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chapter 6 Slam Nation: Immediacy, Mediatization, and the Counterpublic Sphere the Purpose of SLAM! being to ‹ll your hungry ears with Nutritious Sound/Meaning Constructs, Space Shots into Consciousness known hereafter as Poems, and not to provide a Last Toehold for Dying Free Enterprise Fuck ’em for a Buck ’em Capitalism’em. —bob holman, from “disclaimer” Poetry lives on page as words in type, poetry lives on stage as words in body, challenge of CD is to let poetry live as words in air. —edwin torres Perhaps to overcome the charge of trendiness, contemporary artists of the rap-meets-poetry scene have constructed for themselves a family tree, one with many arcing branches, to authenticate their performativity and af‹rm their identitarian politics. Bob Holman, a slam poet and one of the poetry slam’s best-known impresarios (he led the effort to reopen the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a main slam venue, in New York City’s Lower East Side), whimsically situates Whitman as progenitor when he “turn[s] on the Walt Whitman Lite-Brite on the side of the stage” at the Bowery Poetry Club, his slam site, and gushes, “‘Oh, Walt! I love you!’”1 Other slam a‹cionados track back to Walt as well, ‹nding his pluralism appealing: “When I came to the Green Mill [the Chicago birthplace of the slam] that ‹rst night, I remember feeling exhilarated by some of the poets on stage and saying to my friend that old familiar refrain from Whitman, ‘I hear America singing—its varied carols I hear’” (SWR, 141). In his review of the 199 ‹lm SlamNation (1999), which chronicles the progress of several poets to the national slam championship, Roger Ebert cites Whitman’s successor, Vachel Lindsay, as a precursor to these poets, ‹nding that “Most of the material exists halfway between rap music and Vachel Lindsay”; he speci‹cally points to a scene in the ‹lm of a New York book editor sighing over a pile of slam poetry manuscripts as he notes that such poetry does not always translate well to the page, a charge that plagued Lindsay.2 Others locate af‹nities between slam and beat aesthetics, even as they make certain distinctions. Slam poet Lisa Martinovic ‹nds that “Slam is a movement, reminiscent of its Beat generation predecessor, but one that has already more deeply permeated the culture. It is a social phenomenon that—not coincidentally—embodies one of the most diverse communities on the planet. People of all ages, races and sexual persuasions come together to compete on a level playing ‹eld.”3 A reporter for Newsweek makes a similar point about the democratic ethos of the form: “Unlike the Beats, this [the poetry slam] is not just a bunch of white boys rif‹ng on the meaning of life. There are ‘womanist’ poets, rapper poets, gay poets, lesbian poets , neo-Beatnik poets, deaf poets who use sign language, Afro-Caribbean immigrant poets, Latino poets, Asian-American poets, cowboy poets and cyberpunk poets.”4 Marc Smith of the Green Mill observes that “We started [the slam style] with contributions of democratic origin, a focus on the community and the audience, the poet as the servant of the people.” The function of poetry, he argues, is “not to glorify the poet, it’s to serve the community.”5 Bob Holman agrees: slam has “created . . . a community of poets who have democratized an art that was suffocating under a false perception of elitism.”6 Jessica Care Moore, a black performance poet and slam artist, is quick to disabuse us of the notion that the spoken word is in any way a new phenomenon , preferring to see it as a sequel not to the beats but to the Black Arts poets: “We’ve traveled the ocean on Amiri Baraka’s Blue Ark and sang to Jayne Cortez’s Blues while listening to what Nikki Giovanni was gonna do to her lover with a full orchestra in the background. Ain’t nothing new ya’ll.”7 Yusef Komunyakaa also sees the slammers descending from this previous generation of black artists, even as he recognizes a distinct change in tone: “It seems that some of these voices were directly trans‹gured from the Black Arts Movement. . . . The aesthetics are similar, almost down to the uncapitalized personal pronoun i. But the ideological conceits and transparent rage are less on the surface of this poetry of the 1990s.”8 One of 200 american poetry in performance these “voices”—Tracie Morris...

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