book review: ‘spoken word revolution redux’

by Juliet Wilson

In true poetry slam style, the Spoken Word Revolution Redux CD and book set starts out by putting a Poet Laureate head to head with a Slam Champion. Ted Kooser (former USA Poet Laureate) vs Anis Mojgani (twice National Poetry Slam Individual Champion); Andrew Motion (current UK Poet Laureate) vs Sonya Renee (former National Poetry Slam Individual Champion).

I’m not a fan of Motion’s poetry, but even if I were, his polite reading of “Anne Frank Huis” would still be totally blown out of the water by Renee’s electrifying, music backed performance of “Thick”. The comparison is of course, unfair; Motion writes for the page, Renee is a performer. However, any literary poet who is presenting their poetry in front of an audience could learn lessons from performance poets. Lessons about how to bring poetry alive and to engage an audience.

Questions, asked by Ted Kooser in his introduction to the book, about whether performance poetry will endure as literature, are, I think, irrelevant. Each performance is unique and will live on in the mind of the audience who may well memorize the words (as proven by the audience participation in the recording of David Lerner’s “Mein Kampf“*).

Dare I ask the question: is literary poetry in fact the sign of a failure in poetics? That it needs to be written down because no one can remember it otherwise? The first poets performed their work, they didn’t write it down. Performance poetry today continues this tradition. In his article, “Towards a Hip Hop Poetica,” Kevin Coval describes hip hop poets as “modern griots, indigenous keepers and tellers of his/her/stories.” Hip Hop poetry revels in rhyme and rhythm, as demonstrated here by poet Invincible, in this excerpt from “Detroit Winter”:

The city streets are bitter sweet
I pound pavement
While I’m kicking litter at my feet
Under the snow, the ground’s blanket
These heavy hitter beats.

In his article “The New Oral Poetry,” Dana Gioia notes that “the nearly universal critical bias against rhyme and meter as recently as 10 years ago, especially in University writing programmes, indicates how distant the poets in a print culture have become from the orality of verse.”

Some literary poets can seem to be afraid of emotion and humour and often appear to be engaging with a select gathering of fellow literary poets, rather than reaching out to a wider audience. Performance poets however, are rarely afraid of emotion, whether raw anger in Mayda del Valle’s poem about Puerto Rican Spanish speakers, “Tongue Tactics,” or more controlled as in Patricia Smith’s rambling poem of love for her father “When the Burning Begins”:

……. I’m telling you it’s the first thing
I ever cooked, that my daddy was laughing
and breathing and no bullet in his head.

Nor are performance poets afraid to connect with the audience’s points of reference, as in this line from “Lebron James,” by Nate Marshall one of the many young poets featured in this book:

I’ll be the first spoken word brotha with a shoe
deal.

Performance poetry also is unafraid to engage with politics, which can seem confrontational, but it is hard not to at least see where Nikki Giovanni is coming from in her angry poem “All Eyez on U”:

if those who lived by the sword died by the sword there would be no
white men on earth.

There are some performance poets who I find too confrontational, just as there are some literary poets who bore me; at the same time there are literary poets who stun me with their distillations of powerful emotion and there are performance poets who move me with their subtlety. Both sides can learn from each other. This book is a perfect starting point for literary minded poets (or anyone else) to start learning from performance poets.

* The link is to a Lerner reading of his work, not from the CD.

The Spoken Word Revolution Redux, edited by Mark Eleveld, is available from Source Books and Powell’s Books.

Eleveld, Mark, ed. (2007.) Spoken Word Revolution Redux. Naperville: Sourcebooks Mediafusion.

Note: A version of this review first appeared on Crafty Green Poet.