Killing Poetry

Javon Johnson

• Verlag: Rutgers University Press
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813580036
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: American Poetry

In recent decades, poetry slams and the spoken word artists who compete in them have sparked a resurgent fascination with the world of poetry. However, there is little critical dialogue that fully engages with the cultural complexities present in slam and spoken word poetry communities, as well as their ramifications.
 
In Killing Poetry, renowned slam poet, Javon Johnson unpacks some of the complicated issues that comprise performance poetry spaces. He argues that the truly radical potential in slam and spoken word communities lies not just in proving literary worth, speaking back to power, or even in altering power structures, but instead in imagining and working towards altogether different social relationships. His illuminating ethnography provides a critical history of the slam, contextualizes contemporary black poets in larger black literary traditions, and does away with the notion that poetry slams are inherently radically democratic and utopic.
 
Killing Poetry —at times autobiographical, poetic, and journalistic—analyzes the masculine posturing in the Southern California community in particular, the sexual assault in the national community, and the ways in which related social media inadvertently replicate many of the same white supremacist, patriarchal, and mainstream logics so many spoken word poets seem to be working against. Throughout, Johnson examines the promises and problems within slam and spoken word, while illustrating how community is made and remade in hopes of eventually creating the radical spaces so many of these poets strive to achieve. 
 

1

Let the Slam Begin

History, Method, and Beyond

Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go. Let go.

—Buddy Wakefield, “We Were Emergencies”

In the spring of 2000, the Paris Review published its sixth edition of “The Man in the Back Row Has a Question” in which noted literary figures discussed poetry’s past, present, and future. Answering a question about the hallmarks of a good poem, the literary critic and humanities professor Harold Bloom anxiously called poetry slams “the death of art.” As the lone figure to mention them in an interview that had nothing to do with the increasingly popular phenomenon, he seemed to have been waiting for any opportunity to unload his frustrations. After pining over the works of Milton, Blake, Shakespeare, Crane, Yeats, Stevens, and Whitman, he suddenly veered off-topic: “And, of course, now it’s all gone to hell. I can’t bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter, which is actually not there, but might as well be” (Barber et al. 2000, 379).

Bloom’s claims about slam and his list of poets who know how to use “exactly the right word in exactly the right context” read like white male angst (Barber et al. 2000, 379). Because poetry slams represent a forced diversity in terms of bodies, content, and structure, his dismissal is a trite and terrible attempt to save white male normativity, white structures, and the supposed sanctity of the white literary world. Even the mention of an applause meter points to the assumption that only the great literary critics, who are far too often white and male, possess the ability to adequately assess good literature. His comment made many the poets who slam feel as if all of academia were against our work and us. While some creative writing programs and English departments do not recognize the literary merits of slam, many do; and numerous campus program boards and departments are excited to bring slam and spoken word poets to their campuses to perform, lecture, and conduct workshops.

Bloom’s generalized dismissal, which is well known in slam and spoken word poetry communities for having reduced slammers to non(sense) poets, failed to account for the many slam participants who have earned degrees in creative writing from respected programs, published in reputable journals, and won highly coveted writing awards. Plenty of us have tried in earnest to prove we are not the death of art by emulating and participating in the very structures that Bloom accepts as legitimate. I appreciate these efforts, but I am also incredibly interested in slam and spoken word poets who imagine and build institutions and coalitions beyond and outside of the academy. My hope is that, rather than trying to prove our merit and usefulness to the literary world, we can consider the possibility that the death of art—at least in the ways in which Bloom imagines art—can be generative.

The Poetry Slam or Slam Poetry

The poetry slam is the competitive art of performance poetry. It puts a dual emphasis on writing and performance, encouraging poets to focus on what they are saying and how they are saying it. In contrast, spoken word can happen in an open mic format without structured competition or scoring. Traditionally, poetry slams consist of multiple poets who are judged by five randomly selected audience members. Immediately following each performance, the judges rate the competitor, using a rubric with a low of 0 and a high of 10, encouraging decimal points in order to decrease the chance of ties. The bout manager drops the highest and lowest scores and averages the middle three scores, and the total may range from 0 to a perfect 30. The rules of individual venues vary—for instance, in the number of rounds required in a bout—but the energy and spirit of the slam remain consistent.

Spoken word poetry existed long before the poetry slam; the competition element was a trick or a tool to draw people back into poetry. These poets belong to the lineage of radical theater, which refuses the confines of the traditional stage. They create poetic spaces everywhere: coffee shops, record stores, theaters, bars, bookstores, restaurants, homes, and community centers. Yet despite their association with radical politics, they are open to a wide range of styles and topics. In a way, there is no genre called slam poetry: “the key to understanding [it] . . . as a body of work has little to do with form or style . . . because a range of forms, tones, and modes of address exist in slam practice” (Somers-Willett 2009, 9). Yet I like to think of the poetry slam as a range of aesthetic possibilities beyond present standards and forms. While a number of popular modes and styles have come to symbolize poetry slams—so much so that the collective imaginary may assume that the poetry slam is a new genre called slam poetry—I believe that slams and the spoken word communities that often center around them are about ever-emerging possibilities.

A Slamming History

I am sitting in Chicago’s Green Mill Cocktail Lounge. Smoke fills the air, wrapping itself around my neck like a warm scarf on a winter morning, and I choke and cough. I am very uncomfortable, but I figure this is what all ethnographers must go through. The lounge, with its poor lighting and congested seating, is built for jazz. Faux wood paneling lines the walls, and hanging just behind the stage is a gauche stylized neon tube light that spells out “Green Mill.” A piano sits stage-left. I immediately imagine a cheesy lounge singer lying on top of it, singing a tune no one wants to hear. A microphone stands at center stage, and an older white man named Marc Smith grabs it and enthusiastically announces:

The poetry slam is a competition invented in the 1980s by a Chicago construction worker named Marc Smith. [“So what?” the audience screams in response.] This is the slam, everybody. There are slams all over the world, but this is the original slam. I started it all. What makes a slam different than your ordinary poetry reading is that you, the audience, is in control. If you don’t happen to like something, you do this [snaps fingers]. This don’t mean dig me daddy-o, those guys are dead. If you really don’t like it, you do this [stomps foot]. Years ago we created the feminist hiss [women in the audience hiss]. It used to be for when a man did something to offend women, but now it’s virtually for any man for simply stepping on the stage. [“And that’s the way it should be!” women yell.] Oh, I have something in my eye, honey [uses his middle finger to dig at the corner of his eye]. [“Here, let me help you dig it out!” women yell and stick up their middle fingers.] In response, we men have created the masculine grunt [men in the audience grunt weakly]. (Poetry Slam Inc. n.d.)

Marc and the audience perform this pre-slam mantra weekly. Likewise, in every national and regional bout, and even at some local bouts, a bout manager enacts a version of this ritual before the competition. It is performed in every major documentary about slam and appears in most books that deal with the phenomenon. The audience’s energetic “So what?” response to Marc’s role as the slam papi isn’t meant to disavow his importance.1 Rather, the ritual reestablishes “certain customary norms and ethical standards” in which the slam papi assumes his place as the unquestioned patriarch, the father who created the slam and deserves recognition for doing so (Turner 1982, 95).2

Though the history of the poetry slam is brief, it is also vexed. Some cultural insiders and outsiders contest the well-known narrative, but most would agree that the slam began “in 1984, [when] construction worker and poet Marc Smith started a poetry reading at a Chicago jazz club, the Get Me High Lounge, looking for a way to breathe life into the open mike format” (Poetry Slam Inc. n.d.). He sought to give audiences a way to voice their responses to what he suggested were pretentious, monologic, and monolithic poetry readings. When I interviewed him in April 2007, he argued that “traditional poetry readings were boring and self-serving because they had poets reading to only hear themselves, and I wanted to change that.” He continued, “I wanted to merge performance and poetry. You young poets don’t know how hard it was to do that. Many poets thought I was crazy because they thought that performance would sully the poetry, but I didn’t care.”

Eventually, he needed more space, and “in 1986, Smith approached Dave Jemilo, the owner of the Green Mill (a Chicago jazz club and former haunt for Al Capone), with a plan to host a weekly poetry [show on Sunday nights]” (Poetry Slam Inc. n.d.). Jemilo welcomed him, and the poetry slam began to grow into the event that would later sweep the nation. Yet it was not originally about competition but a cabaret-influenced performance poetry reading, complete with costumes, wild acts, and—perhaps most importantly—the involvement of raucous audiences. Marc told me, “Originally, we didn’t know what we were doing. We just knew we had to do something, and that didn’t always involve competition. . . . That came one day when the show was running a bit early, and I kept the competition in my back pocket just in case I needed it.” After “it took off . . . and Al McDougal became the first slam champion,” the term slam became synonymous with competition, he told me, because it was easier, and perhaps more enticing, for the media to write about a competition than about an entire show, which could be “too complex” and required “time or space.”

In July 1986, Marc coined the term poetry slam. It appeared in print later that month in “Poetry Boosters Slam Snob Image,” Lynn Voedisch’s Chicago Sun Times article on his weekly event. “Who can argue?” she writes. “Poetry readings have always smacked of snobbery. Too often, intellectual poseurs sniff through readings of obscure scribblings, while jaded members of the sparse audience nod their heads in subdued agreement. It’s not exactly a happening scene.” Labeling Marc and his colleagues Ron Gillette and Jean Howard “poetic thespians,” she asks, “But then there’s the question of that name. Just why is this event labeled a ‘slam?’” The answer Marc gave her was nearly identical to the one he gave me twenty-one years later: “‘Well, I thought, everybody would think a slam, to hell with poetry, but then I started thinking about a grand slam in baseball and even in bridge. And, well, I had to get the flier out . . . , so that’s the name I went with’” (3).

Voedisch’s seminal article brought the term into public discourse, first in Chicago and soon throughout the nation. A week after it appeared, the Chicago Tribune ran the first advertisement for the “Uptown Poetry Slam” held at the Green Mill. By November 25, the term had made its way into the Los Angeles Times (in Larry Green’s “It Could Be Verse: Performance Poets Liven an Old Art”). On August 24, 1987, it appeared in the Wall Street Journal (in Alex Kotlowitz’s “The Boozer As Critic: Poetry Is Brutal Sport in a Chicago Barroom”). Yet even though a few local poetry readings across the country began experimenting with the poetry slam, the notion did not take off in most cities until after 1990, when “the first National Poetry Slam (NPS) competition was held in San Francisco as part of the third Annual National Poetry Week Festival.” After that, slams began cropping up in Midwest cities beyond Chicago, then in Boston, New York, and San Francisco, and finally everywhere. “The movement had gone national” (Smith and Kraynak 2004, 14–15).

With the help of Paul Devlin’s documentary Slam Nation and the film Slam (both released in 1998), the national competition grew quickly. That growth was amplified when Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam debuted in 2002 as both a Broadway show and an HBO series. Writing in the New York Times, Stephen Holden (1998) captured the impact of these films and performances: “They have helped make poetry sexy again in a way it hasn’t been since the heyday of the Beats” (B12). The 2003 national competition boasted record-breaking numbers of both competitors and audience members, yet both records were shattered in the years following. In addition to PSi’s national competition, other major events include Youth Speaks’ Brave New Voices National Poetry Festival, PSi’s Women of the World Slam, and the annual College Union Poetry Slam Inc. (Poetry Slam Inc. 2016).

The advent of poetry slams in the 1980s marked an important moment in the revival of spoken word poetry. Although Marc Smith himself documents a history of performance poetry that predates his slam, his “poetry with a theatrical flourish” deserves critical attention because it “liven[ed] an old art” (Green 1986, A1). Performance scholar Jill Dolan (2005) has called slams’ concentrated intensity a “utopian performative”: one of those “small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense” (5). In the truest sense of the performative, slam and spoken poets are doing material things with words. Dolan and many others (for instance, Fisher 2005, Parmar and Bain 2007, and Woods 2008) remark on the utopic, alchemic, and democratic possibilities in slam and spoken word poetry, whether in bringing a younger and more colorful audience to Broadway, performatively practicing democracy, or empowering our youth. Not only has this repopularized phenomenon attracted the hearts, ears, and attention of millions within the past couple of decades, but it has also created an amazing network of young poets and loving relationships. For some, such as Darnell “Poetic” Davenport of Los Angeles, it saves lives. Devin “Poetri” Smith, also of Los Angeles, told me, “It’s my prayer.” Aja Monet of New York said, “I do this for my life. It is in creativity that we see the God in ourselves.” I lost count of the number of poets who explained to me, “This is how I breathe.” All of them are a testament to the power of poetry and performance.

While these narratives need to be told and retold, the discussions of slam and spoken word poetry in popular media and academic circles have glossed over some crucial details. Although poetry slams have contributed to a resurgent interest in performance poetry, there has been little critical dialogue that fully engages with the complexities of performance poetry communities. Even Marc Smith and Joe Kraynak (2004) and Felice Belle (2003), all of whom are deeply invested in performance poetry and write about slam and spoken word poetry communities, ultimately fail to account for the problematic ways in which these communities are produced. In other words, while the writers are important members of the communities, their work is not backed by ethnographic research. They largely focus on discussing poetry slams but not the communities that are so vital to understanding them. Recent academic and popular writings on performance poetry are mostly concerned with its presentational style (Dillard 2002; Martin 2002; Ellis, Gere, and Lamberton 2003), or they romanticize the remarkable diversity of performance communities while failing to account for the performers’ underlying racial, gender, class, and sexual dynamics, through which the notion of community becomes contested rather than utopian (see Echlin 2003). In some instances, the literature suggests that performance poetry may be used as a strategy to invite students into other (often read as canonical) styles of poetry (Ellis et al. 2003). Yet there is little dialogue that critically questions the ways in which these highly politicized performance communities are produced and reproduced, maintained and negotiated, or empowered and subverted. By examining the performances of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the making of slam and spoken word poetry communities, I hope to address this absence.

Getting to Slam

I attended my first poetry slam in Los Angeles in the summer 2001. Earlier that year, during the spring, a college buddy, Armando Roman, who knew I wrote poetry, asked if I wanted to go with him to “see some slam poetry.” I happily said yes, but our first attempt ended in an auto accident in which his beloved, hard-earned car was completely totaled. Luckily, everyone walked away without serious injury, and a few months and one car later, we went out to see the slam teams from Hollywood, Los Angeles, and Orange County perform before heading off to the national competition. The event was held in the now-defunct Atlas Café; and while I cannot remember much about the space, I do remember seeing amazing poets such as Shihan Van Clief, Devin “Poetri” Smith, Sekou “Tha Misfit” Andrews, Rachel McKibbens, Buddy Wakefield, Omari Hardwick, Gina Loring, and so many others.

To riff on one of Shihan’s well-known poems, the room was filled with “flashy words.” The excitement was palpable and was compounded by the throbbing hip-hop bass lines interspersed throughout the show, courtesy of Da Poetry Lounge’s resident DJ, Brutha Gimel. Born and raised in the Acres Homes section of Houston, Gimel Hooper had made his way to Los Angeles in 1992 to try his hand in the entertainment industry. He is a thin, dark-skinned brother who stands about five feet, seven inches tall and is unapologetically hip-hop and Afrocentric. On the night I met him he was wearing a dashiki, a pair of shell-toe Adidas sneakers, and a natural haircut. At the time I did not understand that his appearance was a near-perfect symbolic representation of who he is: Gimel, who once told me he “should have been born in the sixties,” is one of the most generous and genuine men I have ever met.

At the end of that night’s show, I walked up to Gimel and said, “Yo, man, this is incredible. Where else do you all do this?” He handed me a few fliers and gave me a quick rundown of the slam scene. He mentioned that Da Poetry Lounge in Hollywood was “a big stage” and suggested that I might want to sharpen my skills at a smaller venue first. Omari Hardwick (now of Starz’s Power fame) then joined our conversation, and both he and Gimel insisted that I should come back. I left the venue buzzing with excitement. I remember feeling as if I had found a community of people to whom I did not have to explain and justify my complexities. I had grown up on a diet of football, gangster rap, and fistfights, so it was not always easy to explain my love for theater, choir, speech and debate, drawing, and poetry. I am not saying that others derided my affinities. Rather, I myself could not understand the seeming contradictions in art and manhood. As a straight cis-gendered black boy raised in 1980s South Central, Los Angeles, I had always thought the arts were spaces for the gay boys, yet there I was, singing in the choir, performing in our school’s theater productions, and writing poems, just trying to make sense of the “fuzzy edges” of my masculinity, to invoke Mark Anthony Neal (2005, 9).

As soon as we got back into ...