The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America

1. On Page and Stage: Slam Poetry as a Genre

CHAPTER ONE On Page and Stage Slam Poetry as a Genre In trying to isolate its appeal to contemporary audiences, scholars have mainly focused on the orality of slam poetry—on the transmission of an original poetic text through speaking. For example, in his 2004 essay “Disappearing Ink,” Dana Gioia characterizes the reemergence of popular poetry through rap, cowboy poetry, and poetry slams as an oral phenomenon . The relationship between audiences and popular poetry, he argues, is largely mediated by methods other than print, recalling poetry ’s preliterate origins and re›ecting an “oral culture” now changing the landscape of the literary arts.1 In this, Gioia echoes a number of other scholars who have focused on poetry’s orality, including Charles Bernstein, Walter Ong, and Paul Zumthor. Other scholars, such as Gregory Nagy, have traced slam back to ancient oral traditions—those of griots, the bards, or the Homeric epic.2 Although the importance of contemporary poetry’s life in media other than print should not be underestimated , a sole scholarly focus on the oral and aural—on speaking and listening—is, I believe, a little misguided. Even though such analyses are critically sound, they miss the mark in exploring what poets and audiences ‹nd truly compelling about slam poetry: the larger cultural and political dynamics it enacts through performance. Orality itself is neither the ultimate characteristic of verse’s current popularity nor its most crucial. Especially in the case of slam poetry, orality is but one component in a poem’s presentation. It is the range of performative aspects of a poem—vocal dynamics, physical dynamics, appearance, setting, hoots and hollers from the audience itself—that in›uences one’s experience of a slam poem. Slams are theatrical events, not listening booths, and what proves compelling to audiences is that such events performatively embody verse and its author. With this in mind, it becomes clear that the popular appeal of slam poetry relies on, and indeed creates, not just an oral culture but a performative culture. The distinction between the oral and the performative is an impor16 tant one to make as it marks the difference between poetry’s transmission and reception. Slam poetry’s following has been gained not merely through the act of listening; although CDs and MP3s are a popular way of documenting slam poetry, such verse is created to be best understood in live performance. In live venues (as well as audiovisual media), appreciating poetry becomes a multisensory experience. Audiences don’t merely listen to a poem; they react to an entire performance of verse, at times performing right back through applause, spiteful hissing, or comments shouted to the poet or slam host. Audiences receive performed verse by experiencing how the poet moves, appears, sounds, and physically embodies the poem. The Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Henry Taylor notes that those regularly attending poetry performances “are there for something other than the purity of oral performance” and are instead looking for physical or vocal habits of the author that “might deepen the feeling of personal encounter with the poetry.”3 What makes slam poetry popular is that it brings verse to be performed in certain ways: expressed with and through particular dialects, formats, gestures , and renegade attitudes that underscore its sense of urgency and authenticity. The current critical emphasis on orality also ignores the importance of the role of the author in slam poetry. Far from harkening back to poetry ’s preliterate origins in which the boundaries of authorship were muddied by oral transmission, slam poetry puts exceptional emphasis on the role of the author and his or her identity. In fact, the rules governing national slam competition stipulate that the performer of a slam poem must also always be its author. In slam performances, just as in poetry readings where poems are read aloud by their authors, one can witness larger ideas about authorship, identity, and audience at work in poetry’s physical and vocal performance. In this way, poetry slams and readings are similar, although they often differ in tone, energy, and audience expectation—qualities fueled, no doubt, by the slam’s competitive structure. Slam poetry does not exist in reference to a preliterate origin, nor is it extraliterate, as critics focusing on orality may suggest. Such an emphasis serves to erase slam poetry’s relationship with text, which, though diminished, is still very much present. Slam poets may appear to improvise or spontaneously recite their work, but in actuality most of their...