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CHAPTER TWO Poetry and the People The Cultural Tensions of American Popular Verse in Performance If there’s one lesson the academy might learn from the slam, it’s that the audience matters. Every poet, regardless of how abstract or esoteric, should have at least one poem he or she can read to a group of strangers on the subway. —Jeffrey McDaniel, “Slam and the Academy” In America, the use of the term popular verse has a varied history. It has been used to describe the lyric formality of rap, the nomadic and hip strain of the Beats, the militant vernacular assumed by Black Arts poets , the populist practice of poetry slams, and even the jingles of radio stations and television commercials. When literary critics speak of American popular verse, they imply a poetry that exists outside of what the poet Charles Bernstein has called “of‹cial verse culture,” the cadre of literary journals, conferences, and academic MFA programs that are a mainstay of contemporary American poetry. It may be steeped in the local, the vernacular, and the discourse of the marginal, insistent on accessibility while existing outside or on the boundaries of both dominant and academic culture. Popular verse is commonly infused with a sense of historically de‹ned “lowbrowness” which, it is assumed, popular audiences can recognize, identify with, and appreciate. Slam poetry, as Jeffrey McDaniel suggests, is one such example of popular verse. The tensions waged between American popular poetry and both academic and dominant culture have quite a history, particularly as they happen to surface in performance. Such is the case with the Beat movement, the Black Arts movement, and even the antebellum tradition of blackface minstrelsy. The last of these has traditionally been considered in a theatrical setting, but I wish to consider it as an early stage for popular verse performance. Although each of these movements in popular verse emerged from unique historical contexts, they all circulated in conscious contrast to the academic verse and dominant culture of their times, perpetuating particular ideas about race, class, and nation in order to reach popular audiences. 39 As the variety of these movements may suggest, popular verse in performance is not bound to a particular style but is instead poetry that performs an attitude of resistance to a dominant literary elite, in today’s terms the culture of MFA programs, the canon, and literary criticism. In this sense, popular verse is marginal, that is, it exists outside the dominant center of poetry’s production, criticism, and reception, which is often located within academic culture. Popular verse in performance also engages in a larger tension with dominant culture, one often located in or embodied by the American white middle class. Its artists are bohemian, vagabond, militant, or otherwise countercultural. In many respects, popular verse’s dual tensions with dominant and academic culture are inseparable, for popular poets often portray them as one and the same. Put in reductive but utterly familiar terms, both cultures are seen as realms of that vague and ominous oppressor, “the man.” Popular verse’s quality of institutional and cultural resistance is more important than the size of its audience, although many popular poets have reached mass audiences through performance media such as ‹lm, video, television, and the Internet. Some have criticized popular performance poetry movements for only reaching a relatively small number of people in local readings; popular verse practitioners often make a similar allegation that academic poetry only reaches an elite group. Neither criticism is wholly accurate, although they both serve to feed popular poetry’s dual tensions. Although it may also perform the same tensions, avant-garde performance poetry usually falls outside the purview of popular verse. Since such poetry aims to be ahead of contemporary taste, it often requires a certain knowledge or aesthetics to be accessible to popular audiences (and hence, to borrow McDaniel’s rule of thumb, it may not be the best choice to read to a group of strangers on a subway).1 In his book Poetry and the Public, Joseph Harrington notes that in any given era American poetry is de‹ned by its relationship with the public: as a way to take “refuge from the public,” as a method of “engaging with the public,” or as a way to negotiate public and private domains .2 With this in mind, the contemporary tension between poetry in the private academy and the public realm of the popular signals a larger de‹nitional debate about what...

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