(cross-posted at www.pagehalffull.com/humanyms)
I’ve got a review copy of The Spoken Word Revolution Redux. It is book 2 in a series on the history of Spoken Word. It is by the publishers who put together Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath (Book and 3 Audio CDs). I got that title years ago from a poetry festival. I still listen to years after I got it. Just to hear Auden and Gertrude Stein in their own voices is very cool. They improved the layout in this one by having an index that cross references track numbers to page numbers.
Intro
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser does the foreword. In it he says there that he feels performance poetry meets one of the basic human needs. One is happiest when doing what our ancestors had to do one to survive — one must cook, one must garden and one must tell stories. Writing is one step removed from this gratifying shaman state of artist-priest. Kooser says, performance poetry is “less revolutionary than – dare I say it – reactionary” against dullness and the “peculiar rectangle of words arranged on a page that poses a kind of riddle that one must solve or die” and dowdy old geezers who are for Literature with a capital L.
That’s up to debate but good debate always moves the field forward. For myself, I don’t know who those geezers might be. Perhaps they all died before I was born. Nonetheless it’s a good lively read.
The whole undertaking is ambitious. How to catch what is current and the essence and reduce down to the key samples that are in themselves excellent and are key indicators of those works that are left out for reasons of time and space. It’s the challenge of any anthology to select these seminal poems for an anthology.
Structure
Redux, published by sourcebooks has a CD with 75 tracks of spoken word and page poets, hip hop poetica, dub poetry and music. It’s like a Rough Guide, a survey anthology from poetic device devising a meditation or telling a memory to amped yell. And every sung note in between the poles.
There are 7 chapters. The first is slammers and laureates with sub-sections of women take the slam and the elders. Part 2 is legacy from Corso to Kerouac to Lerner. Part 3 is music and poetry connection. Slam poets and slam poets writing in form are followed by a chapter on those writing abroad (Germany, Australia, Jordan and more). Youth and hip-hop poetic are the last two foci.
The CD contains less than half the poems that are in the text (about 150 poems total). Although I’d like to have heard them all, that choice makes sense. If they entirely overlapped and duplicated each other, wouldn’t that have made one of them extraneous.
Considering that it’s a literary survey and not a literary magazine it would have been more useful to have bios with a bigger context, written in mini wikipedia style, rather than whatever one sentence the poet submitted. Most did however list some way to find more by them.
Some big personalities are explored in essays. Between one essay is by Henry Taylor, (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,1986) and another by Slam originator Bob Holman, you’ve got the value of the $25 U.S. cover price alone.
Taylor’s essay is 9 pages long and talks about his journey though poetry from academic formalist to slam poetry, still navigating between both “worlds”. As an undergraduate he heard live in the 1960s basically every big name in US poetry. He talks about being one of the readers when another reader took far more than the allotted time and how he and the other reader decided how they what they would do with their thin slice of the pie and all the ruminations of what performance is and what a poet owes to the audience or doesn’t. Holman’s 4 pages are devoted to memories of Robert Creeley.
My main complaint with this is after the build-up of how so much of his poems rests in the presentation, person, voice or Creeley himself, you turn a page and the CD is of Holman reading Creeley. Surely some archive could have been dug out and authorized. Likewise, the poem Thirty Again? slammed on stage by an 90 year old. That I’d want to hear not only read.
There’s a smattering of world voices, i.e. England and Caribbean from America but largely northeastern U.S. Part of the narration is done by one of the editors and organizer’s of this project — Chicago Public radio poet, and high school English teacher Kevin Coval.
There’s a dual market aim — general audience and high school classes, the latter comes out in the graphics and feel of the book (but perhaps it would only seem so to people who have also dealt with a lot of textbooks). A general audience who wanted to explore what this slam poetry thing is without going out, or having heard some and wanting to know the history and general context and range would be well-served.
It’s hard to generalize over so many poets and pieces. There were times in the book and CD that I felt the choices showed the nature of slam poetry to be topical based. There’s a grasp to record a piece of anthropology of a time and place, usually the northeast U.S. youth voice. A lot of the poems are narrative and recorded live bring in the audience reaction as part of the context.
The Poetry
Some narrative poetry lines overlap stand up comedy and storytelling such as Taylor Mali, repeat US slam poet winner. I’ve heard him before on youtube. He tweaks my sense of humor. Included here is his poem on his dad and his idiosyncratic system for labelling keys so no intruder (or anyone else) would know what fits what.
More free form is David Lerner with his rant against what this is not — “no grab bag of word play of sensitive thoughts and gracious theories word play over how many ambiguities can dance on the head of machine gun” in his poem entitled Mein Kampf, tapping the feet and brains of audience to incite rebelling against consumer society and the blindness of it.
Derrick Brown mixes singing then switches to late night radio tones with spoken words such as “We swerved home in black laughter” in Kurosawa Champagne. It’s as goosebump raising as Simone Muench in Tom Waits, I Hate You “for the way your voice snags my skin…plucking nightingales from a piano writhing as if it were my ribcage being played.” I’d really have to quote the whole thing to do it justice.
Or e.e. cummings put off your faces, Death for day is coming as a jazzy choir arrangement. This is clearly a CD and book to go through slowly over a lot of days hitting the pause button often.
A poem that keeps cycling back through my head is one by 2001 National Poetry Slam Individual Champion 2001, Mayda Del Valle which goes in part i’m crossing borders/abriendo puertas/ tongue waggin’/ clicking the roof of my mouth/ rolling ere’s / comiendo ese’s/ yo tengo el toque de tito’s / timbalero / kimbara kimbara kimba kim bam bam / kimbara kimbara kimba kim bam bam / writhing on my lips / i’m riding waves of / language deconstruction// wear ur hardharts / little chicken heads/ coz the alphabet is falling from the sky!! // I’m daring to deliver dialects not commercially created/ and destroy ur nit-wit imbecilic notions of / what language i should speak
Some powerful, some subtle, some political, some personal, some raw, some lyrical, some stories, mostly urban. A lot of poetry that reaches me in it, and a lot that doesn’t (which is par for course). Poetry is made by the audience meeting the word and what is started by the poet is being completed in the reader/listener.
There is a youth focus, but it travels well through time so far. Between backgrounds (on prose poetry on hip-hop poetica) to descriptions of people, passed on and present, and a lot of poetry and stories of lives, there’s a huge amount of resources in this book and it bears rereading. In fact, I already started re-reading it before I got to the end.
Vid Link: Max Middle Sound Project videos does a whole other take on poetry performance [now with correct link].
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