Writing in Rhythm: Spoken Word Poetry in Urban Classrooms by Maisha T. Fisher, and: Youth Poets: Empowering Literacies In and Out of Schools by Korina M. Jocson (review)

Fisher and Jocson both make the case that those involved in public rhetoric and community-based literacy ought to pay more attention to poetry, particularly that created by urban youth. By tracing the roots of contemporary spoken-word poetry to hip-hop, blues, and the Black Arts movement, both studies suggest that poetry has long bridged out-of-school and school-based literacies. For these authors, poetry is a rhetoric that at once celebrates the vernacular and builds coalitions amongst disenfranchised groups.

In Writing in Rhythm: Spoken Word Poets in Urban Classrooms, Maisha Fisher documents the year she shadowed Joseph Ubiles, a high school teacher and coalition builder in the Bronx. Fisher watches, and occasionally jumps in, as Ubiles leads a spoken-word class called Power Writers. Fisher’s ethnography is a pleasure to read, with a brisk and vivid delivery of the poetry workshops and thick description of the cultural contexts that inform them. Her authority is often on display, as when she frames her observations with educational theories, such as Freire’s participatory classroom, and history. But she wears that learning lightly and uses it to illuminate the day-to-day of the workshops.

The book’s title might suggest that its message applies only to schools, but Fisher’s previous works have addressed the knowledge and practices of poets working open mics at neighborhood institutions, particularly Black-owned bookstores in Northern California. One of her research questions probes the degree to which the literacies that operate in these spaces intersect with those in the titular urban “classrooms.” Thus, Writing in Rhythm takes public ground not just when Joe Ubiles acquaints his students with the Nuyorican Poetry Café, the Cloisters, the Upper West Side, the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, or the Apollo Theater. It also makes the case that Joe’s role as a literacy educator places him in the tradition of community memory-keepers, people like the book and magazine vendors of Greenwich Village, respected as “old heads” for the wisdom they have earned through their own experience and through witnessing the experiences of their fellows (83).

It is in this tradition of witnessing that Fisher places herself as she passes on Joe’s and the students’ idiolect. She writes, “the role of a worthy witness is keeping the naming actions of the community intact” (17). Chapter 4, “We Speak in all Tongues: The Politics of Bronxonics” is thus particularly useful as a reminder of the power of “non-standard” English to name the communities in which we live. Bronxonics, we learn, includes elements of both African-American Vernacular English and Puerto Rican- and Dominican-inflected Spanish. Echoing Joe, Fisher argues that this linguistic “gumbo” contains not just a lovely “magic” of rhythm and tone, but also the “money” that young people need to make their way through the day (45). Fisher reminds readers that the “civic” space of civic engagement does not always accept academic language as currency, and stresses “how important it was not to leave our students ‘naked’ when putting them out into the world,” by stripping them of their home language (44). Accordingly, Joe teaches not academese or the vernacular, but both. As one of his students puts it, “[Joe]’s saying adapt to your environment. Let people know you are street smart and book smart” (44).

Maisha’s and Joe’s decision to honor these poets as “[t]rustworthy witnesses to love, heartache, poverty, violence, and struggles for understanding” pays off in the “blues” poems she brings forth in Chapter 6, which comment on these experiences with clarity and force (69). Fisher begins by deftly summarizing scholarly debates over the degree to which rap develops or departs from the blues tradition...