Poetry on MTV? Slam and the Poetics of Popular Culture

New York City's first-ever took place in April 1999. Thirty high-school aged poets competed in a mock-Olympic war of words, each poet's performance ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 by judges picked from the audience. In keeping with the principles of slam poetry, the poets used neither props nor musical instruments, relying instead on the expressiveness of their bodies and voices, and no performance could exceed a 3 1/2 minute time limit. The crowd actively participated in the poetry competition by hollering its approval and disagreement with the judges' scoring. The teen poets paraded on and off the stage, dread-locked and pony-tailed, braided and buzzed, some squeezed into stretch pants and baby T's, others, in the words of slam poet Patricia Smith, drooped in drapery. Iolet is tall, head-wrapped, and regal and told of police brutality. A boy from New Jersey dedicated his poem about being surrounded by a raging sea called heterosexuality to anyone who has ever felt left out of societies' categories, or been to a really boring sweet 16 party in Westchester county. There was a Puerto Rican nationalist poem, an ode to a mother and another to a brother locked up, and many tales of sex and heartbreak. Asheena McNeil, winner of the Teen Slam with a perfect score for her 125th Street Blues, credited rap music, and hip hop culture in general, as having made poetry cool. Rap is the most widespread and commercial branch of a larger movement known as word, a category used to describe forms of poetry and performance in which an artist recites (rather than sings) poetry, often to musical accompaniment that might range from a jazz ensemble to a bongo drummer. While spoken word had been confined principally to coffee houses and street corners, in the early 90's it went mass-market and--media as MTV and Much Music began to televise performance poetry, broadcasting clips of poets in-between music videos. word continues to take new forms: in December, 2001, HBO began airing Def Poetry Jam (co-produced by Russell Simmons and rapper Mos Def), a half hour of spoken word poetry hosted by Mos Def that featured in its first few episodes eminent African-American poets Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, slam poetry veteran Taylor Mali, and celebrities such as Jewel. In 2003 Def Poetry Jam took shape as a Broadway play. Performance poetry also hit the road, touring the United States and Canada with the music festival Lollapalooza and as the star of MTV's Spoken Word Unplugged concerts. This phenomenon of popular poetry is well documented journalistically; (1) media interest has focused on the dynamic and competitive slam poetry movement. Started in the mid 80's at the Get Me High bar in Chicago, poetry slams now take place across North America, and culminate each year in the National Slam. In 2004, 270 poets in 69 teams from cities across the United States and Canada met in St. Louis to vie for the title of Grand Slam champions. In this paper, I make the case that spoken word holds important lessons for curriculum on how contemporary youth communicate, express themselves, and make meaning, through practices constituting what might be thought of as a counter- literacy--outside the formal practices of literacy, pedagogy, and curriculum, and evolving out of exclusion, necessity, and improvised pleasure. But I also build a larger argument for curriculum studies about popular culture as a central site for understanding cultural change. I do both through a study of some slam poetry texts: the film Slam (1998), which brought the poetic genre to a cinema audience; its accompanying anthology, which includes the screenplay and written versions of its poetry; and the anthology ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (1994), the first collection of slam verse, from one of the central performance poetry venues in the United States. Why has spoken word become such a cultural force? I propose that spoken word is so topical, so central to the present cultural moment, because it anticipates forms and theories of language and poetics, sets of communicative conditions and relations, and in turn, new forms of identity and community which are not quite yet, which are in the process of evolving, especially within proliferating contexts of new information and communication technologies and under conditions of globalization. …

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