. In the slam, anyone can get
onstage to read a poem - and the standards of quality rest
entriely on the subjective appreciation of randomly chosen
members of the audience, who rate poems, Olympic
scoring-style, from 0 to 10. Academia's seal of approval is
neither required nor sought.
"Back in Chicago,"
remembers Patricia Smith, four-time National Poetry Slam
Champion, as well as an award-winning journalist, "there
were pundits in the academic world that said [slam]
would never last and it would be the death of poetry.
[It] began to get a lot of attention, audience and
press without being 'sanctioned.' No one was able to
'discover' slam. It birthed itself. It grew despite no grant
money, no kissing ass, not worried about being
published…"
Charles Bukowski, arguably one of the most influential
antiacademic writers of our century and an honorary "slam"
poet, wrote in 1990:
to disrupt this sanctuary
is to them like
the Rape of the Holy Mother.
besides that, it would also
cost them
their wives
their automobiles
their girlfriends
their University
jobs.
The irony was that many of these "slam" poets, were no
different than those that saw them as barbarians at the
gate. They, too, were the disenfranchised, seeking an
opportunity for their voices to be heard.
Brenda Moossy, an MFA student at the University of
Arkansas and a successful slam poet and organizer in the
Ozarks, always incorporates her work in slams into her
classes. "[It] gives permission for people to think
outside the box, allows for creative leaps and
jumps…lets them see that everyday language and
experience are very valuable and, in fact, at the core of
what poetry is about."
"Poetry itself is revolutionary," says Bob
Holman, who went from directing the readings at the St.
Mark's Poetry Project in the late '70's in Manhattan to
creating the slam scene at New York City's Nuyorican
Poets Café in the early '90's. Currently, he's a
Visiting Professor of English at Bard College where he
teaches Exploding Text: Poetry in Performance. Holman says,
"To write a poem, even to read a poem, to take on all that
language can give you is to become an activist. To get the
poem to people in this world, you have to utilize the
mechanisms that this world provides. I love teaching poetry
and performance. I [get] a lot of theoreticians who
want to experience experience."
Of course, none of this is surprising to those who
realize that, long before Gutenberg ever gave thought to
moveable type, poetry had flourished for centuries as an
oral art, and, perhaps most interestingly, as a competitive
one.
"In the history of poetry," says Wadsworth, "a lot of
classical or ancient traditions included the same principle,
competition between poets; it was judged in one way or
another but it was very much like a competitive sport. Slam
has roots that go all the way back in the oral
tradition."
And yet, one of the major criticisms of slam is its
competitive aspect. Many in academia decry the thought of
poems dueling on stage for the approval of an uncredentialed
audience. SlamNation,
last year's award-winning documentary of the 1996 National
Poetry Slam by ESPN-producer, Paul Devlin, sparked
controversy with its tagline: the "Sport of Spoken
Word."
The father of the slam, Marc Smith views such objections
as hypocrisy of the highest order. "Poetry in
[academia] is competing all the time," Smith says.
"You compete for editor's approval, for admission, and it's
a closed competition. [There is] more competition in
MFA's, more serious, more cutthroat than there ever could be
in the slam world. Most slammers realize [slam is]
just a format, a mock-competition, a drama that makes an
audience focus its attention."
Walt Whitman once said, "To
have great poets, there must be great audiences." And the
audience is growing. Ten years ago, the first National
Poetry Slam was held in San Francisco, California, a
one-night event as part of the now-defunct International
Poetry Festival. Two teams of poets, from San Francisco and
Chicago (with Paul Beatty, an MFA student from Brooklyn
College, representing New York), sparred verbally before a
crowd of over three hundred people, the festival's biggest
turnout. Last summer, the ninth annual National Poetry Slam
in Austin, Texas featured 45 teams of four poets each, from
the US and Canada, participating in four nights of non-stop
poetry, which culminated in a finale witnessed by a
standing-room-only audience of over thirteen hundred
people.
Times have changed - the slam has proved itself a viable
art form, and many of the poets who got their start there
have infiltrated the mainstream. Paul Beatty went from that
first National Poetry Slam to publish two well-received
volumes of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank
(Nuyorican Poets Café Press, 1991), and Joker,
Joker, Deuce (Penguin, 1994), as well as the
critically acclaimed novel White
Boy Shuffle (Houghton Mifflin, 1996).
Willie Perdomo, another product of the Nuyorican Poets
Café, had his debut collection of poems, Where
a Nickel Costs a Dime (which included a Performance
CD), published by W.W. Norton in 1996.
Poetry
Nation: the North American Anthology of Fusion
Poetry (Véhicule Press, 1999), edited by
performance poets Regie Cabico and Todd Swift, was published
in February, and includes work by "slam" poets Patricia
Smith, Jeff McDaniel and Beau Sia alongside Allen Ginsberg,
Miguel Algarin and Denise Duhamel.
And Poets & Writers,
Inc., through its Readings & Workshops programs, has
funded many slam poets and events in New York, California,
Detroit and Chicago.
"Like it or not," says Wadsworth, "this is what's going
to bring this art form into the 21st century. I think it's
the creation of a new genre, the creation of a new music.
How it evolves will be very interesting."
Bukowski put it this way:
we have come from the alleys
and the bars and the
jails
we don't care how they
write the poem
but we insist that there are
other voices
other ways of creating
other ways of living the
life
and we intend to be
heard and heard and
heard
in this battle against the
Centuries of the Inbred
Dead
let it be known that
we have arrived and
intend to
stay.
On the verge of its
10th-Anniversary, the National
Poetry Slam will return to its birthplace in Chicago,
bigger than ever, and Smith is preparing a homecoming that
will further imprint his vision on the slam. "Every
revolution becomes an institution. Though it's being adopted
in academia, the main movement is still very radical. It's
still fresh and evolving. The mission isn't anywhere near
completed."
That mission - making poetry accessible, providing a
platform for all voices to be heard - is one that will not
take place in the aisles of your local mega-bookstore one
month a year. It will not be sponsored by Nike, Sprite or
MTV. It is not wedded to the elitist posturings of academics
holding on to their tenures for dear life. It is a
year-round process that is happening in coffeehouses and
bars and community centers throughout the world. The
revolution will happen and, for once, the victory will not
be posthumous.
(c) 1999, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
*This article originally appeared in POETRY IN
AMERICA, Poets & Writers Magazine Special Issue, April
1999.
**Includes excerpts from Charles Bukowki's "the Rape
of the Holy Mother," Septuagenarian
Stew: Stories & Poems (Black Sparrow Press,
1990).
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