University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
2000
Performance, poetics, and place: public poetry as a
community art
Julie Marie Schmid
University of Iowa
Copyright 2000 Julie Marie Schmid
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/189
Recommended Citation
Schmid, Julie Marie. "Performance, poetics, and place: public poetry as a community art." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis,
University of Iowa, 2000.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/189.
Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of the English Language and Literature Commons
PERFORMANCE, POETICS, AND PLACE: PUBLIC POETRY AS A COMMUNITY
ART
by
Julie Marie Schmid
An Abstract
Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2000
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Adalaide Morris
1
ABSTRACT
This dissertation refuses the assumption that poetry is a dying art
form. In this study, I focus on poets Marc Smith, David Hernández, Patricia
Smith, and Bob Holman. I place the work of these four poets within the
context of the contemporary performance poetry movement and argue that
from their position on stage, in the recording studio, or in front of the
camera, they use the performance to forge bonds across racial, ethnic, class,
and gender divides. Throughout this study, I trace the evolution of the
contemporary performance poetry movement from the local to the national,
the embodied to the virtual. I combine original research on public poetries
such as the poetry slam, the poetry-music ensemble, and video-poetry and
synthesize a variety of critical approaches, including cultural studies,
postcolonial theory, and ethnomusicology. I analyze specific elements of the
performance--the voice, music, the body on stage, and the dialogic
relationship betwee performer and audience--and discuss how these poets use
the poetry event to articulate a poetry-community-in-the-making. Throughout
this study, I argue that these poetry events demand our active engagement
with the performance and use emergent technologies to document and analyze
this poetry community. As such, "Performance" ultimately demands that we
not only rethink the relationship between these poets and their communities,
but that we rethink the place of poetry in contemporary American culture.
Abstract Approved: Adalaid Morris
Thesis Supervisor
Professor, Department of English
Title and Department
April 26, 2000
Date
PERFORMANCE, POETICS, AND PLACE: PUBLIC POETRY AS A COMMUNITY
ART
by
Julie Marie Schmid
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2000
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Adalaide Morris
Copyright by
JULIE MARIE SCHMID
2000
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_______________________
PH.D. THESIS
_______________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Julie Marie Schmid
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the
Doctor of Philosophy degree in English
at the May 2000 graduation.
Thesis Committee: ___________________________________
Adalaide Morris, Thesis Supervisor
___________________________________
Margaret Bass
___________________________________
Rudolf Kuenzli
___________________________________
Ashley Dawson
___________________________________
Kim Marra
To my parents, Otto and Peggy Schmid,and to Elliott
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing is always a collaborative act. Given the subject matter and the format of
this dissertation, this is even truer here. I owe many people a serious debt of gratitude for
their support, intellectual, emotional, and otherwise. I would like to begin by thanking
Adalaide Morris whose support and guidance over the past four years has been integral to
this dissertation. I would like to thank the Department of English for the Edwin Ford
Piper Scholarship. This financial resource made it possible for me to travel and do the
research required to complete this dissertation. I would also like to thank the Graduate
College for awarding me a Seashore Dissertation Year Fellowship. The financial support
and the time off to concentrate on this project was a great boon. The folks involved in the
University's Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Pilot Program--John Robert Gardner,
Patty Strabala, and William Welburn-- provided me with the resources to produce this
multimedia document. The video and audio clips included here are the result of John
Brogan's and Denny Crall's handiwork. Without them, this would be a much less
aesthetically pleasing study. I would also like to thank the many poets I spoke with,
interviewed, and exchanged emails with over the past few years. You've all helped me
more than you will ever know. Finally, a big shout-out to Marc Smith, David Hernández,
Batya Goldman-Hernández, Patricia Smith, and Bob Holman. Your patience and
generosity of spirit made this dissertation possible. My heartfelt thanks to you all.
Copyright information follows for the poems, photographs, and audio and video
clips included in this study. Permission to reproduce them is gratefully acknowledged.
• "The Rules of the Slam," courtesy of Marc Smith.
• David Hernández, "Immigrants," from Rooftop Piper by David Hernández.
Copyright © 1991.
• David Hernández, "Florencia," from Elvis Is Dead but at Least He's Not Gaining
Any Weight by David Hernández. Copyright © 1995.
• David Hernández, "Elvis Is Dead but at Least He's Not Gaining Any Weight,"
from Elvis Is Dead but at Least He's Not Gaining Any Weight by David
Hernández. Copyright © 1995.
iii
•
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•
•
•
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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David Hernández and Street Sounds, text and audio clip of "Workers," from
David Hernández and Street Sounds by Sonidas de la Calle Poetry Music
Workshop, Inc. Copyright © 1990.
Text and audio clip of "Roscoe Street" courtesy of David Hernández.
Text and audio clip of "Chi-Town Brown" courtesy of David Hernández.
Patricia Smith, "Criptic Comment," from Close to Death by Patricia Smith.
Copyright © 1993.
Patricia Smith, "Reconstruction," from Close to Death by Patricia Smith.
Copyright © 1993.
Patricia Smith, "Undertaker," from Close to Death by Patricia Smith. Copyright ©
1993.
Patricia Smith, audio clip of "Reconstruction," from Patricia Smith Performs
Always in the Head and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith. Copyright © 1993.
Patricia Smith, audio clip of "Undertaker," from Patricia Smith Performs Always
in the Head and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith. Copyright © 1993.
Close to Death cover. Copyright © 1993 by Zoland Books, Inc., Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
Bob Holman, video clip of "The United States of Poetry," from "Words in Your
Face." Copyright © 1991 by Twin Cities Public Television.
Bob Holman, "The United States of Poetry," courtesy of Bob Holman.
Bob Holman, excerpt from "Sweat & Sex & Politics," from The Collect Call of
the Wild by Bob Holman. Copyright © 1995.
Bob Holman, excerpt from "57 Gazillion Lung-Tongue Varieties," from The
Collect Call of the Wild by Bob Holman. Copyright © 1995.
Bob Holman, video clip of "Sweat & Sex & Politics," from Panic DJ! Copyright
© 1990 by Five Quarters Productions.
Video clip of opening footage of The United States of Poetry. Copyright © 1996
by Washington Square Films.
Video clip of Lois Ann Yamanaka's "Boss of the Food" from The United States of
Poetry. Copyright © 1996 by Washington Square Films.
Video clip of Sparrow's "A Testimonial" from The United States of Poetry.
Copyright © 1996 by Washington Square Films.
Video clip of Besmilr Brigham's "Tell Our Daughters" from The United States of
Poetry. Copyright © 1996 by Washington Square Films.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... vii
LIST OF AUDIO FILES ................................................................................................. viii
LIST OF VIDEO FILES .................................................................................................... ix
INTRODUCTION PERFORMANCE, POETICS, AND PLACE: PUBLIC
POETRY AS A COMMUNITY ART ..............................................................1
Setting the Scene: The Contemporary Performance Poetry Movement
in Context..........................................................................................................6
Public Poetry, Public Scholarship, and the Case for XML.............................12
CHAPTER ONE MARC SMITH, THE UPTOWN POETRY SLAM, AND THE
ESTABLISHMENT OF A POETRY COMMUNITY ...................................16
Crowdpleaser: Poetry, Performance, and the "Art Form of the Show" ..........20
"The Points Are Not the Point. The Point Is Poetry": Marc Smith and
the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill ....................................................31
CHAPTER TWO PERFORMING THE TRANFRONTERA CONTACT ZONE:
DAVID HERNÁNDEZ AND SONIDAS DE LA CALLE/STREET
SOUNDS ........................................................................................................45
Chicago's Unofficial Poet Laureate: David Hernández and the Chicago
Poetry Scene ...................................................................................................48
David Hernández, Street Sounds, and Cross-Cultural Coalition
Building ..........................................................................................................56
CHAPTER THREE "HEARING BETWEEN THE LINES": PERFORMANCE
AND A POETICS OF WITNESS IN PATRICIA SMITH'S CLOSE TO
DEATH ...........................................................................................................71
Close to Death, the Media, and the Creation of a Communal
Counternarrative .............................................................................................82
Performance and the Extratextual Language of Witnessing: An
Audition of Smith's "Reconstruction" and "Undertaker" ...............................95
CHAPTER FOUR "IF IT AIN'T A PLEASURE, IT AIN'T A POEM": BOB
HOLMAN'S DEMOCRATIC VISION, THE UNITED STATES OF
POETRY, AND THE NEW PUBLIC SPHERE ..........................................103
From Plain White Rapper to Panic*DJ!: Bob Holman, Postmodern
Technology, and the Construction of a Counterpoetic Tradition .................111
One Nation Under the Groove: Washington Square Films and the
Construction of a Virtual Public Sphere .......................................................124
CONCLUSION POETRY, COMMUNITY, AND COMMODIFICATION--SOME
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS .....................................................................132
APPENDIX A DAVID HERNÁNDEZ BIBLIOGRAPHY, DISCOGRAPHY,
ANDVIDEOGRAPHY 1971-2000 ..............................................................136
Poetry Collections .........................................................................................136
Anthologized Poems .....................................................................................136
Plays ..............................................................................................................136
v
Prose Non-Fiction .........................................................................................136
Editorial ........................................................................................................137
Audio and Video Recordings........................................................................137
APPENDIX B PATRICIA SMITH BIBLIOGRAPHY, DISCOGRAPHY, AND
VIDEOGRAPHY 1989-2000 .......................................................................138
Poetry Collections .........................................................................................138
Anthologized Poems .....................................................................................138
Plays & One-Woman Shows ........................................................................139
Non-Fiction ...................................................................................................139
Audio & Video Recordings ..........................................................................139
APPENDIX C BOB HOLMAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, DISCOGRAPHY, AND
VIDEOGRAPHY 1976-2000 .......................................................................140
Poetry Collections .........................................................................................140
Plays ..............................................................................................................140
Edited Collections .........................................................................................140
Interviews and Essays ...................................................................................140
Audio Recordings .........................................................................................141
Video Recordings .........................................................................................141
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................142
vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 Cover of Patricia Smith's Close to Death. ...........................................................89
Figure 2 Fliers from the Double Talk Show and The Big Mouth Poets for Peace ..........120
vii
LIST OF AUDIO FILES
1.
Marc Smith: The Rules of the Slam [RULES.AIF] ..................................................37
2.
David Hernández and Street Sounds: "Roscoe Street" [DIV2.MOV] ......................63
3.
David Hernández and Street Sounds: "Chi-Town Brown" [DIV2.AIF] ..................66
4.
Patricia Smith: "Reconstruction" [RECON.AIF] .....................................................96
5.
Patricia Smith: "Undertaker" [UNDER.AIF] ...........................................................99
viii
LIST OF VIDEO FILES
1.
David Hernández and Street Sounds: "Workers" [HERN1.MOV] ..........................59
2.
Bob Holman: "The United States of Poetry" [ROCKS.MOV] ...............................104
3.
Bob Holman: "Sweat & Sex & Politics!" [RAPS.MOV] .......................................117
4.
Opening Footage from The United States of Poetry Video Series
[MONTAGE.MOV] ...............................................................................................130
5.
Footage of Lois Ann Yamanaka'S "Boss of the Food" from The United States
of Poetry Video Series [LOIS.MOV] .....................................................................130
6.
Footage of Sparrow's "A Testimonial" from The United States of Poetry
Video Series [SPARROW.MOV]...........................................................................130
7.
Footage of Besmilr Brigham's "Tell Our Daughters" from The United States
of Poetry Video Series [BESMLIR.MOV] .............................................................130
ix
1
INTRODUCTION
PERFORMANCE, POETICS, AND PLACE: PUBLIC POETRY AS A
COMMUNITY ART
In "The Sidewalk of High Art," Nuyorican poet Miguel Algarín announces, "It is
clear that we are now entering a new era, where the dialogue is multi-ethnic and
necessitates a larger field of verbal action to explain the cultural and political reality of
North America. Poets have opened the dialogue and entered into new conversations" (9).
Published as a preface to Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Algarín's essay
celebrates contemporary postliterate poetries such as the slam, the open mic, and poetrymusic hybrids and calls on his audience to reaffirm poetry's place in the public sphere.
Algarín opens the essay by placing the reader within the historical and geographical
context that led to the reopening of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He begins with a
description of poet Miguel Piñero's funeral procession winding its way through the streets
of New York's Lower East Side. The procession begins on the site of the original
Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the spoken word venue that Algarín and Piñero cofounded in the
mid-1970s. As Algarín and the other mourners walk the streets of the Lower East Side
spreading the dead poet's ashes, residents of the neighborhood join them, adding their
memories of this favorite son to the spontaneous, communal eulogy. For Algarín, this
event is the catalyst for the reopening of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. His documentation of
Piñero's funeral ends with a conversation he has with Bob Holman about refounding this
public poetry venue.
Throughout this essay, Algarín insists on contextualizing this public poetry
movement in the local community, on returning it to the streets. He focuses on close
readings of poems by Cafe regulars--Paul Beatty, Reg E. Gaines, and Tracie Morris--and
places their work within a counterpoetic tradition that includes the Beats and early
Nuyorican poets such as Miguel Piñero and Lucky CienFuegos. Algarín not only
2
documents the poems and the poets' performance styles; he also includes descriptions of
the interactions between these poets and the community of auditors. He maps out a rich
audiovisual field that includes the exchanges between the poets and the audience,
descriptions of audience members, and a description of the club's layout. While the
poetries discussed in his introduction are representative of a larger poetic phenomena--the
emergence and proliferation of a cross-cultural performance poetry movement--they
remain a local art.
I begin with this short review of Algarín's essay because it brings into focus a
number of important issues regarding poetry and community and the cultural relevance of
poetry at the dawn of the new millennium. Algarín's evocation of a politically efficacious
poetry--a poetry that will intervene in and shape national dialogues about identity and
ethnicity--strikes me as thought provoking. On the one hand, it points to the connections
between this poetic form and other expressive forms that are engaged in social protest-rap, most obviously, but also literary antecedents such as Black Arts and the poetry of the
Antiwar Movement. On the other hand, it reflects the utopian idealism that shapes the
philosophy behind this poetry movement, a belief that the ritualized poetic communities
that grow up around these venues are able to effect change within the larger society.
"Performance, Poetics, and Place" focuses on contemporary performance poets
Marc Smith, David Hernández, Patricia Smith, and Bob Holman. I argue that from their
position on stage, in the recording studio, or in front of the camera, these poets use the
performance to forge bonds across racial, ethnic, class, and gender divides and sound the
multiethnic community that Algarín calls for in his essay. What follows is not so much a
sustained argument about contemporary performance poetries and community building as
it is a series of connected case studies. The four poets I discuss here have been
instrumental in the emergence and proliferation of the performance poetry movement
over the past two decades. Through their work as performers and poetry activists, these
four poets take poetry out of the rarefied environments of the classroom, the auditorium,
3
and the art gallery and return it to public spaces such as the street corner, the bar, and the
political rally. Marc Smith, Patricia Smith, and Bob Holman, who founded poetry slam
venues in Chicago, Boston, and New York respectively, have been integral to the poetry
slam's spread from Chicago to urban centers around the nation. Although David
Hernández is not a member of the slam family, his poetry has been integral to the
establishment of a vibrant Latino arts scene in the Chicago. Moreover, his work at the
interstices of poetry and music has influenced other performance poets around Chicago
and nationwide.
Throughout this study, I trace the evolution of the contemporary performance
poetry movement from the local to the national, from the embodied to the virtual. The
chapters included here can be classified into two categories. The chapters on Marc Smith
and David Hernández focus on how these two poets use the space of the performance to
articulate a locally situated poetry community. I look at specific live performance events-poetry slams at the Green Mill and Street Sounds/Sonidas de la Calle performances at
venues in Chicago and Michigan and analyze specific elements of these events-performance style, venue, and the interaction between poet and audience. The chapters on
Patricia Smith's Close to Death and Bob Holman's poetry-video series place these
performance poetry projects within a national context. Patricia Smith uses live and
recorded performances to intervene in and subvert the mainstream news media's portrayal
of black masculinity in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating. Holman's poetry-video
projects also engage mainstream media. In his poetry-video series, both of which
originally aired on PBS, Holman moves beyond the localized community poetics/politics
of Marc Smith and David Hernández. Holman's community is the United States of
America and his self-proclaimed mission is to use "television's power to reach into the
nation's living rooms and reclaim our country's souls with poetry" ("Welcome to the
United States of Poetry" 8).
4
It is my contention throughout this study that poetry performances such as an
Uptown Poetry Slam, a David Hernández and Street Sounds performance, a Patricia
Smith performance, or one of Holman's poetry-video projects are illustrative of what
Nancy Fraser has described as "counterpublic spheres." In her essay "Rethinking the
Public Sphere," Fraser reworks Habermas's concept of the public sphere to reflect the
dialectical interaction between diverse public forums and public discourses in late
capitalist society. Fraser builds on the Habermasian concept of the public sphere as "an
institutionalized arena of discursive action"--that is, a space where individual private
citizens come together to discuss public issues that effect the collective (2). Her work
here undermines the notion of a single public sphere, positing instead a number of public
spheres constituted around diverse sets of concerns. She refers to such twentieth-century
social movements as suffrage, the labor movement, and gay rights and argues that in
stratified societies, "subordinated social groups. . . have repeatedly found it advantageous
to constitute alternative publics" as a means to develop a collective identity and establish
a shared counterdiscourse (14-15). She calls these parallel arenas "subaltern
counterpublics" because they provide a shared discursive space for social groups that are
not allowed full access to institutionalized public forums. Using the U.S. feminist
movement as an example, Fraser goes on to track how these subaltern counterpublics use
discourse to intervene in dominant social spheres and shape the discussion. She writes,
"In this sphere, feminist women have invented new terms for describing social reality,
including 'sexism,' 'the double shift,' 'sexual harassment,' and 'marital, date, and
acquaintance rape.' Armed with such language, we have recast our needs and identities,
thereby reducing, although not eliminating, the extent of our disadvantage in official
public spheres" (14-15). Fraser's analysis reflects what George Lipsitz has described as
the conflation of geographic place and discursive space as viable sites of postmodern
community formation: her index of feminist counterpublic spheres includes bookstores,
5
local meeting places, and research centers as well as journals and film and video
distribution networks. 1
By reading performance poetry in general and the work of these four poets in
particular via Fraser's public sphere theory I am not naively valorizing the political
effectiveness of these poetries (at least I hope I'm not). As Maria Damon points out in her
important essay on public poetries, this sort of blanket valorization of poetry as a free
speech forum while segments of society remain disenfranchised is problematic, to say the
least. 2 Indeed, the issue of performance poetry and real political and social change
becomes particularly significant in my analyses of David Hernández's and Patricia
Smith's performances. It is clear, I believe, that these two poets' performances open up
dialogue and debate on issues such as urban poverty, gang violence, and racism. It is also
clear that the performance, because of its immediacy, draws the audience into empathetic
relationships with the poets and suggests new ways of interacting with one another across
racial and ethnic differences. In the face of recent sociopolitical changes such as the
erosion of Affirmative Action in California and Florida, the increasing gap between the
rich and the poor, and, on a more local level, the leveling of public housing in Chicago
and the displacement of the city's urban poor, these aesthetic alliances are not enough.
Moreover, as my discussion of Bob Holman's work in Chapter Four suggests, the
mediatization of this counterpoetic movement via television and the World Wide Web
raises troubling questions about the community-building function of these poetries.
1 In his introduction to Dangerous Crossroads, George Lipsitz addresses the effects of
new technologies on community building. He writes:
Today, shared cultural space no longer depends upon shared geographic place.
What Henri Lefebvre called "theaterical or dramatized space" becomes
increasingly important as a substitute for the lost public sphere of the industrial
city. New discursive spaces allow for recognition of new networks and
affiliations: they beocme crucibles for complex identities in formation that
respond to the imperatives of place at the same time that they transcend them. (6)
2 See Damon, "Was that 'Different,' 'Dissident,' or 'Dissonant'?" p. 327.
6
That being said, poetry events such as Marc Smith's Uptown Poetry Slam, a
David Hernández and Street Sounds Performance, or Bob Holman's collaborative
multimedia poetry projects do provide a shared discursive space through which members
of a local poetry community are able to address issues such as race and class, municipal
politics and/or national identity. Moreover, as I argue throughout this dissertation, these
four poets' work with exoteric, multiform poetries subverts the hierarchical structure of
the conventional poetry reading and transforms their audiences from passive consumers
into active participants in the event and in the act of community-building.
Setting the Scene: The Contemporary Performance Poetry
Movement in Context
A brief perusal of Ellen Zweig's The Poetry Reading (1981), a compendium of
essays about poetry as a performed as well as written form, makes clear that the interest
in poetry as performance is nothing new. For instance, the excerpt from Thulani Davis's
"Known Renegades" that is included here looks at readings by Black Arts poets from the
late 1960s and early 1970s. She discusses a performance by Amiri Baraka's Spirit House
Movers performance ensemble that she attended in 1968 and a fall 1969 benefit concert
at the Apollo Theater. The 1969 benefit had been organized by the Young Lords Party
and featured such poets as Pedro Pietri and Gylan Kain. In this essay she focuses on the
issue of the performance and connecting with the local community. She writes that these
poetry performances tried "to close the distance created by printing and to give the
audience a sense of community not possible from the individual experience of reading"
(75). Likewise, essays such as Stephen Vincent's "Poetry Readings/Reading Poetry" and
Harry Lewis's "The Circuit/New York City Public Readings" document the lively poetry
reading scenes that existed in San Francisco around the Beat Movement and New York
City around the New York School respectively.
7
This is, of course, an incomplete list. One could go on and document a number of
other examples of poetry performances from the twentieth century alone--the poetry
readings at Chicago's Dill Pickle Club during the first half of the century, Carl Sandburg's
popular (in both senses of the word) poetry readings and folk music performances, and
Vachel Lindsay's "Evening of Higher Vaudeville and Orthodox Verse" performance
series, to name some earlier examples. 3 As my cursory nod to the history of American
poetry in the twentieth century suggests, the poetry performance is not a new
phenomenon. However, the conscious focus on performance as a constitutive element of
the poem is. It is this focus on performance that holds the poets I discuss in this study
together as a movement. My decision to refer to the four poets included in this study as
"performance poets" is in some ways problematic, as none of them write only for
performance (Holman, Hernández, and Patricia Smith publish as prolifically as any
"conventional" poet). Rather, I refer to these four poets as "performance poets" because
all four define the performance as an aesthetic category in its own right. Likewise, I use
the term "performance poetry movement" to describe a loosely connected network of
poets who define themselves in opposition to the poetry establishment and who tend to
public their poetry primarily via the live show, the CD, and the video cassette.
The proliferation of performance poetry in a variety of formats and media over
the past decade-and-a-half suggests that there has been a resurgence of interest in poetry
as a public art form. At the time that I am writing this introduction, a quick web search
reveals that almost every major and medium-sized city in the United States has a local
3 The Dill Pickle Club was a Chicago poetry venue founded and ran by ex-Wobbly Jack
Jones. The club, which was frequented by the likes of H.L. Menken, Carl Sandburg, Yellow Kid
Weil, and Ben Reitman, opened in the mid-1910s and during the next three decades was the heart
of Chicago's bohemian literary scene. For more information on the Dill Pickle Club, see John
Biederman's "Inside . . . The Chicago Poetry Scene: The Green Mill's Uptown Poetry Slam" and
Lee Sustar's "When Speech Was Free (and Usually Worth It)."
8
poetry performance venue, as do the majority of large European cities. 4 In June 1998
Stockholm hosted the first international performance Poetry Olympics and in August
1999 the National Grand Slam celebrated its tenth anniversary by returning to Chicago.
Poetry collections such as the companion book to The United States of Poetry video
series (1995) or individual author collections such as Patricia Smith's Life According to
Motown (1991) or Paul Beatty's Joker, Joker, Deuce (1995) have all run to multiple
printings. (Smith's Motown is now in its fourth printing--a feat practically unheard of in
the poetry publishing world.) Poetry events such as college and high school slams are
covered in major national newspapers and in national magazines. 5 Performance poetry,
undoubtedly due to the affinities between this expressive form and rap, has even
infiltrated the pop music scene. Bob Holman and record executive Bill Adler began
bringing rap artists and performance poets together via the aptly titled Ayatollah's
Granola/Rap Meets Poetry performance series in 1993. In recent years poets have toured
with the Lollapalooza festival, been featured on MTV's Unplugged series, and begun
recording and releasing poetry CDs. Performance poets have been included in featurelength films (Saul Williams and Reggie Gibson come immediately to mind. Williams was
the star of Slam (1998) and Gibson makes an appearance in Love Jones (1996)). In a
surreal turn of events, poets from New York City performance venues were invited to
4 For example, see the Austin slam's home page, www.slam.home.texas.net, the Fargo
Slam on the Plains home page, www.ndsu.nodak.edu/plainspoet, or the Pittsburgh slam home
page, www.suncrumbs.org/slam/slam.html. See also the Cafe Stein (Vienna) slam home page,
www.austria.eu.net/cafe-stein/Real/poetry.html and the Dusseldorf slam home page,
www.zakk.de/programm/poetryslam.htm. The kultureszene web site
(www.kultureszene.de/slam/) features information about poetry slam venues in Berlin, Munich,
Hamburg, and Cologne.
5 See William Honan's "Of Rhymed Couplets, and Raunchy, Too" and Francis X. Cline's
"When Poetry Means Much More Than Lovely Rhyme."
9
perform at the 2000 Winter Extreme Sports Games and their performances were aired
during ESPN's coverage of the games. 6
It is fairly easy to catalog the emergence and proliferation of this grassroots
poetry movement. A quick perusal of the index for the New York Times for the past five
years or a quick search on the internet allows one to trace its spread from a few live
performance poetry venues in major urban centers such as New York, Chicago, and San
Francisco to new locations as well as its crossover from the live performance to new
media. It is more difficult, however, to speculate on why this poetry movement flourishes.
It seems clear that the crossover of rap music to mainstream listening audiences during
the mid- to late-1980s played a major role in the proliferation of performance poetry
forms such as open mics and poetry slams. As the Ayatollah's Granola/Rap Meets Poetry
performance series suggests, in cities like New York these two expressive forms not only
share a common set of aesthetic concerns; they also share audiences. Even in Chicago
where there is less crossover between the rap and the performance poetry scene, projects
such as the Guild Complex's Musicality of Poetry series, a performance series that
combined musical performances and poetry readings, suggest that the hip-hop revolution
has provided performance poetry with a certain amount of street credibility. As with rap,
the crossover to a more mainstream audience has raised serious questions about
commercialization and the kind of cultural work that this poetry does. 7
The information revolution has also played a significant role in the proliferation
of the performance poetry movement. Because web pages can be produced quickly and
with very little cost and because the web is open to anyone who wants to pay the nominal
fee required by internet service providers, they function as an alternative venue for the
6 For a discussion of the ESPN Extreme Games poetry coverage, see About.Com's
Museletter #7 (www.poetry.about.com/art/poetry/library/weekly/museletter/blmuse17/htm).
7 For a more detailed discussion of performance poetry's crossover to the mainstream and
its ensuing commercialization, see Chapters One and Four.
10
dissemination of this grassroots poetry. Moreover, because these web pages are available
to anyone who has access to the internet, web poetry has the potential of reaching a
larger, more diverse audience than, say, a chapbook published by a small press with a
limited or nonexistent marketing budget. Web pages such as Marc Smith's slampapi.com,
Allan Wolf's poetryalive.com, and Bob Holman and Josh Blum's worldofpoetry.org
suggest that the community for these grassroots poetry forms is no longer only the local
community of poets and auditors that gather at a given performance venue. By posting
poems on personal web pages or on virtual slam web sites, poets are able to disseminate
their poetry to a larger, more diverse reading audience with very little cost or effort.
Moreover, because a web site can include a QuickTime movie or an audio clip of a poet
performing her work, these new technologies emphasize the materiality of the poetry,
thus making web sites a more suitable medium for performance poets than conventional
modes of publishing and dissemination.
The pop culture interest in poetry as a material, embodied art coincides with a
growing interest in the materiality of the poem within the academy. The 1996 MLA
convention included a panel called "Public Poetries," which addressed performance
poetry events such as Maya Angelou's reading at the 1992 presidential inauguration, the
open mic reading, and the poetry slam. These three papers focused not only on the poems
themselves; they also addressed such issues as the poet's performance (vocalization, stage
blocking, gestures), venue, and audience demographics. The issue of poetry as an
embodied art form informed the Poetry and the Public Sphere Conference, which was
held in Spring 1997 at Rutgers University. This conference not included performances by
a number of poets--most notably, Amiri Baraka, Miguel Algarín, Reg E. Gaines, and
Sonia Sanchez. The conference also attempted to ease the traditional antimony between
performance poets and academics by inviting the poets to take part in plenary discussions
and round tables throughout the weekend. For me, the highlight of the conference was
when Reg E. Gaines showed up for a paper I gave on Patricia Smith's Close to Death and
11
preceded to "perform" Smith's "Undertaker" along with the audio recording I played. This
wonderfully disruptive, spontaneous performance highlighted the physicality of this
poem for the other panelists, the panel's attendees, and me in the way that a disembodied
audio recording of a performance cannot.
Recent critical works also suggest a renewed interest in the poem as a material, as
well as a literary, artifact. In Repression and Recovery (1989), for instance, Cary Nelson
includes visual reproductions of book jackets, magazine covers, and illustrated versions
of poems by such Modernist poets as Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and Malcolm
Cowley. For Nelson, analysis of the visual presentation of these poems is a necessary
component of the literary recovery project that he lays out for himself here. The design
elements of these visual artifacts hint at the political commitment and ethnic and racial
diversity that comprised the poetic production of the early part of the twentieth-century.
Likewise, in On the Walls and In the Streets: American Poetry Broadsides from the
1960s (1997), James Sullivan includes a number of reproductions of poetry broadsides by
Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Allen Ginsberg and places these documents
within the context of the political and social movements of that era--most notably, Civil
Rights and the Antiwar Movement.
While these two literary studies focus on the visual field, Close Listening(1998), a
collection of essays on poetry and performance edited by Charles Bernstein, and Sound
States (1997), a collection of essays on poetry and acoustic technologies edited by
Adalaide Morris foreground the au/oral aspects of poetry. The essays collected in these
two volumes address the interplay of the textual and the auditory in twentieth-century
poetry by focusing on poetry as a sonic art. Morris's collection, moreover, insists upon a
"reading" practice that is as attentive to the poem-in-performance as it is to the poem-onthe-page. The volume is packaged with a companion CD that includes selections from
works by twentieth-century experimentalist poets (F.T. Marinetti, Hugo Ball, Edward
Kamau Brathwaite, among others) and jazz and blues artists (Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins,
12
John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor). By directing the reader to specific tracks, the marginal cues
throughout the text make it clear that the essays are meant to be read in tandem with the
CD. By placing my dissertation within this new and expanding body of literary criticism,
I suggest a reading practice that is attentive to the materiality of the poetry as well as to
the cultural work that the poetry does.
Public Poetry, Public Scholarship, and the Case for XML
This dissertation grew out of my own experiences as an auditor and sometime
performer in the lively open mic scene that flourished in Chicago in the early 1990s.
Because there has been very little academic writing published on these poetries, I've been
required to take my scholarship to the streets, as it were, and much of what I discuss in
the following pages is the result of a kind of literary fieldwork. 8 My role as scholar and
critic is complicated by the unease that many members of this poetry community feel
toward the academy. Since beginning my research in 1996, I've been lampooned from
stage for my role as an academic writing about performance poetry, been approached by
poets who want to be included in this dissertation, and had poems written about me and
seen them performed at venues throughout Chicago. I have had emcees and poets demand
that I perform passages from my dissertation at their shows. I have had poets get up in the
middle of interviews, perform new poems, and ask me, as the resident literary critic, to
evaluate them. While this has often been frustrating, it has also forced me to rethink how
and why I define myself as a literary critic and how and why I write criticism, to become
a participant in, rather than an observer of, this poetry community.
Just as the live poetry show is the result of collaboration between performer and
audience, this study is the result of a collaborative interpretative process that has
8 Although there is increased interest in the academy in performance poetries, very little
work has been done on the poets discussed in this dissertation. To my knowledge, the chapter on
Bob Holman and The United States of Poetry television series in Christopher Beach's Poetic
Culture remains the only essay to treat any of these poets in depth.
13
involved, since the beginning, the poets discussed in the following pages as well as other
members of the contemporary performance poetry community. Rather than sifting
through texts in the library stacks, I've attended and recorded live performances and
conducted interviews with audience members and performers. I've exchanged ideas and
fact-checked via phone conversations and E-mails with the poets discussed in the
following pages. I've sifted through the boxes of Chicago poetry ephemera housed in the
Hugh Schwartzberg Poetry Collection at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago as
well as through Bob Holman's, David Hernández's, and Reggie Young's collections of
photos, fliers, and chapbooks from the early years of their poetry careers. For the
majority of performances discussed here, I include citations for the events as well as
audio and video clips. When discussing performances that I did not attend, I have,
whenever possible, provided documentation in the form of personal accounts, newspaper
reviews, and photographs of the events. On one level, then, this dissertation suggests a
methodology for the documentation of these community poetries.
This dissertation also reflects my desire to recreate for my reader the energy and
immediacy that informs these poets' works. One of the issues I've struggled with while
completing this study has been how to balance my role as literary scholar--a position that
suggests a certain level of critical distance--with my decade-long role as audience
member and enthusiast. Moreover, I've been vexed by the limits of the printed page as a
medium for presenting these fluid, participatory works. The poetry performances
discussed in this study are illustrative of what Albert Lord has termed multiform poetics.
In The Singer of Tales, his study of the Homeric epic, Lord writes about the challenges
that oral poetries pose for the literary (literate?) scholar. "Our real difficulty arises from
the fact that, unlike the oral poet, we are not accustomed to thinking in terms of fluidity.
We find it difficult to grasp something that is multiform. It seems to us necessary to
construct an ideal text or seek an original, and we remain dissatisfied with an everchanging phenomenon" (100). Poetry performances such as the slam and the open mic,
14
like the oral epics that Lord discusses, subvert conventional notions of authorship and
originality. They are composed and recomposed through the intersection of poet, venue,
and audience that comprises the live performance. And like the multiform works that
Lord discusses in his study, these poetries resist conventional modes of textual analysis.
My decision to compose an electronic dissertation rose out of my desire to
document the ephemera of this movement as well as my desire to parse the textual and
the extratextual elements of the performance. As James Sullivan notes in his introduction
to On the Walls and in the Streets, an analysis of ephemeral poetries such as broadsides
and chapbooks "demands an understanding of poetry not as a reified set of texts (whose
ultimate frame of reference is the historical and biographical moments of their
composition), but as a malleable cultural practice that can involve a host of people,
moments, intentions, and uses" (4). One of the abiding concerns shaping my scholarship
has been how to place the poetry discussed here within the cultural matrix in which it was
produced and received. The XML (extensible mark-up language) format I use here has
allowed me to address the materiality of the poetry in a way that I could not have in a
paper document. I include reproductions of fliers and photographs from live events along
with audio files and QuickTime movies of performances in an attempt to suggest this
cultural matrix for the reader. In order to preserve a sense of the performance for my
reader, I quote the poems performed at length (often times, the whole text of the poem)
and include, where I could, audio or video clips of the performances being discussed. In
Chapters One, Two, and Three for instance, I provide my reader with audio and video
clips from live performances and discuss the poet's performance (timbre and volume of
the voice, tempo at which they performed), the spontaneous exchanges between poet and
audience, and the background noise as integral elements in the construction of local
oppositional poetry communities. In the fourth chapter, I turn to Bob Holman's work with
the emergent form of video-poetry and the construction of a virtual counterpoetic sphere.
I include clips from his "Words in Your Face" and The United States of Poetry and
15
analyze production and post-production elements--the poet's performance, the camera
work, and the sound editing. By including these audio and video clips I attempt to capture
the noisy, ineffable element of this poetry as well as the sense of venue and (in the case
of the videos) set location--the poem's soundscape as well as its landscape. In so doing, I
attempt to place my reader in the position of participant/observer as well as critic.
Moreover, this inherently public format (this document is to be housed on the
University's main server and accessible to a virtual community of readers via the World
Wide Web) underscores my commitment to public scholarship, to writing and
disseminating my work to a general audience. One of my concerns has been to make this
dissertation available and of interest to all concerned communities within the academy
and without. The World Wide Web provides me with the means to ensure that this
scholarship is accessible to a wide range of readers.
A final note on the format of this dissertation. This document has been written
using XML (extensible mark-up language) and integrates QuickTime Movie files, jpgs,
and aif audio files. It is best viewed in Netscape 4.0 or higher or Internet Explorer 5.0 or
higher. Notes, video and audio clips, image files, and appendixes are hyperlinked to the
chapters to which they apply. They can be viewed by simply pointing and clicking on the
appropriate link.
16
CHAPTER ONE
MARC SMITH, THE UPTOWN POETRY SLAM, AND THE
ESTABLISHMENT OF A POETRY COMMUNITY
"Pull the Next One Up," one of the poems that slam poet Marc Smith included in
Crowdpleaser (1996), is preceded by a prose introduction that describes a performance
he gave at a "high-class country club on Chicago's North Shore" (5). Smith, who founded
the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill, had been invited to this country club in order
to bring some "off beat street culture" to Chicago's elite (ibid). It is clear from Smith's
introduction that he perceives this audience to be unflappable and perhaps a little too well
bred for the slam. He describes the audience as "seated sedately at their gourmet dinner
tables--starched, stern, and ready to be bored" (ibid). Given the venue and the audience
(not to mention the mandate to bring "street culture" to the country club set), Smith's
decision to perform this particular poem is noteworthy. "Pull the Next One Up" is a
critique of the myth of rugged individualism. Using mountain climbing as an allegory for
upward social mobility, this poem posits socioeconomic success as the result of collective
action: the men and women in the poem get to the top of the mountain because someone
else has pulled them up and, Smith suggests, it is their duty then to help those below them
to reach the peak.
When you ask how high is this mountain
With a compulsion to know
Where you stand in relationship to other peaks,
Look down to wherefrom you came up
And see the rope that's tied to your waist
Tied to the next man's waist,
Tied to the next woman's waist,
Tied to the first man's waist,
To the first woman's waist
. . .and pull the rope!
Never mind the flags you see flapping on conquered pinnacles.
Don't waste time scratching inscriptions into the monolith.
You are the stone itself.
And each man, each woman up the mountain,
Each breath exhaled at the peak,
Each glad-I-made-it . . . here's-my-hand,
17
Each heartbeat wrapped around the hot skin
of the sun-bright sky,
Each noise panted or cracked with laughter,
Each embrace, each cloud that holds everyone
in momentary doubt . . .
All these inscriptions of a human force that can
Conquer conquering hand over hand pulling the rope
Next man up, next woman up.
Sharing a place, sharing a vision.
Room enough for all on all the mountain peaks.
Force enough for all
(Crowdpleaser 6)
In response to the audience's sedate reception of this poem, Smith steps off stage
and begins touching audience members and pressing close to their bodies. He thinks
about climbing on the tables but decides to hold off. Smith goes on to define this
performance as transformational: by transgressing the boundary between the stage and
the floor, he breaks down the barrier between these wealthy suburbanites and himself and
establishes a connection with his audience. As he finishes his performance, Smith realizes
that "under the crust these well-heeled people were no different than me; day-to-day folks
who had lived their dreams and made their money just as I someday hoped to live mine
and make a little too" (ibid). 1 For Smith this performance becomes emblematic of what
he's identified elsewhere as the slam's role as a counterpublic forum, a "civic house, a
place where a community can gather . . . to hear a lot of voices and to be honest and take
risks" (in Grondahl B1).
Although I remain skeptical about the revelatory nature of this particular
performance, Smith's description does nicely illustrate the community-building function
of live poetry events such as the poetry slam, the open mic, and the poetry/music show.
The performance that Smith describes here reflects what Victor Turner has identified as
the transformational potential of reflexive social dramas such as ritual, carnivals, and rites
of passage. In The Anthropology of Performance, Turner defines these ritualized
1 Smith seems to be suggesting something similar to what David Hernández has
described as the role of community arts in building crosscultural coalitions. See, for instance,
Hernández's comments in the introductory section of Chapter Two.
18
performances as the aesthetic equivalent of the subjunctive mood. Rather than
realistically reflecting social relations in a given culture at a given time, the performance
is "used to express supposition, desire, hypothesis, or possibility" (25). As such, social
dramas are not simply critiques of existing social hierarchies and institutions; they are
also ritualized spaces through which a given community tries out new cultural forms and
new modes of social interaction. By spontaneously leaving the stage, performing from the
floor, and touching the audience, Smith undermines the hierarchical structure of the
conventional poetry reading. The poem becomes a public art, one that is composed in the
chance interactions between performer, venue, and audience.
It is this interdigitation of chance, text, and community formation that I am most
interested in analyzing in this chapter. In the pages that follow, I provide a brief
introduction to the Uptown Poetry Slam, the ritualized poetry competition that Smith
founded at the Green Mill Lounge in Chicago. Maria Damon's "Was That Dissonant,
Dissident, or Different?" and Christopher Beach's "Poetic Screams of I Am," both of
which have been published in the past two years, are insightful introductions to the poetry
slam movement. Neither author, however, provides much information about Smith or the
poetry slam's roots, choosing instead to focus on two diaspora slam communities (the
Twin Cities and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, respectively). By focusing on Marc Smith's
career and the Uptown Poetry Slam in this chapter, I hope to fill in some of the missing
history and contextualize Smith's work as slampapi (founding father of the Slam Family
Collective) within the emergence and proliferation of the slam poetry movement.
My primary interest here, however, is analytical rather than documentary. While
both Damon and Beach describe the poetry slam as engaged in the act of community
formation, neither fully analyzes the relationship between the elements of the show and
the show's community-building function. In "Poetic Screams of I Am," Beach claims that
audience interactivity and community are intrinsic to the slam poetry movement.
However, while the early pages of the essay introduce the reader to the slam scene at the
19
Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the second part of the essay lapses into conventional poetic
analysis. Beach includes close readings of poems by Maggie Estep, Hal Sirowitz, and
Paul Beatty, poets who began their careers performing at the Cafe. Although he claims a
connection between these poets' work and the Cafe, his analyses do not place them within
the poetry community that he is so adamant about addressing in the early pages of the
essay. Damon, on the other hand, surveys a number of dissident poetry events, most
notably the poetry slam and the open mic night. She also calls for a new kind of reading
practice that is attentive to the poem in performance. According to Damon, "This public
poetics deserves a 'close listening' that differs from, on the one hand, the close reading we
have been taught (since the 1940s at least) to associate with a proper reception of poetry,
and on the other hand, from the 'generalized' or master-narrativizing (instrumentalist)
listening that current cultural studies--which is sympathetic to the popular registers of
culture slams purport to reach, but not to poetry itself--brings to such a phenomena"
(332). While Damon introduces the reader to specific performance events around the
Twin Cities area and while her analysis situates the performers within a specific cultural
context, her essay does not include close readings/auditions of the poetry performed at
these events.
By enumerating these criticisms I do not wish to detract from the important
preliminary work that these two essays accomplish. Rather, I hope to bring into focus the
difficulties facing scholars who write about performance poetries. Just as these
community poetries call into question commonly held notions regarding textual authority
and authorial "ownership," they also defy conventional forms of exegesis. If the show is a
constitutive element of the poem, akin to formal elements such as meter, line breaks, and
diction, then how do we develop a hybrid critical vocabulary for talking about the
interaction between the poem-as-text, the poem-in-performance--including the interaction
between poet and audience--and extratextual elements such as audience demographics
and location? Can the tools of textual analysis be applied to a hybrid art form, one that
20
combines the textual and formal aspects of poetry with oral and kinetic elements such as
voice, gesture, and dance? How do we determine authenticity and authorship when
discussing an art form that is the product of a collaborative composition process, one that
involves not only the show's creator and the performers but also audience members?
This chapter is an attempt to address the critical and theoretical questions that are
generated by this vibrant, multiform poetry. It is also an attempt to theorize the
connection between the textual and extratextual elements intrinsic to Marc Smith's
Uptown Poetry Slam and this poetry event's community-building function. What follows
is not meant to be a definitive analysis of the poetry slam as a poetic form. Given the
variation between Smith's weekly shows, not to mention the variation between venues
and slam communities, this strikes me as foolhardy. By focusing on two of Smith's
performance poems and his emcee's spiel from Uptown Poetry Slams that I attended
recently, I hope to introduce the experience of attending this poetry event to the reader. I
also hope to begin to map a critical methodology for talking about poetry in performance,
one that I will expand upon and complicate in the following chapters. Before turning to
my close reading/audition, however, I would like to provide some background history on
Marc Smith and the philosophy behind his performances.
Crowdpleaser: Poetry, Performance, and the "Art Form of
the Show"
Marc Smith's work at the interface of theater, popular music, and poetry
exemplifies the blurring of literary and vernacular cultures that typifies contemporary
performance poetry. Like David Hernández, who is discussed in Chapter Two, Smith is a
seminal figure in the local (Chicago) poetry scene and the national performance poetry
movement (both Bob Holman and Patricia Smith cite him as an influence on their poetry
careers). And, like Hernández, Smith has been a tireless advocate of a place for poetry in
21
the public life of the city. 2 An ex-construction-worker-turned-poet, Smith began
performing his poetry at various poetry venues around the city in the mid-1980s. His
early work with poetry and performance centered around the syncretizing of poetry and
popular cultural forms--the circus, rock music, and jazz. One of the founders of the
Neutral Turf Poetry Festival, Smith has also designed and emceed performance poetry
events for the Field Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and a variety of colleges
and universities (in fact, he designed and emceed the show at the Bryant Lake Bowl in
Minneapolis that Maria Damon discusses in her 1998 essay). He founded the Chicago
Poetry Ensemble, the poetry performance group that preceded the slam, in 1985. In 1988,
Smith founded the Bob Shakespeare Band, a jazz ensemble for voices and the precursor
to the polyvocal "group piece" performances at the National Grand Slams, and Pong
Unit, the rock/jazz/funk/poetry fusion band with which he still performs. 3 Although
Smith remains a purist about performance, he did publish Crowdpleaser, a cross between
a collected works and a history of Chicago's nascent performance poetry movement, in
1996. He is most well known, however, as the founder and emcee of the Uptown Poetry
Slam, the poetry mock-competition that inspired the slam poetry movement. As the
"slampapi" of the Slam Family Collective, a position that seems to include overseeing the
2 Hernández is not an active member of the Chicago slam community. However he did
appear as a featured guest at poetry shows that Smith organized at the Get Me High jazz club in
the mid-1980s and early poetry slams at the Green Mill. For further documentation, see David
Levinsky's article on saloon poetry.
3 A "group piece" is a performance poem specific to the National Grand Slam. These
pieces are collaboratively written and performed by the members of the slam team. They tend to
work like a musical ensemble in that pieces include quite a bit of harmonizing and polyvocality.
For some excellent examples of group pieces by the 1997 Austin, TX slam team and the New
York slam team see Paul Devlin's SlamNation. A "pong" is Smith's term for the fusion of a poem
and a song. For a description of a pong, see Crowdpleaser, p. 25.
22
operations of the newly formed Poetry Slam, Inc. and presiding over the annual Slam
Masters' Meeting, Smith remains the guiding force behind the movement. 4
The Chicago Poetry Ensemble's performance series (1985-1986) anticipates the
interactive, chaotic performance style that typifies the Uptown Poetry Slam. Like other
early experiments with poetry-performance hybrids--Bob Holman's Double Talk Show or
his Panic*DJ! series, for example--early Chicago Poetry Ensemble shows tended to be
more scripted than the typical poetry slam. Circus Chatter, one of the CPE's early poetryperformance shows featured Smith and other members of the ensemble in character as
members of a traveling circus, complete with costumes and props. And like these other
early poetry shows, the CPE's shows emphasized a carnivalesque, participatory
atmosphere. These early CPE shows ensured the interactive aspect of the show by
featuring guerilla performances designed to deflect attention away from the stage. For
instance, Circus Chatter included insurgent performances by members of the Chicago
Poetry Ensemble who worked the door and "broke the ice with the audience" and guest
performers planted at the bar who would interrupt the action on stage by spontaneously
standing up and performing a poem. The structure of these shows, like the structure of
Holman's early shows, reflects a conscious attempt by the show's players to subvert the
4 The Slam Master's Meeting, which Bob Holman has referred to as the yearly hajj, takes
place in mid- to late-March every year. It usually last three days and includes performances,
presentations from cities that want to host future National Grand Slams, and discussions
regarding the future of the movement (in 1996, for instance, the Slam Masters voted to endorse
Paul Devlin's documentary film SlamNation, and to help with its production in any way that they
could). Poet Daniel Ferri has described these meetings as the ultimate expression of grassroots
democracy (Conversation with the author). They are open to anyone and everyone present gets a
vote. It appears likely, however, that Smith's influence on the movement may lessen in the near
future. In his interview with me on February 6, 2000, Smith informed me that he will be taking a
three year sabbatical from the Uptown Poetry Slam to focus on the national scene. For more
information regarding either the Poetry Slam, Inc. or the Slam Master's Meetings, see the April
1996, February 1997, and October 1997 issues of Slam: The International Performance Poetry
Newsletter. For more information on Smith's leave of absence from the Uptown Poetry Slam, see
the open letter he posted on the web at www. slampapi.com/LOA.htm.
23
hierarchical dynamic of a conventional poetry reading by making audience participation
an integral aspect of the performance. 5
In a roundtable interview in Hyphen magazine, Smith underscores the relationship
between the live poetry event such as Circus Chatter or the Uptown Poetry Slam and the
formation of local poetry communities. Recorded in 1993 and published in 1995, this
interview precedes Smith's publication of Crowdpleaser by a year and his establishment
of his web site by close to two years. Smith's comments here, however, remain the most
in-depth discussion of his aesthetic and political project to date. Smith's remarks
throughout this interview reflect his desire to move beyond the page/stage dichotomy. He
begins the discussion by calling for a new poetics, one that is inclusive of a diverse range
of expressive forms. Smith emphasizes the role of what he calls "the art form of the
show" (Smith's catch-all term for the intersection of the show's "script," venue, and
audience) in this new poetics:
First, there's the form of the poem as a text: the words, the lines
and the stanzas and the sections. The text is also how it looks on
the page, how it appears in the book. Then there's the form of
performance: how fast or loud the poet speaks, what articulation is
given to the syllables, the inflection, the tempo of the poem, and
what the poet does with his or her body. Then we have a third
form, which is where this performance takes place: the show or the
venue, you could call it. Sometimes it might be a bookstore with
wine and cheese, no microphone, people standing in the aisles.
Sometimes it might be an auditorium.
So you have three forms: poems on the page, a poem performed,
and the show or venue. Those are the forms that we really should
be talking about. (15-16)
5 For descriptions of some early Chicago Poetry Ensemble shows, see Tim Wood's and
Fran Carris's "Marc Smith: Rediscovering Poetry as a Public Forum," Kurt Heintz's Incomplete
History of the Poetry Slam, and Marc Smith's Crowdpleaser. The Hugh Schwartzberg poetry
video collection at Chicago's Harold Washington Library includes a video tape of the 1988
Neutral Turf poetry event. This tape includes Marc Smith performing an excerpt from a Circus
Chatter performance.
24
Smith's description here is similar to what Charles Bernstein has theorized as the
"fundamentally plural existence" of the poem (Close Listening 9). Like Bernstein, Smith
calls into question New Critical modes of poetic analysis and challenges the primacy of
the text over the performance. And, like Bernstein, he subverts common presuppositions
about textual authority and originality. In his essay, Bernstein is most interested in
analyzing what he calls the a/oral dimension of the text. 6 Smith, however, chooses to
emphasize "the show," a poetic form which, as his definition above suggests,
encompasses text and audiotext as well as extratextual elements such as whether the
performer is miked, the relationship between performer and audience, and the size and
nature of the venue.
Throughout the rest of interview, Smith underscores the role that poetry shows
such as the slam, the poetry-music ensemble performance, and the open mic play in the
democratization and reinvigoration of what has become, in his opinion, a moribund,
elitist art form. In his closing comments, he states:
Performance is an art form in itself, and should be regarded as one.
. . . I have become aware that the one step beyond the performance,
the show, is truly the most important step. What the art form of the
show is really saying is that the community of people who hear the
poetry and are involved in the poetry, and what happens to them, is
more important than any individual poet or any individual poem.
We're a community; we need to be together, not only with poetry
but with everything else we do in our lives. Poetry shouldn't be
separated, it should be just one of the many threads that connect us
as human beings. (28)
Here Smith addresses what he has defined elsewhere as the egocentrism of the traditional
poetry reading. 7 By emphasizing the show--the one poetic form over which the
individual performer has little or no control--over both the text and the performance,
6 See, for instance, Bernstein's discussion of Baraka's July 26, 1978 performance at the
Naropa Institute (pages 7-9).
7 See for instance Smith's comments in "Marc Smith: Rediscovering Poetry as Public
Forum," at www.datawranglers.com/word/issues/9808/marc_smith.html. See also the
introductory comments to "The Father Has Faded" in Crowdpleaser.
25
Smith subverts traditional notions of the poem as a fixed artifact, the product of a single
poetic voice. Smith's elevation of the show over the individual performer or a specific
performance redefines the composition process as a collective act and the poem as fluid,
variable. As such, it parallels the community-building function of collaborative poetry
projects such as a David Hernández and Street Sounds performance or Bob Holman's
Double-Talk Show. 8 For Smith, then, the poetry slam is an inherently public work,
constituted in the variable interactions of text, performance, and location. Smith's
comments here also suggest the role that the live poetry show plays in constructing a
utopian poetry community. It is through the convergence of audience, text, and venue that
audience members and poets establish a connection and a community.
"Sandburg to Smith/Smith to Sandburg" and the "El Train Poem," two of Smith's
more popular performance pieces, exemplify the nexus between the poet, the
performance, and community-formation that Smith describes above. Like Smith's other
performance poems, these two have been made public via live performance and via his
1996 poetry collection Crowdpleaser (there is also talk that both of these poems will be
included on a CD that Smith is working on with Pong Unit that is slated to come out in
the next year or so). "Sandburg to Smith/Smith to Sandburg" exemplifies Smith's
signature performance style. In this poem, Smith samples from and reworks passages
from Sandburg's poem "Chicago." I most recently heard Smith perform this poem at the
January 2, 2000 Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill. It was the final poem that he
performed that evening. Like the other poems Smith performed that evening--"Bicycle
Jockey" and "Ode to Worker Bees," for example--this poem is illustrative of Smith's
working-class aesthetic. Like these other two poems, this poem is a testimonial to the
8 For a brief analysis of these two poetry shows, see Chapter 2, "Performing the
Transfrontera Contact Zone: David Hernández and Street Sounds/Sonidas de la Calle" and
Chapter 4, "'If It Ain't a Pleasure, It Ain't a Poem': Bob Holman's Democratic Vision, the United
States of Poetry, and the New Public Sphere."
26
city's blue-collar workers. In it, Smith details scenes and locales familiar to a local
audience--Calumet Harbor, the Chicago Board of Trade, the University of Illinois in
Champaign-Urbana, and the stockyards--and documents the city's transition from an
industrial to post-industrial economy, the concurrent loss of manufacturing jobs, and the
disillusionment of the city's working people:
Once you were the Hog Butcher for the world.
Elmo from Dakota stuck those pigs
Because it was a job nobody wanted
And he had to take it.
The blood came over his heels
And the pigs squealed.
And every time a street car turned a corner
Those squeals came back to him.
Bloodthirsty men.
Hogs to kill.
Once the tools were made here.
Are they now?
Buy 'em at Sears.
Buy everything at Sears.
Buy the whole god damn world
And cram it all into a thirty foot lot.
Renovate it. Rejuvenate it.
Hire a Polish immigrant to point the bricks.
A Czech to polish the floors.
Make the tools with Japanese steel.
"Stacker of Wheat" he called you.
Well, it must move through here somewhere.
Piled onto a boxcar.
Piped down into a ship's hold.
Stored in a concrete silo.
But where?
Louie Gomez quit school at sixteen to shovel grain off the
slip docks of the Calumet Harbor. It was hard fuckin' work,
but he had to take it. Now, a Champaign Biz-Grad, who builds
his body with free weights and cleans his Caribbean suntan
at the health club sauna, trades stacks of wheat we never see
making Louie's wages at sixteen (times) sixteen (times) the
years of inflation (times) the tick tick seconds of a Market
that closes at midafternoon when and where, Louis, now forty,
sweeps the floor.
Player with railroads, eh? Handler of freight.
There is no more romance to handle there now. No pride.
Just sleepy-eyed union stooges who walk the yards killing
time; pressing a button now and then. Robots, both mechanical
and in the flesh.
(Crowdpleaser 33-34/Jan. 1, 2000 Uptown Poetry Slam)
27
By interweaving his lines with lines from Sandburg's poem "Chicago," Smith
places himself within a populist literary tradition that includes along with Sandburg
fellow Illini Edgar Lee Masters--whom Smith mentions in the poem's final stanza--and
Vachel Lindsay. As I mentioned above, this poem is part of a body of performance
poems that includes a number of poetic reworkings of other poets' works. Since I began
following Smith's performance career closely in 1996, I've heard him perform two
different versions of e. e. cummings's "My Father Moves from Dooms of Love," a
version of George Cabot Lodge's "Song of the Wave," and a poetic version of a news
story by proletariat journalist Jack Conroy titled "Clothes Make the Man, Jack." On the
one hand, this poetic versioning reflects Smith's attempt to place his work in a specific
literary tradition. On the other hand, it suggests Smith's desire to make his poetry--and by
extension, poetry in general--more accessible to his audience. By choosing one of
Sandburg's more popular poems ("Chicago" is frequently anthologized and is often taught
in American high school and college introductory literature courses), Smith draws his
audience into the performance.
The final point I'd like to make about this poem and about Smith's numerous
reworkings of other poets' works has to do with the question of authorship and originality
I raise at the beginning of this chapter. In her work on rap music, Tricia Rose discusses
how the sample raises important issues regarding intellectual property and ownership. As
Rose points out, sampling and versioning not only redefine conventional notions of
authorship, they have also " had important resistive effects in the recording industry. To
reuse portions of copyrighted material without permission undermines legal and capital
market authority" (90). There are, of course, differences between the electronic samples
that Rose discusses and Smith's use of quotation in his poems. Among these is the fact
that Smith's live performances are ephemeral and unscripted and therefore not, as far as I
know, copyrighted works. Also at issue here is the fact that poetry--published and/or
performed--typically does not turn a profit so the enforcement of copyright becomes a
28
non-issue. Moreover, Rose's discussion of rap, the electronic sample, and copyright
controversies deals specifically with this "black" musical form and the connections
between quotation and the articulation of a black counterdiscursive tradition.
While I don't wish to conflate Smith's work with quotation with the very
particular use that Rose theorizes, I do think that the stance toward authorship and the
composition process that Smith's poetic reworkings suggest is similar to the one that Rose
defines in her study. At the February 6 Uptown Poetry Slam that I attended, for instance,
Smith prefaced his performances of both the George Cabot Lodge piece and the Jack
Conroy piece with references to the fact that the works were not in the public domain and
that he was using them without permission. Moreover, as with the sample in rap, Smith's
performances are not straight quotation. Instead, he uses the performance to deconstruct
the original text. With the "Sandburg to Smith/Smith to Sandburg" piece, he takes lines
and phrases from Sandburg's Chicago and incorporates them into his own work, updating
the context. Likewise, with Lodge's "The Song of the Wave," which is subtitled "With
Ripples by Marc," Smith incorporates his lines into Lodge's poem. And while the e. e.
cummings piece is, as far as I can tell, straight quotation, how Smith arranges and
presents it suggests the same sort of creative quotation that he uses in "Sandburg to
Smith" and "The Song of the Wave."
Given the poetry slam's recent incorporation as Poetry Slam, Inc. and
performance poetry's commodification via books, poetry-videos, and CDs, Smith's poetic
reworkings suggest a desire to maintain the slam as a resistive poetic space. I don't want
to naively embrace the utopian philosophy behind this grassroots art form as an
unmitigated good. Indeed, one of the reasons that the poetry slam family decided to
incorporate had to do with Sony's wholesale cooptation of the "poetry slam" at the 1994
Lollapalooza tour and the risk of losing their collective "ownership" of this idea to a large
multinational corporation. At the same time, it does seem clear that the mass marketing of
this performance form is at odds with the grassroots philosophy behind Smith's poetry
29
shows. Smith addressed the effects of commercialization on the local poetry community
in our recent interview. Comparing the recent media interest to the crossover and
commodification of rap, Smith states:
My argument is against that commodification and that mass media
marketing of poetry. . . . In the slam world, it's no longer springing
from your local community and people creating it on their own,
inventing it. . . . It's made even worse by the incredible
commercialization of hip-hop and rap. There are young people
who come here with that style saying absolutely nothing but vacant
rhetoric they hear off the radio. They think that's it. They don't
even listen to all the different styles of what's going on here. I
think the evidence we've seen in last five or six years of what
happens when the performance poet goes out into the mass media,
or has a product he wants to commercialize is the total proof of my
argument. (Interview with the author)
As with rap, performance poetry's crossover to a more mainstream audience via films,
CDs, and television raises questions regarding the commercialization of this community
poetry movement and the kind of cultural work that this poetry does. As Smith makes
clear on his web page/manifesto, the purpose behind the slam and his other performance
poetry shows is the establishment of a local poetry community--a poetic counterpublic
sphere, if you will. It stands to reason that as slam and open mic poetries are
disassociated from their grounding in specific local sites and rearticulated through the
media, these poetic forms will lose some of their edge. 9
The "El Train Poem," another one of Smith's most popular performance pieces,
uses repetition and antiphony to draw the audience into the performance and posit a
communal composition process. He included it, under the title "Nightbound," in
Crowdpleaser and has performed it at nearly every slam that I have attended over the past
few years, including both the January 2 and the February 6, 2000 slams. At the February
6 event, he closed the featured guest set (his band Pong Unit was the featured guest) with
this poem. Because the subject of the poem (the experience of riding Chicago's elevated
9 While a more thorough discussion of this aspect of the slam movement falls outside the
scope of this chapter, I do return and develop this thread more fully in Chapter Four.
30
train) is immediately recognizable to the local poetry audience, this poem tends to be
enthusiastically received by audience members. This poem is a polyvocal performance
piece and Smith opens this poem with a mini-audition and practice. He traverses the
club's floor and recruits individual audience members to play the "blind beggar" in the
first stanza and the "old man" in the third stanza. He then has the audience practice
hanging from the loops, leaning in tandem, and whistling:
Push a button.
Flip a switch.
Clocks. . . timers. . . ready?
Arms and legs, are you ready?
Blind beggar, do you have your jingling cup ready? [audience
member stands, walks around as if trying to solicit the rest of the
audience]
Okay,
Herrreeee.
Herrrrrrrrrrrrreeee.
Herrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeee.
rrrreeee they COME.
The crowd moves.
From the hot dog stand
To the cheap flower man.
From the shoe shiner
To the bar-b-que chicken.
Spit turnin' chicken
Chasin' the backs of heads
Through the tunnels that funnel the world away.
Then,
From loops
The human meat hangs. [audience members stand with one arm in
the air, as if riding an el train]
The trainman calls
Ninety-ninth, One Hundred-n-eleventh,
Cottage Grove, Kensington,
KEEEENSIIIINGTOOOON!
Ten buttons are pushed.
Ten switches are flipped.
Get off. Get on. Get on. Get off.
Cough. Sneeze. Wheeze. Choke.
The train jerks forward. [audience members jerk forward]
An old man spits right on the floor
And says [spoken by an audience member]:
"I remember when the kids
Used to run along side the tracks
Pumpin' their arms
Tryin' for a whistle."
Tryin' for a whistle. Tryin' for a whistle.
Whistle. Whistle. Whistle.
31
WhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaH! [performed by audience]
(Crowdpleaser57-58/Uptown Poetry Slam, Feb. 6, 2000)
This poem, with the incorporation of audience/actors and its call-and-response lines,
transforms the composition and performance of this poem into a community act. Smith
not only calls on the audience to provide key lines, he also calls on them to act out certain
key lines from the poem. The audience here, like the audience at the country club, is
made part of the act and they are invited to be moved by the poem. As Smith recites the
poem's lines, audience members sway to the train-like rhythm of the poem, jerk back and
forth and enact the train's stop-and-go motion, or walk around the club, playing the part
of the blind beggar. Given this poem's focus on audience interaction, it also served as a
nice transition between the featured guest set (the least participatory of the evening's sets)
and the slam competition.
Throughout both "Sandburg to Smith/Smith to Sandburg" and the "El Train
Poem," Smith uses the performance to redefine poetry as an exoteric art. These poems are
composed and recomposed in the live performance, in the chance interactions between
text, audiotext, and context. As such, they elucidate the connection between "the art form
of the show" and the construction of a local grassroots poetry community that Smith calls
for in the 1995 Hyphen interview. Keeping this in mind, I would like to turn now to a
discussion of the Uptown Poetry Slam, the poetry competition that Marc Smith emcees
every Sunday evening at the Green Mill Lounge in Chicago.
"The Points Are Not the Point. The Point Is Poetry": Marc
Smith and the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill
The slam is about returning power to the audience. The audience is
the most important part of the performance, not the poet on the
stage. . . .At the first National Grand Slam, the Chicago slam poets
realized that they had a gift to give to the rest of the world--the gift
of the slam, the gift of poetry--and part of what motivated the
members of the original slam team was giving this gift to the
world.
--Marc Smith, tenth-anniversary slam celebration, July 19, 1996
32
The show starts the minute you walk in the door.
--Marc Smith, Uptown Poetry Slam, February 6, 2000
The Uptown Poetry Slam reflects Smith's desire to take poetry out of such elite
spaces as classrooms, university auditoriums, and art galleries and return it shared
cultural spaces such as the bar, the cafe, and the street corner. Like Smith's other poetry
shows, the slam is a ritualized poetry performance that dismantles the hierarchical
relationship between poet and audience traditionally associated with the poetry reading.
The first poetry slam was an outgrowth of Circus Chatter, a weekly show put on by
Smith's Chicago Poetry Ensemble at the Get Me High, a jazz club that was located in
Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood. According to slam legend, the first slam took place
on July 20, 1986 at the Green Mill Lounge in Chicago, a Prohibition-era jazz club
rumored to have been frequented by the likes of Al Capone and Machine Gun Jack
McGurn. 10 Like other poetry shows that Smith has designed--Circus Chatter or the
Neutral Turf Poetry Festival, for example--the poetry slam returns poetry to its roots as
an oral art form.
The Uptown Poetry Slam generally follows the tripartite structure Smith
developed during the show's first year. The poetry show opens with an open mic set
during which poets from the audience are invited to take the stage and perform. This set
functions as a poetry slam "minor league" of sorts. Poets new to the performance scene
("virgin virgins," in slam parlance) tend to start out performing at the open mic before
moving to the slam competition. The second set--the featured guest set--usually lasts
close to an hour and tends to include guest poets from other slam venues, academic poets,
10 There seems to be some disagreement among early slam participants regarding the
slam's inception. In SlamNation, the documentary film about the 1997 National Poetry Grand
Slam in Portland, OR, Michael Brown cites the Get Me High Lounge as the location of the first
poetry slam. Likewise in "Bob Holman Kicks the History of the Slam, his essay in Slam, the
companion book to the film of the same name, Bob Holman locates the first slams at the Get Me
High as well. At the 1996 tenth anniversary slam, Smith drew a distinction between these early
shows and the poetry slam, placing the first slam at the Green Mill Lounge at the July 20, 1986
performance.
33
and local jazz and rock bands. The final set of the evening is the poetry competition
during which poets get up on stage, recite poems, and are judged by a panel of three
judges chosen from the audience. The competition consists of one or two rounds,
depending on how many poets have signed up to compete. The poems are judged using
the Dewey Decimal Slam System of Scorification--a numerical scoring system based on
the ten-point scale used in Olympic sports such as gymnastics and diving. The judges'
scores, which are written on paper napkins and held up after a poet finishes performing,
are totaled together, points are deducted for penalties such as exceeding the three-minute
time limit. The poet with the highest score at the end of the competition wins the purse-usually ten dollars in cash or ten dollars worth of Illinois lottery tickets. In the unlikely
event that there is a tie, the two poets compete in a "sudden death spontaneous haiku
round"--an overtime round during which they must compose and perform haikus. The
first poet to recite a haiku that doesn't scan correctly loses.
Over the past fourteen years, the poetry slam has evolved from a local weekly
poetry event into an international counterpoetic movement. This hybrid poetry
performance form has spread to over one hundred cities worldwide and generated a
number of variations on the slam theme, including the Heckler's Slam at the Nuyorican
Poets Cafe, the Guild Complex's annual Poetry-Video Slam, the Poetryslam board game,
any number of on-line "virtual" slams, and, my own personal favorite, Fitzgerald's &
Marc Smith's Fat Tuesday/Night of Misrule Slam, an annual Mardi Gras slam celebrating
the seven deadly sins. 11 The slam inspired the 1993 National Grand Slam CD, the
spoken word anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (1994), the 1998
documentary film SlamNation, and a number of web sites, including Smith's
slampapi.com and poetryslam.com, the official site of Poetry Slam, Inc. Slam poetry has
11 My numbers here are based on Smith's opening remarks at the 1996 tenth anniversary
celebration of the poetry slam. This is probably a low estimate.
34
been portrayed on daytime television (the February 14, 1997 episode of Days of Our
Lives featured a Valentine's Day poetry slam), in the feature-length film Slam, and in
Nike's television ads for the 1998 Winter Olympics. 12 Over the past decade, a number of
mainstream newspapers and magazines have run feature stories on the slam, including
The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, and Smithsonian
Magazine. 13 The slam has even made it to that bastion of television journalism, 60
Minutes. As Smith pointed out in our recent interview, Morley Safer's coverage of the
Tenth-Anniversary National Grand Slam in Chicago (1999) has instigated a renewed
interest the poetry slam. Smith's comments regarding the mainstream media's coverage of
the slam and the slam's continuing proliferation were born out for me at a slam I recently
attended. One of the audience members was a bartender/poet from Milwaukee who had
seen the story on 60 Minutes and had come to the Green Mill to learn how to start his
own slam.
The poetry slam's continuing proliferation and evolution suggest that it is best
understood as a syncretic, fluid art form, one that is recomposed as it spreads from
community to community, venue to venue. Even among more "conventional" slams--that,
is slams that more or less follow the Chicago slam's structure--the slam aesthetic varies
greatly. For instance, while most slam venues adhere to a three-minute time limit on
12 Emily XYZ of New Jersey and Matt Cook of Wisconsin were chosen to particpate in
the Nike poetry ad campaign. These Nike ads instigated a debate regarding poetry and
commodification in the popular press. A short editorial published in The Progressive addresses
this Nike ad campaign and poet Martín Espada's response to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners'
offer--he rejects it based on the limits placed on the poems to be included, Nike's shameless
marketing to impoverished inner city youths, and the company's unfair labor practices. (See
"Nike's Poets" by Matthew Rothschild in the January 1998 issue of the magazine). Harper's also
ran a side bar titled "Nike's Poetry Slam," which reproduced the letter sent to the poets invited to
participate in this ad campaign.
13 See Clines, "When Poetry Means Much More than Lovely Rhyme"; Coniff, "Please,
Audience, Do Not Applaud a Mediocre Poem"; Honan, "Of Rhymed Couplets, and Raunchy,
Too"; Kotlowitz, "Readings Are Held as Bouts and Things Do Get Nasty"; Lauerman, "Poetry
Straight Up."
35
performances, until very recently the Nuyorican Cafe refused to place a limit on
performers, applying instead what Holman has referred to as the "the poem rules" rule.
And while the slam masters have forbidden the use of props at the National Grand Slam,
many local venues continue to allow them. The variation from local slam venue to local
slam venue is one of the reasons that the slam continues to flourish. The fact that the
shape and the structure of a given slam remains under the control of the local community
of poets who runs it suggests that in spite of the recent incorporation of the Poetry Slam,
Inc., the slam poetry movement is not a monolithic countercultural movement. Rather, it
is best understood as a loosely knit network of autonomous local poetry communities.
Smith reiterates this point on his web page/manifesto where he writes, "With respect to
its own affairs, each Slam should be free from attachment to any outside organization and
responsible to no authority other than its own community of poets and audience"
(www.slampapi.com/slamphil.htm).
Smith has described the interactive, participatory aesthetic that informs the
Uptown Poetry Slam (and informs his other poetry shows, too) as "organized chaos." On
the one hand, the concept of "organized chaos" emphasizes the slam's status as an
antiestablishment poetry form. It suggests a sort of poetry free-for-all, the literary
equivalent of the barroom brawl or a World Wrestling Federation smack-down. On the
other hand, it underscores the similarities between the community-building function of
the slam and that of other local poetry performances in which improvisation and
spontaneous audience interaction are important components of the show. In a recent
interview, Smith reiterated the importance of organized chaos to the philosophy of the
slam:
But my show, the shows I always design like [the] Fat Tuesday
[slam] at Fitzgerald's, will be organized chaos where you set a
structure up and within that structure, anything goes. Because of
the structure, it can never go too far this way and the safety valve
is always in my shows, me. We snap, we boo. . . . I am the
audience. I'm not Marc. In my mind I'm trying to be the audience,
to see where the audience is. . . . It's chaos but there's a boundary
36
around it. . . . What we achieve here is not about outrageous artists
shocking society, it's about a community of people seeing what's
really involved with them, where they really are. (Interview with
the author)
The show's underlying aesthetic adds to this chaotic, carnivalesque atmosphere.
At the Uptown Poetry Slam, as at most slams, there are no formal or aesthetic limits
placed on what qualifies as a poem (indeed, the only limitations seem to be the time limit
and the prohibition against the use of props). And even though the Green Mill is an
established venue, the open mic and the slam competition are open to anyone who wants
to participate. The typical show usually includes performances by "ringers" (Smith's term
for poets who are included in the evening's performance in order to set a certain tone or
level of competition) but also "virgin virgins." However, the random order in which the
poets perform undercuts any notion of a poetic hierarchy based on aesthetics or style.
Open mic poets read on a first come, first served basis and all open mic poets, regardless
of talent or popularity, are held to a one or two poem limit with a three-minute time limit
on each poem. The order in which the slam competitors compete is also determined by
chance--an audience member draws the participants' names from a hat. Moreover, in
order to ensure that there is no chance of perceived favoritism, Smith often times rotates
the order in the final rounds of the competition.
Because the open mic and the slam are open to anyone who wants to perform, it is
not unusual to hear a diverse range of poetries during a single show. For instance, as I've
suggested above, Smith's performances work out of a populist poetic tradition. However,
other poets who perform regularly at the Green Mill--Maria McCray, Chuck Perkins, and
Reggie Gibson--work out of a tradition that includes Black Arts, black vernacular
cultures, and jazz and blues. Moreover, while many of the poems performed at the Green
Mill and at other slam venues tend to be either social protest poems or confessional
poems (this latter category is especially typical of the poetry performed by virgin
virgins), there is so much variety in the themes and topics covered in these poems that it
is difficult to define a "typical" slam poem. For example, at the poetry slam that I
37
attended on February 6, the poets who performed that evening included Maria McCray,
Chuck Perkins, and Ron Gillette, a friend of Marc Smith's and one of the cofounders of
the Chicago Poetry Ensemble. Other performers that evening included three virgin,
virgins--a middle-aged woman named Elaina, a twenty-something woman named Selma,
and a fifty-ish man named Bill. The range of poetries performed included jazz poetry,
rap/poetry hybrids, dramatic monologues, and short aphoristic pieces. As such, Smith's
poetry show functions as what Charles Bernstein has called poetics that "edits in"--that is,
a poetics that is inclusive of multiple and sometimes conflicting poetic voices, styles, and
rhythms (Apoetics 2).
The poetry slam show performs on a structural level what poems such as Smith's
"El Train Poem" and "Sandburg to Smith/Smith to Sandburg" perform on the level of the
individual performance piece: it deemphasizes the performer and transforms the audience
into participants and cocreators. Smith opens every slam with his trademark introduction-"I'm Marc Smith"--to which the audience responded with an enthusiastic "So what?!?"
He then performs the slam spiel--a ritualized call-and-response performance piece where
the emcee explains the rules of the competition. [Click for Audio File 1. Marc Smith: The
Rules of the Slam]:
The rules of the slam are: If you don't like it a little bit, you snap
your fingers [audience snaps fingers]. If you don't like it a little bit
more, you stomp your feet [audience stomps feet]. If it's Godawful bad, you groan [audience groans]. But if it's so bad, so very,
very, very, very bad that it becomes good, you snap your fingers,
stomp your feet, groan, and yell "Belmont!" [audience snaps,
stomps their feet, groans and yells "Belmont!"] We don't know
why we do this but we do. There's also the feminist hiss. [audience
hisses]. It used to be when a man got sexist in his poem, but now
it's for just about anything a man does as soon as he steps up on the
stage." (Smith, Feb. 6, 2000 Uptown Poetry Slam)
This opening spiel enacts the dialogic principle it espouses. It not only introduces the
rules of the slam competition to neophyte slam goers, it also enacts the participatory
philosophy of the Uptown Poetry Slam by immediately requiring audience involvement
in creating the show. Moreover, it turns the act of listening and responding to a poem into
38
a performance in its own right. Just as the performance of the poem becomes a visceral
act, complete with hand gestures, facial gestures, and stage blocking, so too does the act
of listening. As is clear from the background noise in the audio clip, the audience
members are encouraged to be physically moved by the performance--to snap, to stomp,
to jump to their feet, and clap.
Unlike the conventional poetry reading, where audience members sit quietly in
their seats, listen to the poet recite poems, and clap politely at the end of the performance,
the slam is a raucous, chaotic event that transgresses the boundary between audience and
performer, poetry and popular culture. As with the Chicago Poetry Ensemble
performances discussed earlier in the chapter, the Uptown Poetry Slam deflects attention
away from the stage by eroding the "fourth wall" between the audience and the
performers. Throughout the performance the divisions between the show and the floor are
fluid. Upon entering the club, it is not unusual to be greeted by Smith, who spends the
half-hour or so before the show working the room, handing out fliers, signing people up
for the open mic, recruiting judges for the slam competition, and helping audience
members find seats. During the show, moreover, Smith and other performers often
spontaneously break character in mid-performance and converse with audience members
or leave the stage to perform, unmiked, from the floor. And throughout the show there is
a steady stream of traffic between the stage and the floor: as Smith calls open mic and/or
slam poets' names, they leave their seats and take the stage. During the performance, slam
regulars--that is, audience members who attend the slam on a regular basis--will shout out
to the poets, request specific poems, recite lines from the poems along with the
performers, and heckle performers they don't like.
Unlike the conventional poetry reading where physical boundaries such as a
proscenium arch (if the reading is in an auditorium) or a small podium (if the reading is
bookstore or a gallery), reflects the philosophical division between the poet and her
audience, the layout of the Green Mill underscores the participatory aesthetic that
39
undergirds the poetry slam. Located in Uptown, a multiethnic, working-class
neighborhood on Chicago's North Side, this small, noisy jazz club has more in common
with the environmental theaters of the 1960s and 70s than it does with the traditional
poetry reading venue. 14 The club features a low plywood stage (about six inches above
the floor), set against the back wall of the bar. The audio set-up includes a small portable
sound board and a microphone and an Art Deco-era mural of an Italian fishing village
serves as backdrop. Moreover, because the bathrooms are located behind stage left, there
is always a steady flow of audience members cutting across the stage throughout the
performance, suggesting the focus on the lower half of the body that Bakhtin and
Stallybrass and White have identified as central to the concept of the carnivalesque. 15
The audience sits at the small tables and booths placed throughout the club, stands at the
bar or in the aisles, and--on nights when it's really crowded--sits on the edge of the stage
and on the small flight of stairs leading up to the bathrooms. The typical Uptown Poetry
Slam draws audiences of 150 to 200 people, and as the club fills up it becomes noisy and
smoke-filled. Tables are pushed together and extra chairs are added. Because the serving
14 For a discussion of the environmental theater and how it differs from the conventional
proscenium theater, see Richard Schechner's "Toward a Poetics of Performance," 117-118.
15 Evidently the Get Me High featured a similar layout as far as the stage and the
bathrooms go. Heintz's full description of the Get Me High is so colorful, that it bears repeating.
He writes:
The Get Me High Lounge was a small, damp, run-down bar set in the very center
of Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood. The walls were narrow, painted black and
graffiti'd upon as though they were a chalkboard. Newsclippings [sic], album
covers, and old jazz posters smothered what was left of the walls. In winter, gray
street slush covered the floor while the guests' heads sweltered. The ceiling
leaked a smelly, nondescript liquid onto the bar at a corner near the door; and
guests suspected it was the toilet upstairs. The club's own restrooms were
actually on stage at the back of a small area three steps up from the street-level
floor.(www.e-poets.net/library/slam/)
For analyses of the lower body and the carnivaesque, see Peter Stallybrass &
Allon White's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, especially the introduction, and
Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World, especially Chapters Five and Six.
40
lanes are now blocked, the wait staff weaves in and out between the tables taking orders
and making change for audience members. During their performances, the poets on stage
must compete with the din of audience members' conversations, the exchanges between
the wait staff and customers, the clinking of glasses, and the music on the jukebox. The
layout of the venue, then, not only erodes the division between performer and audience, it
also erodes the division between the event of the performance and mundane events such
as going to the bathroom, buying drinks, and making change. As such, the interactions
between performer, audience, and venue emphasize Smith's desire to return poetry to the
realm of the everyday.
The final point I'd like to make about Marc Smith's Uptown Poetry Slam, and
about poetry slams in general, has to do with the slam competition and communityformation. It probably goes without saying that the slam competition has received a fair
amount of attention from the popular press as well as from academics. Various web pages
and print sources play up the agonistic tone of the slam by tracing the etymology of the
term "poetry slam" to the "body slam" in professional wrestling, and, as both Kurt Heintz
and Paul Hoover point out in their discussions of the slam's prehistory, Smith's poetry
show was influenced by the poetry boxing bouts organized by Al Simmons in the early
1980s. 16 This focus on the slam as popular entertainment isn't completely inaccurate.
After all, slam argot is full of tongue-in-cheek references to the sports world--for
instance, "The Dreaded Sudden-Death Spontaneous Haiku Overtime Round" (the official
16 Kurt Heintz addresses this slam prehistory on his Incomplete History of the Poetry
Slam web site. Paul Hoover corroborated Heintz's history in an E-mail to the UBPoetics listserve
(July 1, 1998). For examples of other documents that play up the slam/wrestling and boxing
connection see the web page for the 1999 National Grand Slam (www.poetryslam.com),
Holman's introductory essay in The United States of Poetry, or the liner notes to Grand Slam!:
Best of the National Poetry Slam (1994), the CD that Holman coproduced with Bill Adler.
Although the wrestling/boxing comparison flourishes both within the slam community and
without, Smith claims that these sports were not the inspiration for the term "poetry slam."
According to Smith, the the term "poetry slam" is an homage to a grand slam that he saw Chicago
Cub Ernie Banks hit when he was a child.
41
title of the final tie-breaking round), "time penalties" for going overtime in a
performance, and, of course, the Olympic-style system of scoring the poems all reference
the world of sport. The slam is a ritualized poetry competition and the competitive aspect
of the performance generates the kind of rowdy audience participation that one usually
associates with a sporting event.
While these connections to sport and spectacle are in keeping with Smith's and
other slam masters' desire to emphasize the populist nature of the slam, the competitive
aspect of the show also tends to draw the most criticism. In an interview on a 1997
episode of WGBH's Greater Boston Arts that included a short story on the poetry slam
movement, Liam Rector argued that the "gladiator, gong show aspect of the slam
trivializes and debases the art." Robert Pinsky reiterates this sentiment on the recent 60
Minutes story on the 1999 National Grand Slam in Chicago, when he describes the
competition as "get[ting] in the way of art." These superficial glosses of the slam
competition strike me as problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is
the underlying classicism and racism inherent in them. 17
Moreover, as Smith pointed out in an interview with the Centerstage Chicago web
site's arts editor, the slam competition is a parody of more traditional forms of poetry
competitions--admittance into creative writing programs, the awarding of literary prizes,
and publication in a prestigious journal or collection. Responding to the interviewer's
claim that the competitive nature of the slam "scares hundreds of poets away" (a
statement that, given the size of the average audience at the Uptown Poetry Slam, and the
amount of poets who perform there on during a typical show, strikes me as incredibly
uniformed) Smith states:
17 For a discussion of the resonances between the current anti-slam sentiment and racism,
see my analysis of Patricia Smith's "Slamming: Shaking up New England's Poetry World" in
Chapter Three.
42
The slam competition is a mockery of competition. The real
competitions are trying to get your poem published. . . . See, all the
literary magazines, contests that are out there, are serious
competition. And it's a closed competition. With the slam, one of
the sayings is, "almost always, the best poet never wins." But this
loose form of competition, it prompts the individual to try harder,
to do better. And that way, it pushes the form forward. The form
I'm most concerned about, is the art of performing poems. That's
what I've done. I've brought the art of performing poems into the
forefront. That's what the slam does.
(www.centerstage.net/chicago/literature/marc-smith.htm)
The parodic nature of the slam is most evident in the method for choosing judges and the
numerical system for scoring poems. At the Uptown Poetry Slam, the judges are chosen
from the audience based on two criteria--that they reflect the demographic makeup of the
audience and that they are not representatives of the poetry establishment (no literature
professors, literary journal editors, book publishers, etc.). 18 For instance, at the January 2
UPS that I attended, the panel of judges included a naval officer from the Great Lakes
Naval Base, an elementary school teacher, and a medical resident. At the February 6 UPS
the panel of judges consisted of a young woman who was a graduate student in
psychology and was at the slam doing research on human behavior, a woman out on the
town with a group of friends who defined her profession as "babysitter for grown men,"
and a middle-aged woman who stated that she was qualified to judge the slam because
she had a "no expertise whatsoever and a funky scarf."
Smith opens every competition with the line, "The best poem never wins," and the
mock-seriousness with which Smith, the judges, and the audience treat this part of the
performance emphasizes the ridiculousness behind the concept of quantifying aesthetic
18 Smith describes the evolution of the judging system in a 1998 interview with Fran
Carris and Tim Wood. He states:
At first I thought, let me find some "qualified" judges. (laughter) So I would get-I know--of course where do I go?--the editors of the little magazines. The most
narrow-minded people in the world! The university academics (not all of them)
but in general they are the most narrow-minded [people]. They have one view of
how it should be and that's horrible. So I went to the street and went to the
everyday guy and let everyday people do it.
(www.datawranglers.com/word/issues/9808/marc_smith.html)
43
taste. Judges are asked to write their scores on paper napkins and at the end of the
performance the judges hold up their scores for Smith and the audience to see. As with a
bad call at a sporting event, audience members will heckle judges if they feel that the
scoring was unfair. Often times, Smith will ask the judges justify their scores, explain
how one performance differed from another, what they were looking for in the
performance, and what the poet could do differently next time.
The competition functions as a dramatized critique of the literary establishment.
As numerous other slam masters have point out, it also is a means for reaffirming poetry
as an oral art and getting audience members curious enough to pick up a book of poetry
or attend other poetry events. 19 In the words of Asheville, NC, slam master Allan Wolf
(as paraphrased on Marc Smith's web site), "The points are not the point, the point is
poetry" (www.slampapi.com/slamphil.htm). As the epigraph at the beginning of this
section of the chapter suggests, the point also seems to be the creation of an oppositional,
grassroots poetry community. In a recent interview Smith described the connection
between this spontaneous, participatory part of the show and community formation.
Discussing the evolution of the poetry slam's structure, Smith stated: "What made the
slam work and other slams work, was the show and not just the competition. The
competition is helpful because it is a built in drama. Any competition, a sports
competition, is about drama. The dramatic question, 'Who's going to win?' That holds the
audience together" (Interview with the author).
Ultimately it is this coming together, this forging of a bond between poet and
audience, and between audience member and audience member, around this ritualized
event, that is the most important aspect of this performance event. As with a David
Hernández and Street Sounds performance, Smith's Uptown Poetry Slam uses the formal
19 See for instance, Patricia Smith's and Michael Brown's description of the competition
as the "hook" on the "Poetry Slam" episode of Greater Boston Arts, WGBH, 1997.
44
constraints of the show--in this case, the system of judging, the heckling of the poets and
the judges by audience members, the "organized chaos" of the open mic and slam
competition--to articulate a ritualized counterpoetic sphere. Just how this counterpoetic
forum evolves as the slam spreads from location to location, medium to medium, will be
addressed in the following chapters.
45
CHAPTER TWO
PERFORMING THE TRANFRONTERA CONTACT ZONE: DAVID
HERNÁNDEZ AND SONIDAS DE LA CALLE/STREET SOUNDS
In a 1997 interview, David Hernández, Chicago-Rican poet and front man for the
poetry-music group Street Sounds/Sonidas de la Calle, analyzes the role of the
community artist in the creation of crosscultural political and aesthetic coalitions.
Focusing specifically on the development of Chicago's Latino arts movement during the
1960s, he states:
Community arts is basically about the artists in the community
who paint and reflect on their community. . . . The thing about
community arts is that they should go beyond their communities
and tie up with other communities so it doesn't just become an
ethnic thing, so we don't say, "Oh Uptown. . . yes, their arts over
there are Vietnamese." There are a lot of different programs out
there that are finally tying all these groups together. Chicago is
very poly-cultural, whatever that means. That should be
recognized. Not separating but combining all of these elements
artistically, because it's the artists from every given community
that, if their consciousnesses are raised enough, they should be able
to do that, to influence their communities to see other
communities. I'll give you a good example of this. For a long time
back in the early 1960s and before that, Chicago's Puerto Rican
and Mexican communities never really got along together. Just like
between other groups, there was this national chauvinism, looking
down your nose at other communities, whether they're Mexican,
Colombian, or whatever. But it was through the arts--poetry and
murals--that these two communities started getting together. The
artists from the Pilsen area and our artists, we all started
connecting. We said, "Hey, let's do murals together. Hey, let's do
poetry readings together. Hey, we're basically the same." So it's the
arts' influence that can drive a community that way. And then once
that happens, if they get together politically, they become a force.
(Interview with the author)
Here Hernández describes what Paul Gilroy has called "the vital connection"
between expressive culture--in this case, murals and poetry readings--and grassroots
political movements. Referring to his experiences with Chicago's Mexican-American and
Puerto Rican arts communities, Hernández insists on the role of these participatory art
forms in the development of a shared Latino ethnic consciousness and the ensuing
46
emergence of local grassroots political organizations. In Hernández's example, MexicanAmerican and Puerto Rican artists, poets, and audiences cross neighborhood boundaries
and come together in public spaces such as the street, the community center, or the
neighborhood playground in order to participate in the unveiling of a mural or a street
poetry performance. As Hernández points out here, moreover, the cultural
event/performance draws the audience into what Simon Frith has described as "the
immediate experience of collective identity," an experience which for Hernández plays
an important role in transforming the political sphere ("Music and Identity" 121). It is
through the empathetic alliances formed between artists from these two communities,
between the artists and audience members, and between audience member and audience
member that individuals begin to imagine a provisional collective identity and construct
viable political coalitions.
Ethnomusicologists and cultural studies scholars such as Simon Frith, Martin
Stokes, and Mayra Santos Febres have written extensively on music's ability to transform
public spaces and disrupt normal social processes. 1 While Stokes locates this subversive
quality in the way that sound fills physical space, both Frith and Santos privilege the
participatory nature of the performance. In "Salsa as Translocation," for instance, Santos
defines salsa music as subversive because it is an improvisational, participatory musical
form, one that breaks down the boundaries between poet and audience, self and other.
She writes, "Salsa is a participatory musical genre; it resists the binarisms of
audience/artists, performers/consumers, founder/follower, subject/object. It privileges
both continuity and rupture, order and hazard, sequence and simultaneity" (176-177).
Frith's essay, on the other hand, focuses on how a collective identity-in-process is
constructed via the musical event. Looking at a variety of popular musics, he states that
1 See, for instance, Martin Stokes's introduction to Ethnicity, Identity, and Music, Simon
Frith's essay "Music and Identity," and Mayra Santos Febres's "Salsa as Translocation."
47
"[t]he experience of pop music is an experience of identity: in responding to a song, we
are drawn, haphazardly, into emotional alliances with the performers and with the
performers' other fans" ("Music and Identity" 121). According to Frith, moreover, these
provisional emotional alliances suggest new imagined communities, what he refers to as
"alternative modes of social interaction" (124). In these essays, both Frith and Santos
define the audience's response to the performance as a social movement of sorts. Through
collective and corporeal activities such as listening, singing along with the performers,
and dancing, the audience expresses what Frith calls "a real experience of what the ideal
could be" (123) and what Santos refers to as a sense of "peopleness" that is "larger than
national and broader than ethnic" (179).
This chapter takes its cue from these recent discussions of identity, community
formation, and musical performance and from Hernández's own writings on poetry, the
public sphere, and social change. In the pages that follow, I introduce the reader to
Hernández's thirty-year career as a community poet and performer. I also attempt to
address the political work that Hernández's poetry does. I place his poems within a
sociohistorical context that includes both his political activism and his role in the
development of a Puerto Rican poetic tradition on the mainland. I then discuss three
Street Sounds/Sonidas de la Calle performance poems: "Workers," "Roscoe Street," and
"Chitown Brown." Focusing on the poems' soundscape and the dialogic interaction
between performer and audience, I theorize the live performance as a political act, one
that exhorts its audience to attend to and be moved by what they hear. Before turing to
my analysis of these live performances, I would like to spend a few pages addressing
Hernández's poetry career.
48
Chicago's Unofficial Poet Laureate: David Hernández and
the Chicago Poetry Scene
As Chicago poets Marc Smith and Carlos Cumpían have pointed out, David
Hernández has been integral to the establishment of both a viable Latino political and arts
scene and the renaissance of the local poetry scene. 2 [Click for Appendix A: David
Hernández Bibliography, Discography, and Videography 1971-2000] Hernández is a
contemporary of Nuyorican poets such as Miguel Piñero, Pedro Pietri, and Sandra María
Esteves. He was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico, on May 1, 1946 and arrived in Chicago with
his family in 1955 at the height of Puerto Rican migration to the mainland. 3 Like these
early Nuyorican poets, he came of age as a poet during the social and political unrest of
the late 1960s. And, like their poetry, his continues to be influenced by personal and
familial experiences of migration and cultural displacement. Hernández addresses the
intersection of the personal and the political in his poetry in the preface to his 1991
collection Rooftop Piper, when he writes:
I grew up here.
I know the streets like the back of a passenger's head on the
subway train. I have tasted the freshly-killed animal anger that
periodically implodes upon seeing a street survivor sleeping in a
2 Smith acknowledged Hernández's contributions to Chicago's performance poetry scene
in his introduction to End of a Decade/Beginning of What's to Follow Encore/Inception Slam
performance, July 17, 1996. Carlos Cumpían is a Chicano poet and founder of the Chicago-based
MARCH [Movimiento Artístico Chicano]/Abrazo Press. Cumpían commented on Hernández's
role in Chicago's Latino poetry movement at an August 1996 performance at the City of
Chicago's Poetry at the Beach series.
3 In Puerto Rican Chicago, sociologist Felix Padilla states that during the 1950s and
1960s, Puerto Ricans began migrating to Chicago in significant numbers and that between the
1960 and 1970 census, the number of Puerto Ricans living in Chicago more than doubled (from
32,371 to 78,963). Padilla goes on to theorize this drastic increases in migration to Chicago after
WWII as a result of Castle, Barton & Associates, a Chicago-based employment agency,
establishment of a branch office on the island. This office was opened at the behest of the Insular
Department of Labor in order to recruit Puerto Ricans as foundry workers and domestic laborers.
At the same time, according to Padilla, Puerto Rican migrants living in the older colonias in the
North East began to report back to family members on the island that there was a shortage of jobs
in New York, Newark and other Northeastern cities (see Padilla, Puerto Ricans in Chicago,
especially Chapters One and Two).
49
hallway under a newspaper blanket headlining the upside of the
economy. Maybe it's the memory of mami y papi struggling to pry
their children loose from a one and a half room, immigrant
apartment that makes me empathize with all the little great people
forever reminding me where I came from. Therefore, it's my
natural choice to write their story from the most intimate poem to a
class-action song of universal celebration. (n. pag.)
Like the Nuyorican poets, moreover, Hernández synthesizes English, Spanish,
and street language and records the experiences of this bilingual, bicultural community.
Poems such as "Me La Buscaré [I Will Find it Myself]," "New Town: A Tribute,"
"Immigrants," and "Tecata" use various combinations of English, Spanish, and Spanglish
to document the collective history of Chicago's marginalized populations--immigrant
families, the homeless, prostitutes, and drug addicts. In "Immigrants," for example,
Hernández juxtaposes English and Spanish and contrasts the (im)migrants' dream for a
better life with the eternal winter, concrete, and poverty that they find upon arrival in
Chicago:
They came to make money
rest, laugh, and yawn with
contented bellies
and dream in half-truths.
Llegaron a piés, en barco,
por trén y avión busando
la luz de esperánza sombrada,
encantádos con cuentos jámás realizádos.
Llegaron a trabajár ha pesár
de un invierno eterno, la apatía,
la indiferéncia y la pobresa
invadiendo una vida migrante,
extranjera y orgullosa.
Llegaron para enterrár
los sueños en concreto
y derramár lagrimas
en cuentas desconocidas.
[They arrived on foot, by boat,
by train and airplane looking for
hope's sheltering light,
enchanted by never-realized stories.
They arrived to work weighed down
by an eternal winter, the apathy,
indifference, and poverty
that invades a migrant life,
foreign and proud.
They arrived to bury
their dreams in concrete
50
and to spill tears
in unknown stories.]
They came in freshly cut green bunches
that ripened in dark basements
with linoleum floors, plastic covers
figurines and worn-out photographs
of youthful weddings.
They worked overtime for half pay
to put on layaway their son's
wheelchair and silver braces.
Becoming strangers to each other's faces,
they fulfilled the myth of countless others.
They departed.
Paying extra-flight baggage
for 30 years of arriving
while dreams flew by
on clouds where sky
greets infinity
and horizons are no more.
Where sky greets infinity
and horizons are no more.
(Rooftop Piper 16/Elvis Is Dead but at Least He's Not Gaining Any
Weight 15) 4
While the title of this poem suggests a larger, more universal theme, "Immigrants"
speaks primarily to the experiences of Puerto Rican migrants who travel back and forth
between the mainland and the island trying to get ahead economically. This poem
portrays the disparity between the migrants' hope for a better life and the reality of their
life as underpaid workers living in a Chicago tenement building. The poem's layout
performs the back-and-forth that typifies the fluid migration patterns between the
mainland and the island. It also contrasts the promise of the American Dream articulated
in the first stanza with the poverty, economic exploitation, and disease described in
stanzas two, four, and six. Throughout this poem, moreover, Hernández juxtaposes
English and Spanish and uses the syntactically parallel structure of the first five stanzas to
deconstruct the American Dream. The bilingual anaphora (They arrived/They
came/Llegaron/ Llegaron/Llegaron/They came) that runs throughout these stanzas
highlights the disparity between the immigrants' aspirations and the reality of their lives
4 I would like to thank Debbie Herman of the University of Iowa's College of Education
for her help with the translations in this chapter.
51
after their arrival in Chicago, as does the translinguistic pun of arriving-as-migration and
arriving-as-assimilation.
In more recent works, Hernández draws on his experiences with multiethnic
political and aesthetic organizations such as La Gente, the grassroots political coalition
that he co-founded with members of the Latin Eagles Organization, and El Taller, the
crosscultural arts workshop that he co-founded with Gamaliel Ramirez, Dean Karabastos,
Salima Rivera, and Cesar Quiñones. 5 He places Puerto Rico's struggle for independence
within the context of Civil Rights, the Black Power movement, and twentieth-century
Latin American liberation struggles and expresses a multiethnic, multinational political
consciousness. In poems such as "Martin and My Father" and "Elvis Is Dead but at Least
He's Not Gaining Any Weight," the title poem from his most recent chapbook, Hernández
addresses the similarities between the African-American and Puerto Rican communities
in Chicago. The autobiographical "Elvis Is Dead but at Least He's Not Gaining Any
5 An outgrowth of the Latin Eagles Organization and a member of the original Rainbow
Coalition, La Gente was affiliated with and shared the political philosophies of the Young Lords
Organization, the Young Patriots Organization, and the Black Panthers. Like these other political
organizations, La Gente ran a free breakfast program and organized community
outreach/education events. In a recent interview, Hernández reiterates the multiethnic nature of
this organization when he states:
La Gente came about when we took the Latin Eagles and they decided not to be
gang bangers any more. They changed their name to the Latin Eagle
Organization, the L.E.O., and for a few months that was good. But at that time,
the neighborhood where we lived in the Lakeview area was not just Puerto Rican,
it had also a poor white, a black, and an Asian community. So we changed our
name to La Gente, which means the people, because it was inclusive of the whole
community at that time. That's what we represented. . . . We had a Rainbow
Coalition even before Jesse Jackson came around with that concept. In Uptown
on Chicago's North Side, we had the Young Patriots, which was a young, white
militant group. Then we had La Gente in Lakeview, in our neighborhood, and we
had the Young Lords in the Lincoln Park area and the Black Panther Party on the
West and South Sides. (Interview with the author)
This description of the development of these political organizations is
corroborated in "Palante," a text written by the Young Lords Organization and initially
published in 1971. For a discussion of El Taller'shistory see, Goldman's article "Gamaliel
Ramirez: Twenty-five Years and Still Painting."
52
Weight," for instance, traces the emergence of a new racial consciousness in the late
1960s by cataloguing the changing attitudes toward kinky hair among Chicago's Puerto
Rican and African-American communities. Framed by Hernández's parodic reading of
Elvis as pop icon, this poem compares Elvis's arrival on the rock 'n' roll scene with
Operation-Bootstrap-era migrants' arrival on the mainland:
Elvis arrived on the scene around 1955
with straight, greasy hair and a loose
pompadour that got all shook up whenever
he rocked n' rolled. At the same time,
we Puerto Rican arrived in Chicago except
we weren't as big of a hit as Elvis was.
My brother Sam and his best friend Manuel
were miserable Spanglish teenagers who
looked like Elvis from the neck down
in their beltless blue jeans, white t-shirts
and the rebel snarl so common in 50's teenagers.
But unfortunately, their hair was too kinky
and wiry so they settled for a forelock they
trained to hang loose by clipping on a clothes pin
before going to bed at night.
Manuel and Sam hated George Perez and I
because we were their little brothers
and they had to take care of us outside.
George Perez and I had recently reconciled again
since the last time that my cousin Hector and I
hung him from the tree in the backyard alley
while playing Delone Ranger and it was George's
turn to be the bad guy. But after the last
spanking, we too wanted to be like Elvis
since it was safer than playing Delone Ranger.
It wasn't long before George Perez and I felt
as miserable as our teenage brothers because
our kinky hair refused to go straight.
We tried clothes pins, do-rags, brylcream hair-tonic,
lye, vinegar, Vaseline and nylon stocking
overnight skull caps hoping to wake up with straight
greasy hair just like Elvis had yet nothing really
worked. So we grew up hating our hair because it
was pasu hair, raisin hair, kinky hair, bad hair and as a result, we
didn't like ourselves too much either.
When the Beatles musically invaded America in the 60's,
they had long straight dry hair and Elvis was no
longer popular with the teenagers so he retreated
to Las Vegas, got high on prescription drugs, shot up
televisions and his snarl became a permanent
fixture on his face.
At the same time that Elvis faded away,
Black People began marching for freedom, embraced
53
their culture and gave pride to kinky, nappy hair
so that soon Afro hair-cuts became very fashionable.
Even white people wanted afros. They tried permanents,
jerry curls, spongecurls, Dippity-doo, curling irons,
hair pins, afro wigs but to no avail because they still
looked like Elvis from the hair-line down.
And something happened to Puerto Ricans like Manuel,
Sam, George, and me. We felt good about our hair.
We were proud of our kinky, raisin, pasu, bad hair
that refused to go straight. And after all those years
of shame we were a big hit with ourselves. We made it.
We had finally arrived.
So even though Elvis split the scene in an over-dose
of drugs, his rock and rolling love songs are now
part of fate. And all I can say is that Elvis is dead
but at least he's not gaining any weight.
(Elvis 33-34)
Like "Immigrants," "Elvis Is Dead" is narrated from the point of view of an adult
looking back on his childhood, and like "Immigrants," "Elvis" draws on personal
experience (the poem includes references to Hernández's older brother Sam and Sam's
friend Manuel Perez, both of whom appear in his poem "Workers" as well). This poem,
however, focuses primarily on issues of identity and identification, particularly on the
effects of popular culture images of physical attractiveness (white skin, straight hair) on
the young men and boys in Chicago's Puerto Rican community. As I've suggested above,
however, this poem is not only a testimonial to the privations faced by OperationBootstrap-era migrants. It also documents and celebrates the emergence of a shared
political consciousness around the Black Power movement and the role that a shared
aesthetics (in this case, hair styles) played in the development of this shared political
consciousness. In language that resonates with Kobena Mercer's discussion of the politics
of black hair styles, Hernández details the rise of a radical ethnic identity via the history
of the popular hair styles of 1950s through the 1960s--from Elvis's loose pompadour, to
The Beatles's "long, straight, dry hair," to the ascendancy of the Afro as signifier of the
Black is Beatiful movement. 6
6 See Kobena Mercer's "Black Hair/Style Politics," specifically pages 39-42.
54
In poems such as "Florencia," "Juan Valdez Speaks Out," "3rd World This," and
"Why I Don't Drive a Car," Hernández contextualizes discrimination against Puerto
Ricans on the mainland within the one-hundred-year history of American occupation of
the island and United States' ongoing political interference in Latin America and the
Caribbean. These poems address topics such as economic exploitation, American cultural
imperialism, and the portrayal of Latino/as in the American media. "Florencia" protests
the United States' continued colonization of Puerto Rico, Operation Bootstrap's effect on
the island economy, migration and the resulting disintegration of Puerto Rican culture,
and state-sponsored sterilization programs for Puerto Rican women in the 1950s. In this
poem, the story of Florencia's forced sterilization is an allegory for the exploitation and
destruction of the island's environment:
I will try to tell it
without remorse or
impassioned language
so you can hear it
deep in your heart forever.
My aunt Floréncia Marquéz
was 20 when she began working
for an American company in Puerto Rico.
The company was taking advantage of a
cheap-wage, tax-free economic program
called Operation Bootstrap created in the 50's
to get Puerto Ricans back in the work-force
after having their agricultural jobs
eliminated by industry.
My aunt Floréncia Marquéz
had river-green eyes and
mountain-brown skin.
Sometimes the women who worked
for the company would take maternity-leaves
and the officials did not like this.
So Operation Bootstrap implemented an
island-wide sterilization program since
it was cheaper than day-care centers.
The women would go to the hospital,
give birth and have their fallopian tubes tied
in the process without their consent.
This was done to my aunt
after my cousin Anita was born
and after grieving for awhile,
my aunt went back to work.
She eventually saved money,
55
moved to Chicago and got a better job.
My cousin Anita and I grew up together
on the city's north-side.
Around 1962 when Anita was sixteen,
she got pregnant and died from a coat-hanger
operation because abortions were illegal
at the time.
She had river-green eyes
and mountain-brown skin.
After grieving for awhile
my aunt returned to Puerto Rico
where Anita was buried and went
back to work for the same company
that sterilized her years before.
My aunt Floréncia Marquéz is an old woman now
who enjoys the island breezes from her
rocking chair on the verandah.
But if you place your ear
close to her chest,
You can hear the ocean like a
hollow seashell on the sand.
I have nothing more to say.
(Elvis 18-20)
In this poem, as in "Immigrants" and "Elvis Is Dead but at Least He Isn't Gaining
Any Weight," Hernández draws on personal and familial experiences and documents the
collective history of the displaced jíbaro community on the mainland and the island.
Throughout this poem, moreover, Hernández compares the effects of gender oppression,
economic exploitation, and the destruction of the agricultural-based economy of the
island's interior on this community. As the descriptions of Florencia's and Anita's
physical appearance--their "river-green eyes" and "mountain-brown skin"--suggest, their
story is the story of the island. As such, the poem's detailing of Florencia's forced
sterilization and Anita's death from an illegal abortion are not only testimonials to the
violence these two women experienced. These events also reference the destruction of the
island's environment by American industry.
The final point I'd like to make about "Florencia" has to do with the relationship
between the act of listening and empathy. Like Patricia Smith's "Reconstruction" and
"Undertaker," which are discussed in the following chapter, this poem draws the
reader/auditor in and places her in the position of witness to the violence that the poem
56
describes. Hernández opens this poem with a reference to the poem as a means for
establishing a connection between poet and reader/auditor: he is telling this story so that
the reader/auditor "can hear it/deep in [her] heart forever." In this opening stanza,
Hernández insists on the act of speaking--in this case telling this story--as a means for
establishing a sort of solidarity with his reader/auditor. He calls on us to take this poem in
and to be moved by the events he describes. Keeping in mind this connection between
poetic witnessing, audition, and empathy, I would like to turn now to a discussion of
Hernández's work with Street Sounds/Sonidas de la Calle, the salsa-poetry conjunto that
he founded in 1972.
David Hernández, Street Sounds, and Cross-Cultural
Coalition Building
I came from a street background. My poetry reflects that. Twenty
years ago I wanted to bring poetry out of the wine and cheese
crowd, bring it to the streets, to the public. I've been pretty
successful so far.
-David Hernández, 1993
Hernández's thirty-year career with Street Sounds/Sonidas de la Calle exemplifies
what Paul Gilroy and Stephen Nathan Haymes have defined as the intersection between
expressive cultures, geographical place, and liberatory politics in urban social
movements. 7 Street Sounds is an outgrowth of Hernández's work as Minister of
Information for La Gente. The poetry-music ensemble was founded in 1971 at a street
festival on Roscoe and Halsted Streets--literally right down the block from the storefront
that served as La Gente's headquarters. Like the poetry slam and other community-based
poetry movements, Street Sounds has taken poetry from the elite spaces of the university,
the museum, and the gallery--the wine and cheese crowd in the above epigraph--into the
7 See, for instance, Stephen Nathan Haymes's Race, Culture, and the City or Gilroy's
There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, especially "Diaspora, Utopia, and the Critique of
Capitalism" and "Conclusion: Urban Social Movements, 'Race,' and Community."
57
city's neighborhood bars and cafes, public schools and community centers, street festivals
and political rallies. Over the past three decades, the ensemble has performed at such
major civic events as the City of Chicago's sesquicentennial (where they performed
before an audience of 1.1 million), Mayor Washington's second inauguration,
Washington's funeral in November 1987, the 1988 Neutral Turf Poetry Festival, and the
city's 1990 Poem for Osaka contest. 8 They have also performed and at small clubs and
bars throughout the city, including the Get Me High, the jazz club where early slam poets
such as Marc Smith, Michael Brown, Patricia Smith, and Jean Howard began their
careers. 9
Street Sounds/Sonidas de la Calle is loosely based on the traditional salsa
conjunto ensemble. Like the typical conjunto, Street Sounds synthesizes Latin American
and Afro-diasporic musical forms and performs the experience of translocation, nostalgia,
and cultural syncretization that typifies the day-to-day life of post-Operation Bootstrap
Puerto Ricans in urban centers on the mainland and the island. 10 In performance, this
poetry-music ensemble incorporates standard English, Spanish, Spanglish, and street
English and a variety of musical forms, including blues, gospel, Afro-Latin music, Nuevo
Cancion (a Latin-Caribbean musical form associated with Central American liberationist
8 A favorite of Mayor Harold Washington and of the City of Chicago's Office of Special
Events, there was some discussion of making Hernández the city's official poet laureate in the
mid-1980s, an initiative that died down after Washington's death. Recently, there has been
renewed discussion about bestowing this title on Hernández. For descriptions of Hernández's
performances at the city's sesquicentennial and at Washington's funeral, see Barbara Brotman's
"City's Unofficial Poet Chronicles It All."
9 For a more in-depth discussion of role of the poetry events at the Get Me High Lounge
and the Poem for Osaka Contest in the development of Chicago's performance poetry scene, see
Kurt Heintz's An Incomplete History of the Slam.
10 I would like to thank Batya Goldman for suggesting this connection to me in a
November 11, 1998, phone conversation. For a more in-depth discussion of the cultural and
political roots of salsa see A. G. Quintero-Rivera's Music Social Classes, and the National
Question of Puerto Rico, Mayra Santos Febres "Salsa as Translocation," and Hernando Calvo
Ospina's Salsa! Havana Heat, Bronx Beat.
58
political movements), and the rock and folk music of the 1960s. Throughout their
performances, Hernández and Street Sounds tune to the sounds heard on the street
corners and front stoops of the Lakeview and Humboldt Park neighborhoods of Chicago
and re-sound the city's aurally rich and culturally diverse soundscape. In this heterotopic
juxtaposition and mixing, this re-sounding of the amalgamation cultures and languages
that typify these neighborhoods, Street Sounds simultaneously records the collective
history of the Puerto Rican community in Chicago and gives voice to a locally situated
crosscultural identity-in-the-making. 11
In Hernández's performance poem "Workers," the soundscape of the poem
functions as an extratextual narrative, a poetic analogue to what Paul Gilroy has theorized
as the "beyond words" in Afro-diasporic musics (Union Jack 159). Hernández has
described "Workers" as a biography of his parents' lives right after they moved to
Chicago from Puerto Rico, and, like "Immigrants" or "Florencia," this poem draws on
Hernández's family history. The poem is written in free verse and narrated from the point
of view of an adult looking back on childhood memories of his parents and older brother.
Hernández published a shorter version of this poem in his 1991 collection, Rooftop Piper.
In performance, the poem, which roughly follows the tripartite form of traditional salsa
song, is transformed into a polyvocal testimonial to the experiences of the Puerto Rican
diaspora in Chicago. While the published version of the poem begins with the second
stanza, Hernández's performance follows the formal structure of a conventional salsa
composition. It opens with a spoken/chanted stanza which functions like the inspiracion
or head in a salsa composition by introducing the poem's main theme. The poem then
moves into the soneo, the longer, often improvised, middle section of a salsa song. Like
11 In "Of Other Places," Michele Foucault defines a heterotopia as a countercultural site
in which "all the other real sites that can be found within the culture . . . are simultaneously
represented, contested, and introverted" (24).
59
the traditional salsa composition, the poem ends with the instrumental salsa descargas
(an improvised jam session which revisits the musical themes introduced in the
inspiracion and soneo). 12
Throughout this poetry-salsa hybrid, Hernández takes on a collective voice. He
chants/speaks the lyrics in an irregular trimeter and tetrameter variation--a metrical form
that suggests the clave beat of Afro-Latin musics such as the rumba, the mambo, and the
cumbia. He speaks across historical eras and national identities and documents the history
of the Puerto Rican diaspora in Chicago. While the inspiracion is spoken from the point
of view of a recently-migrated parent, the majority of the soneo is performed from a point
of view of an adult reflecting on his family's past. Towards the end of the soneo, the
poetic voice shifts again and Hernández speaks from the point of view of his older
brother and his brother's friend before slipping back into the adult/narrator voice. [Click
for Video File 1. David Hernández and Street Sounds: "Workers"]:
In los estados/the states/
there are rice and beans for my children,
more so than before,
while love and tears freeze in the city.
My children go to good schools,
are healthy, no hookworms, swelling bellies.
And I work hard. I don't like the snow.
Naked trees,
street cars,
people with cold hearts.
A sad landscape.
Soon, palm trees will gently sway
under wind and sun.
I look at the garbage can in the alley
behind the gray tavern, silently,
with fears I never knew before.
Thinking then I knew life.
In los estados there is money.
[juega!]
Papi worked hard in the factory
for twenty-five years he worked
12 For a more developed discussion of the formal aspects of salsa, see Quintero-Rivera's
Music, Social Classes, and The National Question of Puerto Rico and Calvo's Salsa! Havana
Heat, Bronx Beat.
60
leaving his drop of sweat
deeper than the ocean.
He would replenish his dream,
wipe off the sense of not belonging,
and think of mami
on the other side of town
working in the hospital
cleaning bedpans
with full-strength ammonia
and Ajax for institutional use only
and made beds with fresh sheets
while the old people
saw her as an angel of mercy
who understood their pain
and she would smile a soothing smile
that word got round that she was a soft touch
because she shed real tears when anyone
left the hospital
and they loved her mucho
because she would talk
of her oldest son
who woke up at five in the morning
before going to Waller High School
and sweep and mop floors
for a company around Fullerton and Sheffield
and how he would give her
ten dollars a week
to help out with groceries
and keep enough for the movies on Saturday,
him and Manuel Perez,
who also worked hard,
but they were bold
and dared to ask,
Is this the way forever?
Something better's got to give.
Something better's got to give.
Something better's got to give.
Something better's got to give.
As they watched all the upheaval
and drama on the screen
but the movie was way deep inside their hearts,
especially the ending,
where all the badness got blown apart,
and they left the theater
real happy and full of hope.
That cold day of 1959
was never the same again,
was never the same again.
61
[juega!]
(Performance 1990, my italics) 13
The ensemble synthesizes Hernández's bilingual lyrics with a musical score that is
part blues, part salsa, and performs the anguish associated with the experience of
migration and cultural dislocation. The instrumentals that open the performance
simultaneously re-sound the ambient noise of urban Chicago and the island. This
complex matrix of sounds suggests the experience of living in both cultures at once and
belonging in neither. The woodwinds and the repetitive one/two beat on the woodblock
mimics tropical birds, the coqui (a frog that is indigenous to Puerto Rico), the ticking of a
clock, and a factory whistle. The rainstick in the melodic bridge between the two stanzas
references indigenous, pre-Columbian musical traditions. Through a performative
synaesthesia of sorts, the instrumentals contrast the aural environments of Puerto Rico
and Chicago and perform the cultural displacement expressed in the poem's lyrics.
Throughout this particular performance, moreover, Street Sounds' musical
accompaniment documents an extratextual history of the experience of migration to the
mainland by sounding the ineffable--the parent's nostalgia for the island, the brother's
desire for something better, the narrator's pain at remembering his parents' suffering. The
soundscape of this poem contexualizes the experiences of Hernández's family and, by
extension, the Puerto Rican community in Chicago within the history of other diaspora
communities' experiences of cultural dislocation and loss. The ensemble incorporates a
number of musical forms that are the result of exile, migration, and cultural syncretism.
By quoting from and synthesizing the Afro-Latin clave beat, flamenco, and the blues, the
band sonically references events such as the middle passage, the Great Migration of
13 The transcription above is based on a 1990 performance at the Edge of the
Lookingglass, a Chicago performance venue. The line breaks, spacing, and italics above are my
own and are my attempt to transcribe how the poem sounds in performance. I've transcribed all of
the performance poems discussed in this chapter in this manner.
62
Southern blacks to cities in the North, and the expulsion of Moors and gypsies from
Andalusia during the inquisition.
"Roscoe Street," Hernández's 1973 poetic portrait of the Lakeview street that he
grew up on, exemplifies what I have referred to above as the relationship between
geographical place, ethnic identity, and discursive space in his work. Roscoe Street is the
Chicago street from which La Gente's newsletter The Roscoe Street Blues took its name.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was the heart of political and cultural activity in
the primarily Puerto Rican, working-class community on Chicago's North Side. 14 Over
the past twenty years, this area has been gentrified and the working-class families who
lived there in the 1960s and 70s have been replaced by upscale boutiques, restaurants,
and bars that cater to thirty-something (primarily white) urban professionals. Like other
poems Hernández has written about the Lakeview neighborhood, this poem celebrates the
neighborhood's street culture while protesting gentrification and the ensuing displacement
of the community that once lived there. 15
A version of "Roscoe Street" was published as a prose poem in both Rooftop
Piper and Elvis Is Dead. However, Hernández continues to revise and rewrite the
performance version of this poem, cutting and adding lines and stanzas and/or
improvising new endings based on the themes of other poems included in the evening's
performance, the ethnic and socioeconomic background of the audience, and the location
of the venue. In other words, how this poem sounds is influenced by the context in which
14 For a discussion of the Puerto Rican community in Lakeview, see Felix Padilla's
Puerto Rican Chicago.
15 See for instance, his 1972 poem, "New Town: A Tribute," which was republished in
U-Direct #2/3, and "Armitage Street," which was published in Elvis Is Dead. For further
discussion of the effect of gentrification on Chicago's Puerto Rican communities, see Hernández's
Brown Baggitt column, "Oh-Oh! There Goes the Neighborhood" and his 1992 poem, "Ode to
Wicker Park: Or, I'm Gentrifying Myself." In these two works, he directly addresses the
gentrification of Chicago's West Town (Wicker Park and Humboldt Park) and suggests ways that
the Mexican and Puerto Rican communities to organize and oppose this process.
63
it is being performed. 16 In the following version of this poem, for instance, Hernández
cuts two stanzas from the 1991 and 1995 published versions of this poem. In the tradition
of a good sonero, he improvises the final stanza, which functions as the verbal equivalent
of the typically instrumental salsa descargas. This particular performance was preceded
by a poetry reading at which Hernández read from his 1995 collection Elvis Is Dead But
At Least He's Not Gaining Any Weight and Batya Goldman Hernández read from her
collection Black Sheep: The Collective. "Roscoe Street" was the fourth poem in a
performance set that focused primarily on poetic portraits of Chicago's borderland
neighborhoods and the "little great people" who inhabit them. Other poems performed
that evening included "La Calle/The Streets"; "Miss Patches and Lotion, Friday Night
Good Time Lady," a poem about a prostitute on Chicago's north side; "Rooftop Piper,"
which is dedicated to Kenny Serritos, a Chicano poet and the original saxophone player
for Street Sounds who died of cancer in the mid-1980s. [Click for Audio File 2. David
Hernández and Street Sounds: "Roscoe Street"]:
You walk down Roscoe Street
between Halsted and Broadway
and it's a world by itself, man.
I mean early in the morning
when the summer sun is waking up to the yawns of the trees
and Jim Johnston is dreaming that he turned into a basketball.
There's a certain smell to Roscoe Street.
It's all rice and beans,
wine and reefer,
dog-drops, Roscoe play-lot, courtyard lawns
and Steve's pickled herring that keeps him awake
16 Hernández's composition and revision process directly contradicts Maria Damon's
claims regarding the relationship between publishing and performance in postliterate poetries in
her essay "Was That 'Different,' 'Dissident', or 'Dissonant'? Poetry (n) the Public Spear: Slams,
Open Readings, and Dissident Traditions." In this essay, Damon writes, "The question of whether
to publish arises for slammers and oral poets. Like Nagy's medieval trouvères ("discovers") their
work ends when something is definitively cast in print; and there's a reasonable desire to forestall
closure on the creative process: invention and reinvention, improvisation, performance,
competition, and other interactive modes" (336). Hernández's continuing improvisation on and
revision of this performance piece over the past twenty-five years as well as his publication of
different versions of the poem in different collections of his work suggests that Hernández sees
publication as a continuation of the performance process rather than a foreclosing of it.
64
so he can write and hear the city sounds.
Roscoe's a different trip, man.
You walk to the Del-Mar Apartments,
stand underneath the second floor window,
look up and yell
Americo! AMERICO!
and a head will pop out with an Afro ten feet high,
"What the hell do you want?"
as he throws the key to the main door downstairs."
Some coffee man!"
Americo's been doing a thing with his binoculars again.
He calls it getting to know the community.
But a lot of people would blush if they knew what he saw.
But that's Americo, Jack.
It's afternoon on Roscoe Street.
Now you feel the wine and summer heat,
listen to radio music,
chump change,
and the voices of Roscoe street people
Bobby, Marcia, Molly, Eddie, Jackie, Davie, Steve.
Judy, Tommy, Sally, Tony, Jesse, Fletcher, Casey,
Alex, Damaris, Clarence, Americo, Mac, Marie, and Melvin.
All freaking out, all freaking out
the slow-moving cop car with their knowing smiles.
Roscoe's a new world, man.
Time, time fades lazily with the day
and the houses change colors as evening sets in.
You're feeling so good now,
you're feeling so good now
that you swear you saw a line of cucarachas
on the sidewalk with their belongings.
All mumbling and grumbling.
All moving out because their apartments got renovated
and they can't stand that health food those new tenants eat.
"Where's the rice and beans, man? I don't know"
You see Roscoe, Roscoe is tar buildings,
winos, old people, and children,
conga drums and poets, painters and readers,
workers and those who think about it,
cats and dogs and old newspapers.
While in the darkness, in the darkness,
when silhouettes dress the rustling trees
and noises have changed into quite murmur,
you realize why Roscoe Street is.
Roscoe Street is everything you want it to be or dream about.
Good night man.
Take it easy.
I'm gonna hang out at Batya's house tonight.
Take it slow.
Hey let's go have some spaghetti over at Sara's house.
Not too soon, baboon.
After supper.
(Performance 1995)
65
In this blues-inspired poem, Hernández and Street Sounds use what George
Lipsitz has described as the "shared cultural space" of the performance to reclaim this lost
public space and the community that inhabited it (6). In performance, this poem functions
as a means for creating empathetic alliances between the audience and the Roscoe Street
people who inhabit the poem. Hernández describes this poem as taking people back to the
Roscoe Street of his youth, as "bring[ing] the audience down the street in the morning
and bring[ing] them back in the evening" (Performance 1995). Hernández and the band
use the performance to transform the venue into Roscoe Street as it existed twenty-five
years ago. Like the cataloguing of sights, smells, and sounds in the poem's lyrics, the
soundscape of the poem--the conversation between the poem's narrator and Americo, the
conversation between the displaced cockroaches, the snippets of conversation in the last
stanza, the congas, and the guitar riffs--recreates the voices and sounds of Roscoe Street
within the temporal and spatial boundaries of the live performance.
During the performance, moreover, Hernández and Street Sounds use the
soundscape of the poem to construct a crosscultural provisional community. The
audience is surrounded by the sounds of Roscoe Street, from the exchanges between
Roscoe Street's residents to the dense sibilants in the poem's sixth stanza that perform the
evening's rustling trees and quite murmurs. Likewise, in the final stanza of the poem
Hernández improvises a conversation between the "Roscoe Street people" and the, in this
case, primarily Anglo, college-age audience members. In doing so, he collapses the
distance between contemporary audiences and the Roscoe Street community of twentyfive years ago. In this vocal equivalent of the salsa descargas, Hernández places the
audience in dialogue with this community. He includes references to audience members
from this particular performance in the final stanza of the poem, including his wife Batya
Goldman Hernández and Sara Harrison, the president of the Hispanic Student's
Association at Hope College and the emcee of the evening's performance and creates a
66
new imagined community--one that embraces performer and audience, Anglo and Latino,
past and present.
Because it so clearly expresses what Mayra Santos Febres has defined as the
disruptive quality of salsa music, I would like to end with a close reading/audition of a
live performance of "Chi-Town Brown" from David Hernández's and Street Sounds' 1998
Valentine's Day performance at The Note, a jazz club in Chicago's Wicker Park. Unlike
the two poems discussed above, "Chi-Town Brown" currently exists only as a
performance piece, although it is likely that a version of it will be published in
Hernández's forthcoming collected works. In it, Hernández returns to his salsa roots--like
"Workers" it more or less follows a traditional salsa formula--and experiments with
synthesizing his lyrics with the more layered sound of a salsa conjunto. "Chi-Town
Brown" was the third poem in a seven-poem set that focused primarily on familial and
romantic love. The set included "Chicago Revolu/Jam," "Random Love," "Mean Wife
Blues," "Por Hecharmelas de Concinero--Pensado en Mami/Playing Sorcerer in the
Kitchen--Thinking of Mom," and "Un Buqúe de Flores," a poem dedicated to his wife.
Like "Workers," "Immigrants," or "Florencia," this poem is a testimonial to the soulcrushing living and working conditions that confront a majority of the poor and workingclass Puerto Ricans living in Chicago. Hernández juxtaposes images of industrial
Chicago with those of a rural Puerto Rico and compares the migrants' hopes and dreams
prior to migration to the poverty and despair that they face once they arrive in the city. He
posits the poem as a counterpublic discourse, one that challenges the picture a civic
harmony and prosperity that the politicians advance. He exhorts his audience to listen
while he protests the poverty, the drug use, and the mistreatment by the welfare system
that is endemic throughout the Puerto Rican community. At the same time, it is a love
poem to the city that Hernández has lived in most of his life [Click for Audio File 3.
David Hernández and Street Sounds: "Chi-Town Brown"]:
67
Chi-Town Brown!
I am Chi-Town Brown!
I am parent dreams of maletas/card board suitcases
The tropical faces United Airlines brings
To hope-dealer Chi-Town, to factory-life Chi-Town
And winterized and unrealized pain.
I wear survival on my shoulders like a mad dog.
I am Chi-Town Brown!
I am black, I am white, I am red, the rainbow
Underground found in utopia speeches
The political leeches talk about
While my tears and shouts melt in their lies
While Mami y Papi beg to survive, while this anger
And hate has no limit and knows no bound
I am Chi-Town Brown!
Stay alive coño!
Don't let him pluck at your nerves!
Be hard! Be bad! Have no pity for a man-city
Where children's games is to name their addictions
When their veins become a golf course for the needle's
Conviction that it is a god! Listen to me! Listen to me!
Can't you see so long ago I could laugh with rice and beans
As my words en español! As my being era boricua!
As my being was unmachined! & my feeling eran healthy
And my thoughts eran wealthy! Dedicated to the love
The small town that gave me birth!
I am Chi-Town Brown!
I am the phenomenae!
The question-mark on the welfare application
When you realize with slow hesitation
That I live! That I am proud! That you will see me!
That I am of this! First a human!
First Boricua! A tropic Rican!
The primary Mohican pioneering new love!
I am Chi-Town Brown! Chi-Town Brown!
(Performance 1998) 17
In "Chi-Town Brown," Hernández and his ensemble sound what Josh Kun has
theorized as the audiotopic potential in diasporic musics, the ineffable ability of the
musical performance to create "spaces where cultures can be both contested and
consolidated, both sounded and silenced" (288). The use of internal rhyme in the repeated
phrase "I am Chi-Town brown" yokes geographical location to ethnicity and articulates
what Santos has described as the "translocal" hybrid identity that results from migration
17 Unlike the other two poems, this poem is transcribed from Hernández's score for this
Feb. 14, 1998 performance.
68
and cultural mixing. 18 Chi-Town Brown is one of Hernández's poetic personae. He is a
composite character, a poetic everyman who follows in the tradition of Langston
Hughes's Jesse B. Simple. References to Chi-Town Brown or his close relation Brown
Baggitt show up throughout Hernández's poetry and essays. His 1991 collection Rooftop
Piper included a poem titled "Words by Chi-Town Brown" and from 1995 to 1996 he
published a series of Brown Baggitt essays in Mary Kuntz Press's U-Direct arts and
poetry 'zine. While both these characters reference a radical pan-Latino ethnic identity, a
brown pride of sorts, "Chi-Town Brown" suggests an ethnic consciousness that is specific
to Chicago's Puerto Rican community.
Throughout this performance, moreover, Hernández and Street Sounds juxtapose
Spanish, Taíno, and English words with an Afro-Latin clave beat and a blues guitar solo.
This linguistic and musical fusion simultaneously performs the history of Puerto Rican
colonization and migration and celebrates an emergent hybrid identity--La Raza Cósmica
that Hernández references at the beginning of the second stanza--that results from this
process. 19 In phrases such as "my being era Boricua," "First Boricua! A tropic Rican,"
and "my words en español," precolonial and colonial languages jostle up against one
another, collide, and fuse, performing at the level of language both the cultural and
18 For a discussion of how salsa music constructs this translocal identity, see page 180 of
Santos's essay, "Salsa as Translocation."
19 The term La Raza Cósmica--"the universal race"--was coined by Mexican educator
José Vasconcelos to explain the hybrid "race" and culture that resulted from the mixing of
indigenous peoples with the Spanish conquistadors and African slaves in the Caribbean and Latin
America as a result of Spanish colonization. It also suggests or points to the cultural hybridity of
the conquistadors who colonized the new world, many of whom were from Andalusia and were
expelled from Spain as a result of the inquisition. The term is often used by Latino/a intellectuals
to describe an ethnic identity that is always-already hybrid and to place the continuing cultural
mixing that results from (im)migration to the U.S. and American cultural imperialism within a
historical context. For a brief overview of the concept of La Raza Cósmica, see Victor Hernandez
Cruz's "Some Thoughts as We Approach the 500th Anniversary of the Discovery of the
Americas."
69
linguistic mixing heard in Chicago's borderland communities. 20 The musical
accompaniment--a blues/salsa fusion performed in a minor key--emphasizes the
desperation portrayed in the lyrics, as does the electronically reverberated violin solo that
sounds like a wailing human voice. The use of percussion instruments such as the claves
and the congas and the referencing of salsa and other Afro-Caribbean musical forms
simultaneously sounds the linguistic and cultural assimilation that results from migration
to mainland cities such as Chicago, New York, and Newark.
At the same time, the anaphoric chorus, the "I am Chi-Town Brown" that
punctuates this poem, suggests a collective identity-in-process, one that comes into being
in the time/space of the live performance. I am not arguing for Hernández's performance
as enacting an erasure of ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic difference (it is clear that the
poetic persona speaks out of a specific history of colonization and oppression). Rather,
that the way that the juxtaposition and mixing of languages and musics in this
performance enacts something similar to the movement across boundaries between
neighborhoods and ethnic communities that Hernández describes above. At the
performance I attended, the audience members were transformed into active participants
in the performance and were, in effect, drawn into what Simon Frith has called "affective
emotional alliances" with the Hernández and his band as well as with other audience
members. Hernández invited a young woman who was an ex-student of his up on the
stage to perform her poetry between the ensemble's sets and encouraged audience
members to sing along, keep time on beer bottles and cocktail glasses, and grab partners
and hit the dance floor. As such, Hernández and his ensemble called on those of us there
that evening to be collectively moved by the performance and construct new ways of
interacting with one another. As we simultaneously chanted the line "I am Chi-Town
20 A "Boricua" is a citizen of Boriquen, the Taíno word for the island of Puerto Rico. It is
also marker of identity favored by supporters of the independence movement.
70
Brown," as we tapped our feet or "salsaed" across the dance floor, we were enacting the
politically charged moment of mutual recognition and empathy--the "Hey, we're basically
the same" that Hernández identifies in the passage at the beginning of this chapter.
"Chi-Town Brown," like performance poems such as "Workers" and "Roscoe
Street," reflects what Hernández has described as the poet's mandate to transcend the
boundaries of race, class, gender, and ethnicity and transform the public sphere. In a 1997
interview, Hernández addressed this mandate when he stated:
There have always been lines that divide people. There's race, age,
sex, class. For me, as a poet, the artistic community has always
been the one that explores different concepts. It's the practice of
the artist to go beyond the lines of race and age and so forth.
(Interview with the author)
Like Marc Smith, Patricia Smith, and Bob Holman, Hernández insists on the
transformational power of this vernacular, community-based performance form. And like
these other community poets, his work demands that we rethink the cultural and political
relevance of poetry. In the fusion of languages and musics, the improvisational back and
forth between the poet and the musicians on stage, and the dialogic interaction between
poet and audience, Hernández and his ensemble call on us to be moved by the music, to
take in the lyrics and the rhythms, and imagine the collective identities that are formed as
a result of these musical and linguistic border crossings.
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CHAPTER THREE
"HEARING BETWEEN THE LINES": PERFORMANCE AND A
POETICS OF WITNESS IN PATRICIA SMITH'S CLOSE TO DEATH
I have a twenty-year-old son. At the time I wrote Close to Death,
he was sixteen. I wrote the book because I wanted to feel what it
was like to be black and male in America. Of course, I'll never
know but I wanted to get as close as I could, so I could help him
deal with his problems from an informed point of view. Every year
a statistic comes out that says, "A black male child born in this
year will not live as long as a white male child born this year."
Same statistic comes out every year, and reporters go rushing into
the black community, run up to the first available black man they
see and ask "Howdoesthismakeyoufeel?" What a ludicrous
question. So I decided to take my tape recorder and just talk to as
many black men as possible, just about living. I talked to the
undertaker, the street kid. When the story had run, I still had all
these voices on tape and running around in my head. I wanted to
go deeper somehow. . . . I wanted my son, my son's friends,
anyone who read or heard the poems to say, "Damn, somebody's
watching this shit. Somebody's listening, somebody's hearing."
--Patricia Smith, Interview with the author, 1997
Close to Death, Patricia Smith's most recent collection of poems, exemplifies the
melding of the performative and the political that David Hernández and Marc Smith call
for in their interviews, essays, and manifestoes. In this collection, Smith bears witness to
the violence and nihilism that urban, working-class black men face daily. In the
collection's prelude Smith emphasizes the oral dimension of these poems. She defines the
text as a "a love song, an elegy, a dirge, a celebration. . . . a scream, a whisper, a giggle, a
sigh" (4). Throughout the poems included here Smith takes on the voices of her father,
her son, the performer Little Richard, a prisoner in Massachusetts's Walpole Prison, Mike
Tyson, Miles Davis, an undertaker, and a gangbanger, to name a few. Many of the poems
included in the collection were inspired by Smith's recorded conversations with men from
the Roxbury, Mattapan, and Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston, and throughout these
poems she attempts to recreate these conversations, capturing the rhythm and diction of
these interviews on the page. As with the newspaper interviews that inspired this series of
poems, Smith weaves together a range of discursive forms and inserts black voices into
72
the news media's discussions and analysis of the annual statistics regarding the escalating
mortality rates within the African-American community.
Throughout Close to Death, Smith articulates an oppositional discursive space,
one that draws on African-American expressive forms, the poetry slam, and newspaper
stories, in order to bear witness to contemporary African-American urban experiences.
The poems in this collection articulate a transgressive counterpoetics, one that references
blues, jazz, Motown, signifying, and religious witnessing and speaks of the contemporary
urban black experience. In this chapter I return to some of the questions I raised in earlier
chapters regarding the relationship between performance poetry, vernacular tradition, and
community. I look at the relationship between Smith's hybrid poetic practice and other
black expressive forms and focus on how her performances of these poems give voice to
a communal counternarrative. To that end, I include close readings/auditions of live
performances of two poems included Close to Death--"Reconstruction" and
"Undertaker." Focusing on Smith's use of rhythm, the voice, and poetic devices such as
anaphora, repetition, alliteration, and rhyme, I argue that the public performance of these
poems speaks of a poetic witnessing beyond language, one that exhorts the auditor to
hear between the lines.
Born and raised on Chicago's West Side, Smith began both her journalistic and
poetic careers there. 1 Smith's poetic career began, appropriately enough, when she was
1 Smith began her career as a reporter while working at the now-defunct Chicago Daily
News in the mid-1970s. After the Daily News folded in 1978, she took a position as an
entertainment writer for the Chicago Sun-Times. In 1990, Smith became an arts and entertainment
critic at the Boston Globe. She later moved to the Living/Arts Section, where she wrote primarily
about black culture. She also wrote for the Globe's metro, op-ed, and national pages and has
covered national and international news stories like the Clinton inauguration, the first Urban
Peace and Justice Summit, the uprising that followed the Rodney King verdict, and the 1994
South African elections. In June 1998, Smith who was the first African-American woman to have
a bi-weekly column in the Globe, resigned amid charges that she had falsified information in her
columns. Reactions to her resignation have varied. Ken Sanes's article "The Boston Globe,
Patricia Smith, Mike Barnicle, Alan Dershowitz, and the Media," for instance, expresses selfrighteous indignation toward Smith for her transgression. As Bob Holman's "Patricia Smith,
Journalism & Poetry: Shall We Mediate on the Truth?" illustrates, however, the slam poetry
73
assigned to cover Chicago's first Neutral Turf Poetry Festival for the Chicago Sun-Times
in the winter of 1987. 2 At the encouragement of Marc Smith she began performing her
poems at the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill, and by 1988 Smith was Chicago's
reigning slam diva. Like the other community poets discussed in this study, Smith is part
performer and poet and part cultural ambassador. Smith's work as a poet and a slam
master (one of the founders and guiding forces behind the Slam Family Collective)
reflects both her proselytizing zeal and her desire to construct the slam as an oppositional,
crosscultural poetry movement, one that challenges and critiques what she has referred to
as the "poetry status quo." In her two manifesto-style articles on the slam, "Chicago
Poetry: It Ain't for Sissies" and "Slamming: Shaking Up New England's Poetry World,"
Smith defines the slam as a performance form that explores poetic innovations and
challenges assumptions about the cultural and social impact that a poem can have. These
two articles were written five years apart and analyze two separate slam communities
(Chicago and Boston). In both of them, however, Smith stresses the slam's role as an
intercultural performance form that brings poets and audience members together across
the boundaries of class, race, gender and sexuality. 3
community has rallied around Smith and she continues to pack houses whenever she performs.
She currently works as a columnist for Ms. magazine. Her debut column, "Fools in Love," an
account of a visit to her son who is serving time in the Middlesex House of Corrections outside
Boston, ran in the February/March 2000 issue of that magazine.
2 The Neutral Turf Poetry Festival was started in Chicago in 1987 and was held in
B.L.U.E.S., Etc., a blues club on Chicago's north side. Founded to mend the rift between street
poets and academic poets by bringing them together on neutral turf, it has grown exponentially
over the past decade and is now held every summer on Chicago's Navy Pier.
3 In the Sojourner article, Smith equates the Boston poetry establishment's prejudice
against slam poetry to racism and Jim Crow. Smith describes the reception that she ("a Black
woman with braids, an attitude, and Chicago, Illinois, stamped on my birth certificate") and
Michael Brown received from Boston's poetic community as follows:
I moved here three years ago to take a job with the Boston Globe, and--silly me-thought I would encounter an open-minded literary and academic community,
enthusiastic about new forms, new ideas, and new rhythms. Little did I know that
"new" would set those spines a rattlin', and that I would be deceived by friends,
74
Through her work at the interface of print journalism, poetry, and contemporary
theater, Smith has helped shape the topography of both the American and the
international performance poetry scene over the past decade. Described by Chicago poet
Quraysh Ali as the "Queen Slamma Mamma Jamma," Smith is five-time champion of the
Uptown Poetry Slam in Chicago; four-time individual champion of the National Grand
Slam; and cofounder, along with Michael Brown, of the Boston Slam at the Cantab
Lounge. Due to their work as slam ambassadors, moreover, Smith and Brown are
responsible for spreading the slam throughout New England. 4 She has performed in
Osaka, at the Sorbonne, at the Poet's Stage in Stockholm, at the 1994 Lollapalooza Music
Festival, at the Bahia '94 Musical Festival in Brazil, and at the 1997 Taos Poetry Bout,
where she tied Jimmy Santiago Baca. 5
While she is most well known for her work as a performer, Smith has published
both with smaller presses devoted to performance poetry and more traditional poetry
organs. In the past seven years, she has published three volumes of poetry--Life
According to Motown (1991), which is based on a series of poems that Smith used to
shunned by the local poetry status quo, and warned in hastily scrawled letters to
"go back where I came from." I almost expected to see restrooms, water
fountains, and bus depot waiting rooms labeled "POETS" and "SLAMMERS."
(20)
4 I would be remiss not to acknowledge the influence that Michael Brown has had on the
International Slam Family. Founder and publisher of Slam!, the official slam newsletter, Brown is
also webmaster for the slam family's web pages, one of the organizers of the 1998 International
Slam Olympics in Stockholm, and a premier slam poet in his own right. A professor of
communications at Mount Ida College in Boston, he has published fiction, travel essays, and
poetry, including The Falling Wallendas, a collection of his poetry.
5 There is some disagreement about the judges' decision at the 1997 Taos Poetry Bout.
According to many eyewitnesses, Smith was the clear winner. Officially, Baca and Smith tied the
bout. However, according to the Poetry Bout's rules, in the event of a tie, the $1000.00 purse goes
to the titleholder rather than the challenger. The tie has generated heated debates on the internet,
in local newspapers, and on talk radio. Writer Nathalie Goldberg was so outraged at the judges'
decision to award the purse to Baca that she wrote Smith a personal check for $1000.00 on the
spot.
75
perform in bars on the North Side of Chicago in the late 1980s; Big Towns, Big Talk
(1992); and Close to Death (1993). Her work has been featured in The Paris Review,
TriQuarterly, AGNI, and The Nation and has been anthologized in Penguin's
multicultural anthology, Unsettling America, and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican
Poets Cafe. Her second collection, Big Towns, Big Talk, was awarded the prestigious
Carl Sandburg poetry award and was a finalist for the 1993 Paterson Poetry Prize. She
coauthored Africans in America (1998), the companion book to the PBS series of the
same name. She is also currently working on a novel based on the Yummy Sandifer
story. 6 Throughout her published work, Smith destabilizes the divisions between print
and performance by integrating her work as a journalist with African-American musical
forms like the blues, jazz, and soul and vernacular forms like signifying and the dozens.
I argue in my discussions of David Hernández's and Bob Holman's work that the
contemporary performance poetry movement draws on and references a myriad of other
performance forms, from black and Latino vernacular traditions to MTV videos. Because
these poetries build on a dynamic, improvisational aesthetic, many contemporary
performance poets have adapted their poems to other media (or had them adapted by
other artists or directors). Like the other poets discussed in this study, Smith works at the
cusp of poetry, theater, and music. 7 Her first collection of poems, Life According
6 On August 28, 1994, Robert "Yummy" Sandifer, an eleven-year-old and a member of
the Black Disciples Gang, one of the largest gangs on Chicago's South Side, shot and killed a
fourteen-year-old girl by the name of Shavon Dean. He eluded the police for three days before
fellow gang members caught up with him and executed him. Because of the age of the victims,
this news story received major national coverage. It was the cover story for the September 19,
1994 issue of Time magazine. For more information, see Nancy R. Gibbs, "Murder in Miniature
at Age 11" in the September 19, 1994 issue of Time.
7 The most celebrated example of this sort of crossover work would have to be
Nuyorican slam poet Reg E. Gaines who received an Obie in 1996 for his work as the librettist of
Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk. Other examples include Chicago poet Cin Salach who
performs with her band The Loofah Method; Chicago poet Marvin Tate who performs with his
two funkadelic bands, Uptighty and D'Settlement; and, of course, David Hernández, whose work
with Street Sounds is discussed in Chapter Two. Likewise, Bob Holman has directed
76
Motown, began as a one-woman show that she performed in bars around Chicago. In
1992 Life According to Motown was produced as a multi-character play by Theater One
in Hartford, Connecticut, and staged along with "Combination Skin," a play by Amiri
Baraka's daughter, Lisa Jones. Over the past five years Smith has begun to work more
specifically with performance forms other than the slam and has adapted her published
poems for her one-woman shows and poetry videos. In 1994, Smith performed a series of
poems entitled "Life After Motown" at Boston University's Playwright's Theater, which
she then performed at Derek Walcott's Trinidad Theater Workshop the following spring.
She is currently working on a one-woman show based on Close to Death and on a play
based on the Charles Stuart case in Boston. 8 Over the past few years, Smith has also
begun to work with the medium of the poetry video. At the present, two of her poems,
"Chinese Cucumbers" and "Undertaker," have been produced as video poems. Both of
these video poems were screened at the Twentieth Annual Poetry Film Festival in San
Francisco--which was hosted by the Poetry Film Workshop in conjunction with the
National Poetry Association--and also have been aired on national television.
"Undertaker," which is one of Smith's strongest poems, was screened at Sundance Film
performances of Tzara's The Gas Heart and Artaud's Jet of Blood. He also founded the Rap Meets
Poetry performance series.
8 On October 23, 1989, the pregnant Carol Stuart was shot and killed and her husband,
Charles Stuart was mortally wounded. Both Carol Stuart and the baby died. Charles Stuart,
however, recovered and reported that both he and his wife had been shot by an African-American
assailant. Based on Charles Stuart's testimony, the Boston police began rounding up black
"suspects" and charged William Bennett with the murder after Charles Stuart identified him as the
perpetrator. Shortly thereafter, Charles Stuart committed suicide. After Stuart's death, it became
clear that he had, in fact, planned and committed the murder himself with the help of his brother
and that William Bennett was innocent. Reading this event through his rewriting of the Oedipal
triangle, in which "black men and white men are adversaries over the body of [white] women,"
George P. Cunningham writes that, "Everything is predictable about the Stuart case but its failure.
Neither the death of Carol Stuart nor the 'confession' by an African American 'murderer' was
unusual, nor, following the unraveling of the story, was the confusion handled in an unpredictable
way. The death of Charles Stuart, however, is the most resistant event in the continually revised
narrative" (148).
77
Festival and was aired on the Lifetime channel's Women's Film Festival in March 1996. 9
[Click for Appendix B: Patricia Smith Bibliography, Discography, and Videography
1989-2000.]
Smith's impressive curriculum vitae points to an interstitial, incorporative
discursive practice, one that synthesizes her work as a journalist with her work as one of
the country's premier performance poets. Her discursive practice exemplifies Henry
Louis Gates's definition of performance poetry as the "hybrid cultural space where
cultural styles jostle and collide. . .[and] spawn not new resentment but new cultures"
(42). 10 By sampling from and referencing a variety of discursive modes, including the
9 In 1996, Smith collaborated with Chicago video artist Kurt Heintz on a video version of
"Chinese Cucumbers," a poem included in Big Towns Big Talk. The video was originally
produced by Bob Holman and WNYC in New York, but it has aired on the PBS affiliate in
Chicago and was included in the "Living Room Festival" on KQED in San Francisco in
September 1996. Smith also recently collaborated on a video version of her poem, "Undertaker,"
with Tied to the Tracks film group in San Francisco. This video was shown at the Sundance film
festival and was included in the Lifetime Channel's "Women's Film Festival" in March 1997.
Both videos were shown at the Twentieth Annual Poetry Film Festival in San Francisco in
November, 1995. While outside of the scope of this chapter, poetry video raises a series of
important issues regarding the growth and evolution of community poetry in the United States.
Performance theorists such as Peggy Phelan argue that the subversive quality of live performance
is due to the fact that it is unreproduceable and, therefore, uncommodifiable. However, poetry
video producers such as Kurt Heintz, George Aguilar, and Bob Holman are at least partially
responsible for the resurgence of interest in poetry and performance around the country. While
beyond the scope of the argument of this chapter, I would like to address Smith's work with video
and the questions that this raises about commodification and community. Bob Holman, Jean
Howard, and other slam poets have begun to work primarily with video and the medium will
undoubtedly expand the audience for performance poetry, an effect that will benefit live
performances and slams as well. At the same time, as bell hooks points out in her essay on
African-American performance practices, performance "risks losing its power to disrupt and
engage with the specific locations from which it emerges via a process of commodification that
requires reproduction in a marketable package" (215). Given Smith's own engagement with the
slam and black vernacular and musical traditions--both of which risk losing some of their
transgressive potential due to the co-optation of these performance forms by MTV and large
recording labels--and her investment in preserving both as "raggedy, chaotic forms," this issue
becomes all the more urgent (Interview with the author). For a further discussion of poetry video
see Chapter Four.
10 While Henry Louis Gates is referring specifically to performance poetry in this
statement, cultural critics like Paul Gilroy, Tricia Rose, and Herman Gray make similar claims for
other forms of black expressive culture. See, for instance, Rose's Black Noise, Gray's Watching
Race, or Gilroy's There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack.
78
Black Church, Motown, jazz and the blues, African-American vernacular traditions, and
print and television journalism, Smith's poetry articulates the intercultural community
poetics that she calls for in "Slamming" and "Chicago Poetry." As a performance poet,
Smith, like contemporary hip-hop artists, is the inheritor of the oppositional black
aesthetics. Cultural critics Paul Gilroy, Tricia Rose, and bell hooks have argued that black
vernacular performance forms, like the blues, jazz, and rap, articulate a dynamic
"resistive cultural space" that exists outside of and in opposition to institutionalized
discursive fields. Likewise, slam poetry, with its roots in Beat poetry, the Chicano
tradition of el corrido, the Puerto Rican vernacular tradition of las descargas, and the
black vernacular traditions enumerated above, is a self-defined oppositional, intercultural
poetry movement.
Smith's signature performance style--the persona poem--draws on these
concurrent and overlapping aesthetic traditions. Throughout her persona poems, Smith
integrates the rhythms and cadences of jazz, blues, and the Black Church into the slam
form of the three minute time limit, the use of the first person, the manipulation of the
voice--especially volume and timbre, the rejection of end rhymes, and the use of short
three- or four-beat lines. 11 In a 1997 interview, Smith describes the persona poem as a
poetic version of her journalistic signature style in which she "step[s] into someone else's
life and write[s] from their perspective" (Interview with the author). The persona poem is
a hybrid poetic form, one that is ostensibly the result of a marriage of the slam style (what
Smith has referred to as a chaotic, "in your face" performance style) and her work as a
11 I do not mean to indicate here that these sorts of formal and aesthetic qualities only
show up in slam poetry but rather that they are the stylistic elements that are consistently
observable in most slam poems in most slam communities. As Patricia Smith suggests, the slam
is a "raggedy, chaotic" performance form and, therefore, the aesthetics of the slam tend to vary
from community to community. For instance, as Bob Holman pointed out to me in a 1996
correspondence, the Nuyorican does not implement the three-minute time limit. Likewise,
aesthetic issues such as volume and timbre of the voice and the manipulation of the body on the
stage are issues that other performers address as well.
79
journalist. These persona poems are also influenced by black vernacular forms and the
tradition of religious testifying. 12 Many of Smith's strongest performance pieces-"Undertaker," "Spinning till You Get Dizzy," "Always in the Head," "Skinhead," and "A
Motherfucker Too"--work well as performance pieces not only because they draw on the
cultural reservoir of black expressive traditions but also because they tend to give voice
to subject positions and experiences that have been marginalized in history and in the
mainstream media.
In There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, Paul Gilroy analyzes the significant
role that soul and rhythm and blues performers played during late 1960s and early 1970s
as guardians of an African-American communal countermemory. Exploring the cultural
and political significance that artists like James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, and Aretha
Franklin played during this era, he states that "these singers did not simply provide a
sound-track for the political actions of their soul sisters and brothers. They were
mandated to speak on behalf of the community in elaborate, celebratory, ritual
performances" (177). Smith reiterates this sentiment in her 1997 interview:
12 In our 1997 interview, Smith expressed some reticence about my desire to connect her
performance style back to the Black Church and to religious witnessing. In our interview, she
defined her aesthetic process as follows:
When I talked about having to recall whatever emotion or incident sparked a
poem whenever I perform it, that means letting the poem take over. I guess that's
the same way the Lord takes over during a religious experience, especially in the
southern Baptist tradition. Whatever the poem wants to do, you let it do. And I
hate to disappoint you--but while my mother dragged me to church every
Sunday, I was never what you'd call "born again." . . .In the few times that I've
written about my mother, church can't help but enter the picture because that's
such a huge part of who she is. Other than that, I can't say that it has much of an
influence on my work, except for the fact that the Lord blessed me with whatever
talent I have. (Interview with the author)
I want to be clear that I am not arguing that Smith has any sort of specific
relationship with the Black Church or any other religion, for that matter. Rather, I am
suggesting that religious witnessing is part of the cultural reservoir that she references
throughout her poetry.
80
When I was a kid, my life was pretty much dictated by whatever
Motown song was out at that time. The Temptations were the
source of my social consciousness, Smokey taught me about
romance. Whenever I have a chance to choose the music I listen to,
Motown is what I listen to. It represents the youth and optimism of
a time when black folks had no doubt that everything would work
out fine. (Interview with the author)
Throughout her poetry, Smith explores the role that blues, jazz, and Motown have had on
shaping contemporary African-American aesthetic and political practices. In "Life
According to Motown," the title poem from her first book and a poetic kuntslerroman of
sorts, Smith describes the role that Motown had in "teaching [her] what it meant to be a
black girl" in 1960s Chicago. She posits this music as the basis for her poetic style and
her racial consciousness, a theme that she continues throughout both her live
performances and her published work. Smith's later poems, "The Architect" (dedicated to
Little Richard), "The Ultimate Blues Bar," and "Changing Partners," capture the texture
of blues and R & B. With their short, staccato lines, repetition, assonance, and
alliteration, these poems exemplify what Houston Baker, Jr. has theorized as the poetic
equivalent of the blues artist's "worrying the line." 13
Throughout her poetry, Patricia Smith posits performance as an oppositional art
form through which she critiques both the traditional Western lyric and contemporary
13 See for instance, Smith's "Sweet Daddy" where the poem's rhythm is the result of her
use of alliteration, slant rhyme, and repetition rather than meter:
62. You would have been 62.
I would have given you a Roosevelt Road kind of time,
an all-night jam in the twine-time joint,
where you could have taken over the mike
and crooned a couple.
The place be all blue light
and JB air
and big-legged women
giggling at the way
you spit tobacco into the sound system,
showing up some dime-store howler
with his pink car
pulled right up to the door outside.
(Big Towns 46-47)
81
media culture. In her poems, the Black Church, Motown, and the blues bar are at once
representative of the African-American tradition of public poetry and a working
paradigm for her own aesthetic project. In Life According to Motown, for instance, Smith
includes poems that rewrite and comment on historical events, major news stories, and
tabloid news. Throughout this collection, she draws on specific news events--the only
execution of a white man for the murder of an African-American man in Mississippi, a
pregnant woman's murder in a Chicago video store in April 1988, or the story of a threeyear-old girl who is molested and murdered by her father--and includes synopses of these
news stories as marginalia or epigraphs to these poems. Smith connects her revisions of
news stories more directly to African-American countercultural traditions in her second
book, Big Towns, Big Talk. Just as her first book looks at the relationship between her
work as a poet and the Motown music that she grew up listening to, this second collection
is an exploration of the nexus between the blues and her poetic project. The final section
of this book, "Nobody's Blues but Mine," connects her poetic revisions of historical and
current events directly to blues music and blues culture, including epigraphs that
reference specific news items as well as more general references to the tabloid media. In
live performances of these poems, Smith also includes references to the news stories that
influenced them. For instance, in a 1993 performance of her poem "Undertaker" at the
Old Vienna Kaffeehaus in Boston, Smith begins the poem with a reference to the 1991
news story that inspired this poem. By drawing on and responding to these news stories,
Smith's poetry critiques the mainstream news media by voicing subject positions and
points of view that are typically not covered or reported. Simultaneously, by invoking the
media and by placing her poems in dialogue with newspaper articles and tabloid stories,
Smith posits her poetry as a public form of discourse.
Smith's work across media and genres articulates a poetic "versioning" of sorts in
which the poem on the page, the live performance, and the video poem are in dialogue
with one another. In his work on black expressive cultures, Paul Gilroy describes the uses
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of "versioning"--lyrical and formal repetition of and borrowing from other artists--in jazz,
soul, and reggae music as a means for the musicians and their audiences "consciously
reconstruct and celebrate their own histories"(Union Jack 209). According to Gilroy,
versioning is inherently political because it "makes the past literally audible in the
present" by placing a musician's work within a specific lineage. Smith samples from and
blends her work as a journalist, a poet, and a performer, and maps out a fertile discursive
field that performs the cultural syncretism that Gates describes in his New Yorker essay.
With this in mind, I would like to turn to a reading of Smith's most recent collection,
Close to Death, and extratextual versions of these poems, like live performance, recorded
performance, and video.
Close to Death, the Media, and the Creation of a
Communal Counternarrative
CRIPtic Comment
From an interview with an L.A. gang member, 1992
If we are not shooting
at someone,
then no one
can see us.
--Patricia Smith, Close to Death, 1993
Close to Death is Smith's most thematically coherent collection of poems to date.
A series of poetic testimonials written in the voices of African-American men, this text
samples and weaves together slam poetry, black vernacular culture, and her work as a
journalist. The book was inspired by a series of interviews that Smith conducted for her
1991 news stories "Voices of the Endangered American Black Male" and "Role Models
for Troubled Youth." It includes persona poems based on these interviews as well as
poems which drawn on her interviews with African-American men in Chicago and Los
Angeles. This collection of poems, like the newspaper stories that inspired it, protests the
marginalization of black voices and the demonization of black men by the news media
while simultaneously drawing on and celebrating the rich cultural reservoir of African-
83
American expressive forms like R and B, rap, the blues, and religious testifying. And,
like these articles, it bears witness to the increasing mortality rates due to homicide, drug
abuse, homelessness, and AIDS that plague urban working-class African-American
communities. In the poems included in this collection, Smith subverts the monolithic
portrayal of African-American men by the mainstream news media by taking on the
voices and personae of characters as diverse as a homeless man named Edwin, Michael
Tyson, Little Richard, and an undertaker whose clients are the mothers of young men
killed in gang-related shootings. In Close to Death, as in her two earlier books, Smith
draws on and references African-American expressive forms and commemorates black
communal spaces like the blues bar, the street corner, and the church. While Life
According to Motown and Big Towns, Big Talk are primarily celebrations of these black
vernacular forms and shared cultural spaces, Close to Death is more directly engaged in
exploring the role that these musical and performance forms have played in helping to
shape the progressive political struggle within the African-American community.
I would like to return here to Sudden Def, the Henry Louis Gates article that I
discuss in the first chapter of this dissertation, as a way to theorize the symbiotic,
incorporative discursive practice that is articulated throughout Close to Death and Smith's
performances of its poems. In this article, Gates describes performance poetry as a
"hybrid cultural space where cultural styles jostle and collide" and, in the process, create
new cultures (42). With its sampling from news articles, musical lyrics, religious
witnessing, and black vernacular traditions, Close to Death maps out the contact zone
between journalism, black expressive culture, and the slam and exploits the boundary
between the oral and the written. The fact that many of these poems were first made
public as live performance pieces further underscores this nexus between the text and the
performance. Throughout these poems Smith indexes and celebrates the liberatory role
that these performance forms continue to play within contemporary urban African-
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American communities and contextualizes her work as a poet within this transgressive
performance practice.
Since Close to Death was inspired by "Voices of the Endangered American Black
Male," many of the poems included in this collection are verbatim reproductions of long
passages of dialogue that Smith includes in these two articles. 14 As a result, this
collection is more directly engaged in examining the American media's portrayal of urban
black communities and African-American (male) subjectivity than either Life According
to Motown or Big Towns, Big Talk. BecauseClose to Death was directly inspired by
Smith's journalistic project, I would like to begin by discussing "Voices" and its
companion piece, "Role Models for Troubled Youth." These two articles were published
on September 4, 1991--six months and one day after the Rodney King beating in Los
Angeles, an event which has become representative of the news media's portrayal of
black male subjectivity. While Smith does not refer to Rodney King directly in these
articles, they are, on one level, responses to the Rodney King beating and his ensuing
voicelessness in the media. "Voices" and "Role Models" are polyvocal testimonials that
speak about what it means to be a black man in post-Rodney King America. They
examine and critique media coverage of urban black communities and the portrayal of
urban, working-class African-American men in the news by weaving together national
statistics regarding mortality rates among African-American men; interviews with men
from the Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan neighborhoods of Boston; rap lyrics; and
Governor Wilder of Virginia's opening statement at the Twenty-First Century
Commission of African-American Males.
14 See "Us, and the World Outside" which draws directly on Smith's interviews with
Lafayette Neal, Emmitt Perry, and Willie President in her article "Voices of the Endangered
American Black Male" or her signature performance piece, "Undertaker," which reiterates
passages from her interview with Floyd Williams.
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Smith's articles respond to and destabilize what Herman Gray has described as the
news media's creation and institutionalization of "hyperblackness"--the image of the
black male subject as incorrigible and black urban communities as lawless--by literally
inserting voices from the streets, churches, and housing projects of Boston's
impoverished African-American neighborhoods into mainstream print journalism. In
Watching Race, his study of television representations of African-Americans during the
1980s and 1990s, Gray writes that "in television news accounts and newspaper stories,
blacks, especially the black poor, are presented as victims of crime, perpetrators of crime,
and the objects of white fear and suspicion" (156). He then analyzes the relationship
between the news media's creation of "hyperblackness" and the ascendancy of the New
Right and the discourse of traditional family values during the Reagan/Bush
administrations, citing Reagan's construction of the image of the "black welfare queen"
and the Central Park jogger case, as well as the Bush administration's use of the image of
Willie Horton and the Charles Stuart case in Boston. A study released by Boston's Media
Education Project's Community Media Study in 1992--a project with which Smith was
involved--bears out Gray's claims. Focusing on the major newspapers and television
news channels in the Boston area, this study found that while people of color were quoted
as sources for news stories about as often as whites, they were the subject of these stories
about twice as often as whites. Moreover, when quoted as sources for the stories, people
of color were rarely depicted as "experts" on the subject being reported; rather they were
portrayed as "leaders, innocents and villains" and their testimony was usually
corroborated by "expert" testimony from a police officer (in O'Connor 3). Smith's
articles, then, are not so much a recovery of silenced voices as they are an insistence on
acknowledging alternative discursive forms that exist outside of and in opposition to
mainstream America media. In the opening paragraphs of "Voice of the Endangered
American Black Male" Smith writes:
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Every year, the stats are flashed in urgent typeface across the front
of newspapers, picked apart on talk shows, analyzed in official
magazines of thought. At some point every black man is asked the
inevitable question: "How does it feel?" The problem was that
usually the numbers don't have faces, or voices. Now they do. (53)
Smith's articles counteract the media's abstraction of black men's experiences (as
represented by newspaper headlines, statistics, talk show topics) by calling for the
recontextualization of these statistics within the life stories of specific individuals from
the local black community. In doing so, these two articles give voice to social and
political realities that shape black male experience in Boston's African-American
neighborhoods and confirm the importance of local public spaces like the playground, the
street, and the Roxbury Men's Club as community forums within these neighborhoods.
These articles are written as a dialogue between men from various age groups, economic
classes, and religions, and their pages are literally occupied by the voices and the faces of
black men from Boston's black community. Throughout, Smith quotes long passages
verbatim from her interviews with members of the Roxbury Men's Club; eighteen-yearold Mesfen Manna and his brother Tarik; and Floyd Williams, owner of the Floyd
Williams Funeral Home, placing these men in conversation with one another. The article
follows a call-and-response format. These interviews respond to national statistics on
increasing mortality rates among black men, the drop in college enrollment for young
black men, increased gang activity, the rise in alcoholism, and the increased percentage
of black female-headed families.
In "Voices" and "Roles Models," Smith not only records the voices of individual
members of Boston's African-American community; she insists on placing these
conversations within the context of local communal spaces. In Black Noise, Tricia Rose
theorizes rap artists' use of neighborhood scenes in their music videos as means both for
articulating the relationship between identity and location and for inserting marginalized
voices into the public consciousness. According to Rose, moreover, rap videos become a
vehicle for articulating and recording communal counternarratives by allowing the
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residents of these communities to challenge the news media's portrayal of their
neighborhood and "to speak for themselves and for their communities" (11). Likewise,
Smith's description of the Roxbury Men's Club, the street life on Washington and
Shawmut Avenues, and the playground outside of the Mandela Apartments in Roxbury
throughout these articles acknowledges the role that these particular public spaces play in
the articulation of a communal counterdiscourse. The inclusion of photographs of Mesfen
Manna, Floyd Williams, and Lafayette Neal in these locations with captions lifted from
Smith's interviews with them foregrounds the relationship between identity and
community, voice and place. These communal spaces are important not simply because
they function as public forums where members of the neighborhood can debate and
challenge mainstream media portrayals of their community; they also directly connect the
individuals that Smith interviewed to a specific geographical location and to specific
material conditions. In Smith's articles, the voice cannot be severed from the body that
speaks it nor can it be removed from the community from which it speaks.
Like "Voices," Close to Death is a critique of the media's portrayal of urban, postRodney King black male subjectivity. It testifies to the continuing physical violence
against and the dehumanizing treatment of African-American men that this event has
come to represent and affirms the role that performance plays in establishing and
maintaining a shared counterdiscursive tradition. Throughout the poems included in this
collection, Smith draws on her experiences as a reporter, as a mother, and as a daughter
and synthesizes national statistics, news events, and personal experience. In her prelude
Smith articulates the nexus between the personal and the political that the testimonial
form implies: 15
15 For further discussions of the relationship between the individual and the communal
voice in testimonial literature, please see Carolyn Forche's introduction to Against Forgetting,
John Beverly's Against Literature--especially Chapter Four--and Carolyn Cooper's discussion of
the Sistren Theater Collective in Noises in the Blood.
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This book is because nearly half a million black men are behind
bars in the United States. Because I have seen my son with
shackles at his ankles and wrists. This book is because black men
represent only 3.5 percent of a national college enrollment of
almost 13 million. Because I know a 51-year-old man who cannot
read. This book is because 45 percent of black males are likely to
become victims of violent crime three or four times in their
lifetime. Because my father was killed by a bullet fired into the
back of his head. This book is because a black male infant born in
1993 has a 1 in 27 chance of losing his life in a homicide. Because
a gangbanger in Chicago used a 2-year-old boy as a shield. This
book is because young black men in New York City are wearing
clothing emblazoned with the logo "C2D"--Close To Death.
Because so many of them are. (4, Smith's emphases)
As the dialogic structure of this passage suggests, these poems draw on Smith's
experiences as a mother of a sixteen-year-old son and as a daughter whose father had
been murdered. Part of what makes this book so moving is how Smith insists on filtering
abstract, impersonal statistics through personal experience. The book cover--a portrait of
her son, Damon, with superimposed vertical lines that suggest a jail cell--resonates with
the above passage, as does the inclusion "My Life as a Baseball Game," a poem written
by Smith's father. Moreover, poems such as "Sweet Daddy," "The Music Swells, Fade to
Black," and "Always in the Head," address violence toward African-American men
through her memories of her father's murder and her anxiety about her son's future.
89
Figure 1 Cover of Patricia Smith's Close to Death.
Close to Death explores the role that African-American musical traditions play in
interrogating and subverting the media's portrayal of black male subjectivity by drawing
on and referencing these performance forms. As in her two earlier collections of poems,
Smith includes poems that are written about or in the voices of (primarily male) jazz,
blues, and soul musicians, and a perusal through the table of contents reads more like a
90
discography than a list of poems. Poems like "A Motherfucker Too" and "Spinning Till
You Get Dizzy" are elegies to jazz artists Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Sarah
Vaughn that celebrate jazz as a chaotic musical form that "was never about capture and
compliance" (105). Likewise, Smith celebrates blues, R & B, and soul in poems
dedicated to Buddy Guy, Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson, Little Richard, Michael
Jackson, and the Temptations.
Throughout this collection, moreover, Smith juxtaposes the failings of post-Civil
Rights America with what she has defined as Motown's "youth and optimism." Her poetic
triptych "Smokey Lied," which is included in the "Closer" section of the text, examines
the changing significance of soul and rhythm and blues in the wake of events like the
Rodney King beating, Bensonhurst, and the Charles Stuart case in Boston. This series of
poems traces Smith's sexual and political awakening, following her from early
adolescence through her late thirties, and reflects on the role that Smokey Robinson in
particular and Motown in general played in her life. In the first poem, the young Patricia
of the poem conflates her desire for sexual liberation--as is seen in her description of
adolescent fantasies about Smokey whisking her away to "mindless days of romance"-with Smokey's message that "the ghetto was just a state of mind"(46). As she grows to
adulthood, Patricia comes to realize that in the context of her father's murder, Emmett
Till's lynching in Mississippi, and the continuing police brutality in African-American
communities around the nation, Smokey's hopeful songs seem almost obscene. This sense
of frustration culminates in the final poem of the triptych, "Smokey Lied III." In this
poem Smith recounts her experiences at a Smokey Robinson concert in Chicago in 1991,
analyzing the lyrics in light of the Rodney King incident a few months earlier. Reflecting
on the optimism that Smokey's lyrics instilled in her as a thirteen-year-old, Smith writes:
You lied. The words moved in my throat
and pushed at the back of my teeth. You lied,
you green-eyed bastard.
Life was no quick whirl on the dance floor,
brother, no sassy wink.
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It was the cracking of a black man's cheek,
my first love walking away
to a jagged soundtrack.
It was blood in the air,
glass rising up in the sidewalk
to slice dancing feet, and right now
if you want to set things right,
beg me for something.
(68)
In this poem, Smith synthesizes the personal (her frustration with the aging Smokey, her
first love walking away) and the public (images like "the cracking of a black man's
cheek," "blood in the air" which reference her description of the Rodney King incident in
the collection's prelude) and testifies to the failure of Motown's message after Rodney
King. For Smith, then, the music that gave voice to the possibilities promised by Civil
Rights is inadequate when faced with post-Civil Rights violence and oppression.
As the above indicates, the Rodney King incident represents an epic break for
Smith, the reversal of the legacy of Civil Rights, and she returns to this event again and
again throughout this text. In the prelude to Close to Death, Smith articulates her role as
witness to the Rodney King beating and places it and the Los Angeles uprising following
the first verdict in the context of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination and the ensuing
Chicago riots twenty-five years earlier. Smith equates her own racial coming-of-age
during the 1968 Chicago riots with her son's initiation into American racial violence
while watching the nightmarish images of the Rodney King video tape and the Los
Angeles uprising on the television. Smith then locates the Rodney King incident within
the history of the violent oppression of black bodies and the silencing of black voices
both in the United States and abroad by referencing slavery, police brutality in urban
America, apartheid South Africa, America's Jim Crow laws, and lynching:
Then Rodney King's bones were smashed beneath the repeated
blows of nightsticks. The clubs whipped through the night with a
sick rhythm, and the whole world was forced to watch. A
schoolboy in South Africa. Martin Luther King on a balcony in
Memphis. Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst. Rodney King clutching
the dust in Los Angeles. A rage that could not be harnessed. (3)
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This passage places the Rodney King event within the larger context of racial
violence in America and South Africa. In the litany of names and locations in the above
passage, Rodney King's beating is conflated with Yusef Hawkins's murder, the death of a
schoolboy in South Africa, and Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968. Throughout
this collection of poems, moreover, Rodney King's silenced, beaten body becomes a
metaphor for institutionalized brutality toward African-American men and the specter of
the Rodney King beating and the Los Angeles uprising after the first Simi Valley trial
haunt the poems included in this collection. Whereas "CRIPtic Comment," "Smokey Lied
III," and "Reconstruction" respond to the Rodney King beating directly, poems like
"Found Poem," "The Dark Magicians," and "Discovering Country" reiterate the prelude's
contextualization of the Rodney King event within what Houston Baker has referred to as
the "classic American 'scene of violence'" ("Scene. . .Not Heard" 48). These three poems
testify to the horrors of slavery and lynching and recount the story of Emmett Till's
murder in Mississippi in 1955.
Besides contextualizing and historicizing the surrealistic images from the "gritty
black-and-white videotape" that Smith describes in her prelude, the above passage
reconnects the visual images from the Rodney King video with the tape's silenced
soundtrack. In her essay on the Rodney King videos, Elizabeth Alexander theorizes the
role that sound plays in establishing collective counternarratives within AfricanAmerican communities when she states that "Hearing, too, is central to witnessing.
Sounds. . .haunt the mind as much as visual images. . . Furthermore, those who receive
stories become witnesses once removed, but witnesses nonetheless" (87, 85). She
analyzes how Frederick Douglass's and Linda Brent's slave narratives use literary devices
such as synaesthesia and aural and visual imagery to articulate the corporeal terrors of
slavery. According to Alexander, these narratives, with their emphasis on the auditory,
exhort the reader to place herself in the subject position of the narrator and take up the
"perspective of witness rather than a spectator" (87). Drawing on her analysis of these
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two slave narratives, Alexander then argues that the moral force of the Rodney King
video is lessened because the soundtrack is removed. She states that the eighty-twosecond video loop, "stripped of a soundtrack in which falling blows and bystanders'
screams are audible, disallows the possibility that the sounds of terror could imprint
themselves on the jury's mind" (87). Likewise, when shown on news programs around the
nation, the moral force and urgency of the soundless video is lessened by the "silencing"
of the witnesses' screams, the noise of the nightsticks making contact with King's flesh,
and--most importantly--the sound of King's voice.
Houston Baker, Jr. offers a similar analysis of the Rodney King event in his essay
"Scene . . . Not Heard." In this essay, Baker establishes the lineage between the white
abolitionists' use of the silent slave's body as "the Negro exhibit" and the news media's
exploitation of the eighty-two second video clip of the L.A. police beating King. Baker
points out that although the video clip of Rodney King's beating is aired over and over
again on various news programs around the country, "King is silent, and barely seen
outside of the repetitive scene of the video-ed violence" (43). The media's exploitation of
the Rodney King video, according to Baker, not only serves to silence King. It also
displaces the event, decontexualizing it from its place in the history as well as severing it
the social and political realities of L.A.'s urban black community. Referring to Frederick
Douglass's narrative, Baker then posits rap as a means for recording "the disastrous
semiotics of the American scene of violence." According to Baker, "the expressive
economies of rap. . . are far more likely to yield a hearing that forestalls further American
urban disaster" than are post mortems on the nightly news or reports issued by
presidential task forces (48, author's emphasis).
In her prelude, Smith counteracts the news media's silencing of Rodney King by
both literally and what Baker would call "metasonically" giving voice to the Rodney
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King beating and to the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. 16 She recreates the experience of
witnessing this event and the uprising that followed in its aftermath by describing in
nightmarish detail images from the eighty-two second videotape loop of Rodney King
"clutching the dust" as he is beaten by the L.A. police officers, apocalyptic images of "the
sky catching fire" during the L.A. uprising, and the reaction of her son to these images.
Jut as it bears witness to the ocular horrors of the Rodney King event and the ensuing
L.A. uprising, this passage, with the repetitive and rhythmic invoking of Yusef Hawkins,
Martin Luther King, and the South African schoolboy, suggests the sounds missing from
the Rodney King video. In so doing, it forces the reader into the position of auditor of and
witness to this event. The anaphoric structure of Smith's litany and the alliterative
plosives that are repeated throughout this passage (bones, beneath,blows, schoolboy,
Bensonhurst) invoke the "sick rhythm" of police officers' nightsticks as they make
contact with Rodney King's flesh, just as the assonant and repetitive use of gutturals
throughout this passage (bones, blows, clubs, through, whole world, forced, schoolboy,
South, Luther, on, balcony, Yusef Hawkins, Bensonhurst, Rodney, clutching, dust, Los,
would not) articulates both the bystanders' and King's calls and screams. As with her
newspaper articles, the insertion of the voice into the narrative establishes an immediacy
that is usually missing from the media's accounts of these events. The passage's
extratextual noise infuses this prelude with a moral force and an urgency that cannot be
fully captured in the indexical, descriptive quality of the language on the page.
16 In "Scene . . . Not Heard," Houston Baker describes how Frederick Douglass's
discussion of the songs works to counteract the visual display (the "scening") of the run away
slave by northern abolitionists. According to Baker, Douglass's "interpretive recollection" of
these songs fill in the missing narratives from the abolitionist meetings by enjoining the reader to
"hear" these songs. Baker defines this interpretitive recollection as a "'metasonic' interpretitive
positition that enjoins the readers to hear between the lines" (Baker's emphasis 41). My
discussion of Smith's poetry picks up on this term and uses it to describe how she uses the poem's
sound scape to place her listeners in the position of "metasonic" witnesses to contemporary
scenes of violence against African-American men.
95
In the poems included in this collection and her performances of them, Smith
relies on both the visual and aural imagery and the extratextual noise of the poem in order
to bear witness to the scenes of racial violence that urban African-American men face
daily. Throughout this text, Smith deploys poetic noise and repetition in order to create a
poetics of witness that not only recounts the event but also re-sounds it. In poems like
"Reconstruction" and "Smokey Lied III," Smith uses repetition and anaphora as well as
onomatopoeia and assonance to describe the Rodney King beating and the Los Angeles
uprising. Lines like "It was the cracking of a black man's cheek," in which the alliterative
use of the "k" and the hard "c" perform the sound of the nightsticks cracking King's cheek
bone, and "glass rising up in the sidewalk/to slice dancing feet," in which the sibilants
perform the hissing noise of fires burning, resound the missing soundtrack from the King
video as they recount the poet's coming to terms with Smokey's mortality and the
ephemerality of the Motown message (68). In "A Poem for the Man Who Shot My
Father" and "Undertaker," Smith uses repetition and consonance to perform the sound of
guns being shot and bullets entering the flesh and assonance to reiterate the screams of
the victims and the bystanders. Throughout both the reader's silent audition and her
performances of these poems, Smith deploys voice and rhythm--what Dick Hebdige has
called the "vital mix" in Afro-diasporic performance forms (148)--and posits a poetics
that re-sounds marginalized communal experiences and voices.
Performance and the Extratextual Language of Witnessing:
An Audition of Smith's "Reconstruction" and "Undertaker"
Smith's poems on the page suggest the power of the audiotext in articulating a
poetics of witness. In the performance of her poems, however, the relationship between
extratextual elements and the auditor's role as witness is defined even more clearly.
Drawing on Alexander's discussion of witness literature and Baker's discussion of rap and
"metasonic" witnessing, I am going to spend the final few pages of this chapter analyzing
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how Smith's performances re-sound marginalized voices and articulate a poetic
counternarrative. It is my contention here that the ephemeral and uncommodifiable
aspects of performance--the voice, the way that the performer uses her body on stage,
improvisation, the rapport between performer and audience--infuse the poem with an
immediacy and urgency that cannot be captured on the page. Focusing on live
performances of "Undertaker" and "Reconstruction," two of the poems included in Close
to Death, I will discuss how these poems both literally and sonically bear witness to the
events they depict.
The title of "Reconstruction" is a triple reference: to the rebuilding of the South
after the Civil War, the mending of Rodney King's broken body and smashed face, and
the reconstruction of the neighborhoods that were destroyed during the L.A. uprising.
Comparing Rodney King's healing to a national mending, Smith states [Click for Audio
File 4. Patricia Smith: "Reconstruction"]:
Enough of the horror. Let us consider
the delicate maze of bone in the face,
the eyes glistening and vulnerable,
teeth easily shattered. Let us wonder
at the miracles of patch and knit,
the slick immediacy of scarring,
the swelling that flattens to sinew.
Let's rejoice as human returns to human,
as new tall walking signals rebirth.
Enough of the gritty reel. No more
clutching dust, curling against
metronome swing. April already,
another fire simmers. Quick,
let's find the man. Film the mending.
(41)
"Reconstruction" critiques the media's decontextualization and exploitation of the eightytwo second video of the Rodney King beating, as is signified by the repetition of
"Enough of. . ." at the beginning of both stanzas and Smith's final call for us to film
King's mending. This sonnet revisits the prelude to Close to Death and Smith's
description of her reaction to seeing the Rodney King video on television, as well as her
description of how this event affected her teenage son. Phrases like "the gritty reel" of
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film, "clutching dust," and "the metronome swing" (of the nightsticks) are sampled from
the prelude, as are the descriptions of King's shattered teeth and face and the allusion to
the L.A. uprising.
As in Smith's description of the Rodney King video in the prelude,
"Reconstruction" counteracts the missing soundtrack by literally giving voice to this
event. This sonnet uses the poetic device of the blazon to testify to the physical injuries
King received--shattering of his cheek and teeth, the scarring of his face, his injured leg.
Moreover, the extratextual noise of this poem, which is present on the page but is
articulated with all the more urgency in the performance of this poem, reiterates the
sound missing from the videotape. Throughout the performance of this poem, Smith uses
repetition and anaphora (both at the level of the stanza, as is signified by Smith's
repetition of "Enough of," and within the first stanza, as is heard with the internal
anaphora "Let us") and guttural assonance (Enough, of, us, consider, vulnerable, wonder,
human, returns, clutching, dust) to sound the rhythm of the "metronome swing" of the
policemen's nightsticks and the dull thud of these clubs striking flesh (or perhaps King's
vocal response to the beating). Likewise, the alliterative and consonant use of the sibilant
throughout this poem references the whistling of the nightsticks through the air or
perhaps the hissing noise of the simmering fires that the uprising left behind. Throughout
this poem, the audience is exhorted to "hear between the lines," to listen to the resounding of the horror of this scene of violence against Rodney King and the destruction
that the simmering fires of the L.A. rebellion signify. Because the audience is made
witness not only to Smith's visual images of the beating and the uprising but also to how
this event sounds, Smith's call for rebirth, for a moving beyond this event and what it has
come to symbolize, is all the more significant.
Smith's performance of "Reconstruction" re-sounds the silenced soundtrack on the
Rodney King video, speaking of this watershed event and what it means both for AfricanAmericans and for the nation as a whole. "Undertaker," on the other hand, gives voice to
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the too-common scene of gang violence in black urban neighborhoods and to the
aftermath of that violence. In both her 1991 "Voices" article and her poem "CRIPtic
Comment," Smith critiques the news media's and Hollywood's commodification and
glamorization of violent crimes in black urban neighborhoods. Analyzing Mesfen
Manna's description of his friend's death, she writes: "Glamorized. Like in the movies.
Another guy jumps bad, gets smoked, dusted, blasted, capped, bucked. The new guns
gleam, bodies fall dramatically to the pavement. People gather 'round to point, laugh,
scream" ("Voices" 56). In "Undertaker," Smith testifies to the part of this scene that is left
out of the nightly news and the Hollywood films--the boy's death, the mother's
unspeakable pain, the undertaker's distress at having to bury yet another young black
man.
Almost three times as long as "Reconstruction," "Undertaker" is Smith's signature
performance poem. This poem has been included on A Snake in the Heart, a CD of
spoken word poetry that recorded by Chicago's Tía Chucha press. It was performed at the
Fourth National Grand Slam in San Francisco in 1993 and included on the CD recorded
at that slam and was adapted for poetry video by Tied to the Tracks, a film production
company in San Francisco. "Undertaker" is dedicated to Floyd Williams, the owner of the
Floyd Williams Funeral Home in Dorchester and one of the men that Smith interviewed
in her 1991 article, "Voices of the Endangered American Black Male," and it revisits
many of the themes covered in this article. In this virtuoso performance piece, Smith
steps into the personae of the undertaker, the mother, and the murdered boy and narrates
the story of a young mother who comes to the undertaker's office to work out the details
of her murdered son's funeral. As such, the poem becomes a polyvocal testimonial to
violence and the increasing mortality rates in African-American neighborhoods. While
Smith speaks in the voices of all three personae, the poem is narrated primarily in the first
person from the undertaker's point of view and tells the gruesome story of how he
reconstructs the young man's body after the young man has been murdered in a gang-
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related shooting. As such, this poem is the poetic correlative to the photograph that Robin
Scott Manna shows to Patricia Smith during her interview in the "Voices " article. In this
article, Smith describes in vivid detail the photograph that Ms. Manna carries in her
wallet like a talisman. Smith writes:
Since her sons have grown too old to be called back from the
streets, Robin Scott Manna has been haunted by a picture she saw
in a newspaper. At first, she had no idea of what the picture was.
Then her eyes traced a mass of tubes to a gaunt, naked black body.
It was a picture of a young man being embalmed in preparation for
burial.
She carries it in her wallet. (57)
In "Undertaker," Smith uses the elements of the live performance to emphasize the
violence of the embalming process and the evoke the mother's helpless grief [Click for
Audio Clip 5. Patricia Smith: "Undertaker"]:
When a bullet enters the brain, the head explodes.
I can think of no softer warning for the mothers
who sit doubled before my desk,
knotting their smooth brown hands,
and begging, fix my boy, fix my boy.
Here's his high school picture.
And the smirking, mildly mustachioed player
in the crinkled snapshot
looks nothing like the plastic bag of boy
stored and dated in the cold room downstairs.
In the picture, he is cocky and chiseled,
clutching the world by the balls. I know the look.
Now he is flaps of cheek,
slivers of jawbone, a surprised eye,
assorted teeth, bloody tufts of napped hair.
The building blocks of my business.
So I swallow hard, turn the photo face down
and talk numbers instead. The high price
of miracles startles the still-young woman,
but she is prepared. I know that she has sold
everything she owns, that cousins and uncles
have emptied their empty bank accounts,
that she dreams of her baby
in tuxedoed satin, flawless in an open casket,
a cross or blood red rose tacked to his fingers,
his halo set at a cocky angle.
I write a figure on a piece of paper
and push it across to her
while her chest heaves with hoping.
She stares at the number, pulls in
a slow weepy breath: "Jesus."
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But Jesus isn't on my payroll. I work alone
until the dim insistence of morning,
bent over my grisly puzzle pieces, gluing,
stitching, creating a chin with a brushstroke,
I plop glass eyes into rigid sockets,
then carve eyelids from a forearm, an inner thigh,
I plump shattered skulls, and paint the skin
to suggest warmth, an impending breath.
I reach into collapsed cavities to rescue
a tongue, an ear. Lips are never easy to recreate.
And I try not to remember the stories,
the tales the mothers must bring me
to ease their own hearts. Oh, they cry,
my Ronnie, my Willie, my Michael, my Chico.
It was self-defense. He was on his way home,
a dark car slowed down, they must have thought
he was someone else. He stepped between
two warring gang members at a party.
Really, he was trying to get off the streets,
trying to pull away from the crowd.
He was trying to help a friend.
He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Fix my boy; he was a good boy. Make him the way he was.
But I have explored the jagged gaps
in the boy's body, smoothed the angry edges
of bullet holes. I have touched him in places
no mother knows, and I have birthed
his new face. I know that he believed himself
invincible, that he most likely hissed
"Fuck you, man," before the bullets lifted him
off his feet. I try not to imagine
his swagger, his lizard-lidded gaze,
his young mother screaming into the phone.
She says she will find the money, and I know
this is the truth that fuels her, forces her
to place one foot in front of the other.
Suddenly, I want to take her down
to the chilly room, open the bag
and shake its terrible bounty onto the
gleaming steel table. I want her to see him,
to touch him, to press her lips to the flap of cheek.
The woman needs to wither, finally, and move on.
We both jump as the phone rattles in its hook.
I pray that it's my wife, a bill collector, a wrong number.
But the wide, questioning silence on the other end
is too familiar. Another mother needing a miracle.
Another homeboy coming home.
(71-73, author's emphasis)
In "Undertaker," Smith relies on both the detailed use of imagery and the
primarily first-person narration of the poem to draw the reader/auditor in and implicate
them as witnesses to the violence that the poem describes. Moreover, the polyvocality of
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the poem--the insertion of both the mother's and the murdered young man's voice into
what is primarily the undertaker's monologue--articulates a matrix of events that the
reader/auditor of this poem witnesses simultaneously. By stepping into character and
speaking as the undertaker, the mother, and the murdered boy, Smith puts us in the
position of witnessing not only the conversation between the mother and the undertaker,
but also the boy's death and the secondary violence of the undertaker's craft. The poem
describes both the fragmented body and the undertaker's reconstruction of that body in
painstaking detail. The piling up and juxtaposing of images of the various body parts
adds to both the violence inherent in this poem and the reader's/auditor's sense of the
body as fragmented and dehumanized. The dead boy is described as "grisly puzzle
pieces," "shattered skulls," "jagged gaps," "plastic bag of boy," "flaps of cheek," "slivers
of jawbone," and "assorted teeth." Smith brings her journalistic eye for detail and
description to bear on this poem, graphically describing the disarticulated state in which
the undertaker receives the corpse and hinting at the violence and force of the bullet that
ripped the young man apart.
Perhaps more striking than Smith's use of detail is the fact that she places her
readers/auditors in the position of witnessing the undertaker's reconstruction of the corpse
rather than the boy's death. As with her journalistic signature style, Smith steps into an
underrepresented subject position and narrates the story primarily from the point of view
of the undertaker rather than that of the murdered young man or the mother. The
reader/auditor is forced to witness the aftermath of the boy's murder, including the
undertaker's seemingly emotionally detached response to the dead body and the violent
nature of his work. Throughout the poem, Smith indexes the undertaker's crafting of the
boy's new face, describing in graphic detail the further desecration of the corpse: the
undertaker carves "eyelids from a forearm," "paints the skin," recreates lips, smooths out
bulletholes (72). What the reader/auditor witnesses, then, is a secondary act of violence
against the body, a further dismemberment.
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Smith's poetic witnessing relies not only on detailed descriptions of the young
man's dead body and the undertaker's handiwork--what Elizabeth Alexander would call
the literal language through which the body speaks what it has witnessed. This poem also
speaks of an extratextual witnessing that exists in the timbre and volume of Smith's voice
while she performs, as well as in the alliterative and assonant repetition of the plosives
throughout the first, third, and fifth stanzas (bullet, brain, doubled before desk, begging
boy, player, "plastic bag of boy," "building blocks of my business," "puzzle pieces,"
"boy's body," "bullet holes," "before the bullets"). What the soundscape of this poem
suggests, and what comes across so clearly in the performance, is both the anguish of the
mother and the undertaker (as indicated by way Smith modulates her voice and the way
that she moves her body on stage while performing this poem) and the ghostly echo of
the gun shot and the bullet entering the boy's skull (all the alliteration throughout the
poem). Smith's intricate rhyming is clear on the printed page. During the performance of
this poem, however, the aural witnessing that this poem articulates comes across more
clearly as Smith vocalizes the plosives in this poem, emphasizing the alliteration.
In "Scene. . .Not Heard," Houston Baker calls for a metasonic witnessing of the
Rodney King event that tell us "precisely what it sounds like to be violently scened in the
United States" (48). Throughout the performance of poems included in Close to Death,
Smith deploys poetic noise and repetition in order to do exactly that. In the performances
of these poems, the ephemeral and uncommodifiable extratextual elements--the volume
and timbre of the voice, the way that Smith uses her body on stage, improvisation, the
rapport between performer and audience--infuse the poems with an immediacy and
urgency that cannot be captured on the page, further underscoring the vital role that the
voice and the body play in witnessing these "scenes of violence." What Smith's poetry
requires of us, finally, is an attentive listening--what Baker would call a "hearing between
the lines"--in order to hear the voices that have been silenced or marginalized by
mainstream forms of public discourse.
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CHAPTER FOUR
"IF IT AIN'T A PLEASURE, IT AIN'T A POEM": BOB HOLMAN'S
DEMOCRATIC VISION, THE UNITED STATES OF POETRY, AND
THE NEW PUBLIC SPHERE
In order to be heard now, you have to shout through the
megaphone and the megaphone is a system of electronics and
technology that poets have wanted to move away from. Ever since
Plato kicked the poets out of the polis, out of the city, out of the
Republic, we've been very content to stay outside and have a
beautiful view of things. It's only that now we're so far away from
them that whatever we say can't be heard. How do you get heard in
1994? . . . That's the question. The universal remote control is
being passed into the hands of a new generation. Click! Poetry!
-Bob Holman to Canadian dub poet, Clifford Joseph, 1994 1
On the 1991 "Words in Your Face" episode of Public Television's Alive TV, Bob
Holman performs a short poem titled "The United States of Poetry." Sandwiched between
video-taped performances by Nuyorican Poets' Cafe regulars Maggie Estep and Nicole
Breedlove, this video/poem opens with a close-up shot of Holman outside an adult video
store on Manhattan's Forty-Second Street. The jittery, hand-held camera, the rapid edits,
the postproduction special effects, and the reverbating soundtrack all evoke the chaotic
din of midtown Manhattan during rush hour. As the camera pulls back from his face,
Holman, whose pork-pie hat, suit coat covered with irridescent question marks, and
sunglasses suggest a cross between a carnival crier and the Riddler from the Batman
television series, shouts: "WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES OF POETRY!" 2 He
1 Transcribed from Holman's conversation with Clifford Joseph on "Have You Heard the
Word?" (1994) an episode of T.V. Ontario's In Print series that focused on contemporary
performance poetry movement.
2 The irridescent question-mark jacket that Holman wears in this video-poem functions as
a visual cue. It references Holman's twenty-year career as a performer and an emcee and suggests
continuity between his earlier work and this video. The jacket, which was designed by Holman's
wife, artist Elizabeth Murray, is one in a series of question-mark jackets that Holman has worn in
live and recorded performances. This particular jacket is the same one that Holman wore in his
Panic DJ! performance film, a still from which is featured on the back cover of his 1995 poetry
collection, The Collect Call of the Wild. Holman wore another question mark jacket in his 1985
"Sweat&Sex&Politics!" poetry-video which was produced for Rose Lesniak's Manhattan Poetry
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then recites the first five stanzas of "Rock n' Roll Mythology," a poem he first performed
in the early-1980s as part of his Panic*DJ! rap/poetry series. As the camera follows his
movement up the street, panning past the crowd that has formed on the sidewalk and the
neon marquees advertising strip clubs, kung-fu theaters, and adult cinemas, Holman raps
[Click for Video File 2. Bob Holman: "The United States of Poetry"]:
Welcome to the United States of Poetry
I gotta ROCK N' ROLL MYTHOLOGY
I gotta Total Apocalypse Pathology
I got the most PostHysterical Poetry
& if it ain't comin' at you then it's breezed on by
I got the heavy-duty political intent
I got the worm farm free-form diamond noodle content
I got breezy ways & boppin' rays
when the word explodes the mother lode is where I'm at
& it's light here but YOU cannot see
doesn't matter any way, since you cannot breathe
you see the words mean, they're putting on the squeeze
that could strangle you--but hey, what's that mean
say what he say
say what he say
he said he say
he said he said
say what he said
go on & say he said
what'd he say he said
that's what he said
that's what he said to say
he said to say
open up the book w/ yr finger hook
& scan it w/ yr television eyes
(televisionize televisionize televisionize televisionize)
ah, stick it with your eyes
stick out yr tongue & memorize
it's just you reading
the book is breathing! 3
Like The United States of Poetry (1996), the five part poetry-video series that
takes its name from this performance, this short video-poem is a panegyric to the spoken
Video Project. The Villager's 1985 article on The Double Talk Show, a performance series that
Holman cofounded and hosted with Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri, features a photograph of
Holman in his white question-mark jacket.
3 Transcribed from Holman's 1991 performance on "Words in Your Face."
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word, a celebration of the crosscultural "multiform poetic" that Holman calls for in his
1998 essay/film journal, "Bob Holman Kicks the History of Slams." 4 The video's
extratextual elements--the booming soundtrack, the elaborately produced visuals-articulate a cultural genealogy that includes popular expressive forms such as rock n' roll
(most obviously), televangelism, vaudeville, and black vernacular culture. In this
performance, Holman reclaims poetry as a corporeal as well as a verbal art, a claim
which is reinforced by the video-poem's audiovisual field. Lines such as "open up the
book w/ yr finger hook," "scan it w/ yr television eyes," "stick out yr tongue &
memorize," the pun on "television eyes/televisionize," and the slant rhyme
"reading/breathing" in the last two lines redefine speaking, reading, listening,
memorizing, and watching as physical, as well as intellectual, activities. Moreover,
Holman's energetic profilmic performance (his gestures, facial expressions, and
blocking), the camera's movement (the close-up shots of his face and hands, the cuts
between Holman and the audience that has spontaneously gathered on the street), the
rapid edits between images, and the visual and sonic resonances between this video-poem
and Holman's Panic*DJ! performance series and The Double Talk Show evoke the
physicality and dynamism that one usually associates with the live performance. 5
I begin this chapter with a close reading/listening of this fifty-three second
performance for a number of reasons. More than any of his other video-poems, Holman's
"The United States of Poetry" enacts the synthesis of text, performance, and technology,
4 Holman addresses this point directly in an E-mail to me on January 27, 1999. In
response to my query about the relationship between his opening line in the 1991 performance
and the 1996 video-poetry series, he wrote, "It just hit me. It wasn't the whole of ["Rock N Roll
Mythology"], so I wanted to differentiate. And I just said that Welcome line. So, in a way, it was
the performance that started the whole USOP project."
5 I would like to thank Tom Comerford of the University of Iowa's Film Production
Program for helping me develop a vocabulary for analyzing the poetry videos I discuss in this
chapter. I would also like to thank Bob Holman for his generosity and patience. Without his help
this chapter could not have been written.
106
of poet and video producer, that has defined Holman's career over the past two decades. It
suggests Holman's proselytzing zeal, his desire to use what George Lipsitz has called "the
circuits of commodity production and circulation" to introduce performance poetry to a
mainstream viewing/listening audience (12). Finally, it raises questions regarding textual
authority and authenticity. Maria Damon and Achy Obejas have suggested that the
process of publication and/or recording forecloses creative processes such as
improvisation and the dialogic interaction between performer and audience by
concretizing an ephemeral, performance-based artform. 6 The existence of multiple
published/publicked versions of this poem, however, suggests that the relationship
between the live performance and the published poem is more complicated than is
allowed for in Damon's and Obejas's analyses. The product of Holman's early
collaboration with Josh Blum, his partner at Washington Square Films, and MTV music
video producer Mark Pellington, this video-poem is a truncated version of Holman's
signature performance piece, "Rock N Roll Mythology," a rap/poem which was
originally performed as part of his Panic*DJ! performance series (1980-1990). Prior to
this 1991 performance, "Rock N Roll Mythology" had been released on a forty-five in
1981, included in the 1987Panic*DJ poetry collection, and featured in the 1990 Panic
6 In "Was That Different, Dissonant, or Dissident?", Maria Damon writes:
The question of whether to publish arises for slammers and oral poets. Like
Nagy's medieval trouvéres("discoverers") their work ends when something is
definitively cast in print; and there's a reasonable desire to forestall closure on a
creative process: invention and reinvention, improvisation, performance,
competition, and other interactive modes. (336)
Achy Obejas offers a similar argument in "What? Me Publish?", her newspaper article on
the crossover from performance to publication in Chicago's performance poetry community. For
further discussion of performance, publication, and authenticity, see the introduction to this study.
107
DJ! film. 7 Moreover, since this video-poem aired on PBS, a second version of this same
five-stanza excerpt was broadcast on MTV's Spoken Word Unplugged (1994) series
under the title "Welcome to the United States of Poetry" and a performance of all
eighteen stanzas was included on the Poetry in Motion II CD-ROM (1995). 8 "Rock N
Roll Mythology" was also included in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the
seminal alternative poetry collection that Holman coedited with the Café's founder,
Miguel Algarín, and in The Collect Call of the Wild (1995), Holman's first poetry
collection to be published by a major publishing house.
Like the epigraph that opens this chapter, "The United States of Poetry" videopoem performs Holman's desire to use electronic technology to construct an alternative
public sphere, one that is articulated via the shared cultural space of the media.
Throughout this video-poem, Holman claims the television as a counterpoetic space, the
virtual equivalent of the bar, the coffeehouse, the streetcorner. The resonances between
this performance and his live shows, the camera pan of the crowd gathered on the street,
and the spontaneous, Whitmanesque opening line all invoke a postliterate poetic
community, a nation of poets that is bound together by the networks of reproduction and
transmission rather than through direct interaction between performer and audience,
audience member and audience member. In so doing, Holman not only expands the
cultural relevancy of poetry; he expands that of television and, by extension, other media
as well.
Holman addresses his poetic/political project directly in his 1998 interview when
he states, "Russian poets read to audiences of ten thousand or more, Leopold Senghor
7 Variations Panic*DJ!, Panic*DJ!, Panic*DJ, and Panic DJ! reflect the variant spellings
that Holman uses for the live performance, the audio cassette, the published volume, and the film
respectively.
8 The performance of "Rock N' Roll Mythology" that was included on the Poetry in
Motion CD-ROM was filmed in 1981 at the St. Marks benefit performance series at the Ukranian
National Home in Manhattan.
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founds Senegal, Ho Chih Minh leads Viet Nam, seven of the nine Sandinista leaders are
published poets. Poetry can be in the world, and in the U.S. that means taking on
technology and media and propelling the poem, just as Mayakovsky demanded"
(Interview with the author). "Words in Your Face," the poetry-video show on which "The
United States of Poetry" first aired, exemplifies the role that the electronic media can play
in the proliferation of counterpoetic movements such as the poetry slam, words n' music,
or spoken word. The episode first aired on Alive TV in 1991 and again in 1994 as part of
the series' tenth aniversary show. The series also continues to be disseminated and used
as a teaching tool in schools, prisons, and community centers around the country. By
virtue of its multiple broadcasts on national air time on PBS and its dissemination via
video tape, this half-hour poetry-video show has reached a larger, more geographically
and economically diverse audience than the live poetry events it references. As such, it
makes manifest Holman's poetic vision, his desire to transcend the local community and
his commitment to use the electronic media to reestablish poetry's place in the polis.
The goal of this chapter, then, is twofold. It is first and foremost an attempt to
document Holman's two-decade career as a poet and a self-described poetry activist and
contextualize his work at the interface of print, performance, and technology within the
contemporary performance poetry movement. It is also an attempt to address the
ambiguous role that postliterate technologies such as the World Wide Web, the CD
player, and the VCR play in the evolution and proliferation of this counterpoetic
movement. Given Holman's experiments in the emergent genres of poetry-video, poetry
CDs, and poetry web pages and his fifteen-year career as a video producer and record
executive, his work suggests new ways of understanding the place of poetry and the poet
in postmodern culture. It also complicates the relationship between place, performance,
and community building that I explore in earlier chapters of this study. As Holman points
out in his manifesto/introduction to Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe,
technologies such as the personal computer, the modem, the video camera, and the
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mixing board have revolutionized the ways in which poems are composed, performed,
and received. 9 These technologies have also radically altered how poets define their
relationship to a specific place (a city, a neighborhood, a performance venue) and a
specific poetic community (both other poets and their audience).
In Performing Rites, Simon Frith discusses how new technologies shape
vernacular culture. He draws on Charles Keil's work on the influence that the rise of radio
and the recording industry had on emergent musical forms such as polka and the blues
and analyzes the role that these technologies played in the spread of popular music.
Reversing the conventional wisdom regarding vernacular culture's crossover into the
mainstream, Frith states, ". . . rather than a 'folk' style developing 'naturally,' as it were,
out of sight and hearing of the media until it becomes too big or noisy to be ignored (the
supposed rock 'n' roll story, for example), it actually develops in the soundscape mapped
by the media." (232) Frith's argument is significant because it suggests a way around
questions of technological reproduction and authenticity that I reference earlier. As he
goes on to argue, both the performer's and the audience's aesthetic sensibilities were
transformed by these new media. According to Frith, these early recordings, rather than
recreating or representing the live performance, articulated another aesthetic, one that
was shaped by the recording and editing processes:
The basic point here is that in popular (unlike classical) forms, live
and recorded practices are not necessarily seeking to realize the
"same music" (even if people's expectations about what a band can
and should do may carry over from one form into the other--one of
the great pleasures of a pop concert is hearing the "hits": songs
with which we have a long and sometimes profound intimacy
suddenly sound both just the same and quite different). There is a
9 See Holman's statement, "It's the nineties! Poems are being written with television
cameras, composed in recording studios, downloaded via computer networks. . . "(2). Marjorie
Perloff offers a similar, albeit more ambivalent, argument in Radical Artifice, her study on poetry
in the media age. In her preface she writes, "There is no landscape uncontaminated by sound
bytes or computer blips, no mountain peak or lonely valley beyond the reach of the cellular phone
and the microcassette player. Increasingly, then, the poet's arena is the electronic world . . . "
(xiii).
110
sense . . . in which the record in popular music takes on the role of
the score in art musics--as a kind of register of what the music is
ideally--but then the music's live performance takes on its own
value as a unique, audience-involving contingent experience. (233)
Frith's claim that the ascendancy of radio and recording technologies in the early
part of the century resulted in two different aesthetic paradigms for popular music proves
useful for understanding Holman's work with emergent technologies and poetry. His
argument suggests that when faced with these dual aesthetics, the existing critical
vocabulary is inadequate. Frith's work on technology and vernacular cultures also raises
questions regarding the nexus of the political and the aesthetic in the live performance.
Paul Gilroy, bell hooks, and Peggy Phelan have argued that the live performance is
politically subversive because it is an unrepeatable event that exists outside of and in
opposition to the processes of reproduction and commodification. 10 However, Frith's
discussion of how completely electronic technologies have shaped vernacular musical
forms over the past century suggests that the issue of technology, reproduction,
commodification, and depoliticization is perhaps more complex. How is the political
efficacy of such events as the poetry slam, a poetry/music ensemble performance, or an
open mic night transformed when it is disassociated from a specific place and audience
and rearticulated via the "cultural space" of the electronic media? What is lost in the
process of reproduction and commodification? What previously unimaginable aesthetic
innovations and political alliances do these processes of reproduction and distribution
10 See, for instance, Phelan's comments regarding the live performance in Chapter Seven
of Unmarked, Gilroy's work on black performance in "'. . . To Be Real': The Dissident Forms of
Black Expressive Culture," and hooks's discussion of the political significance of live
performance in the black community in "Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition." Chicago
slam poet Dan Ferri addressed the issue of commodification and depoliticization in a
conversation with me at a showing of Paul Devlin's SlamNation at the Freedom Gallery, 1998
Slammasters' Meeting in Chicago, IL. Responding to my queries about Bob Holman's work with
poetry and video, Ferri said, "Television is not a community. If you want to see a real poetic
community, come down to the Green Mill on a Sunday afternoon." To read more about the
divisions within the Slam Family Collective regarding the slam and commodification, see
Chapter One.
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create? Keeping these questions in mind, I would like to turn to a discussion of Holman's
career as a poet and a poetry activist.
From Plain White Rapper to Panic*DJ!: Bob Holman,
Postmodern Technology, and the Construction of a
Counterpoetic Tradition
Bob Holman's work at the interface of poetry, performance, and electronic media
exemplifies the blurring of literary and vernacular culture, of the page, the stage, and the
recording studio. The most prolific of the four poets discussed in this dissertation,
Holman has played an integral role in shaping the contemporary poetic landscape, both in
the United States and abroad. He began performing his poetry in New York's poetry
haunts in the late 1960s and over the past twenty-five years, he has published six poetry
collections; co-edited Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; and recorded a
forty-five, two audio cassettes, a CD, two poetry-videos, and a poetry-film. Like the other
poets discussed in this study, he has been influenced by contemporary theater,
specifically Neighborhood Playhouse Method as taught by Sid Kay and Open Theater
techniques as taught by Steven Gilborn. He has written, adapted, and/or directed plays for
the Poets Theater, Eye and Ear Theater, and the Shaliko Theater. He has coordinated
reading series for St. Mark's Poetry Project, the Whitney Museum, and the Public
Theater; founded two travelling poetry troupes; and founded and emceed a number of
poetry shows, including The Double Talk Show, the Poets in the Bars series, and The
Ayatollah's Granola/Rap Meets Poetry series. 11 Holman founded the Friday night poetry
11 Holman worked with the Poets Theater Workshop (1975-1989); ran the Monday night
reading series at St. Mark's Poetry Project (1977-1980); and served as St. Mark's project
coordinator along with Bernadette Mayer (1980-1984). The Double Talk Show ran from 1985 to
1987; the Poet in the Bars performance series ran from 1988 to 1989; Rap Meets Poetry ran from
1995 to present. POET (Poets' Overland Expeditionary Troupe), a traveling poetry troupe he
founded with fellow CETA poets Rolando Legiardi-Laura and Pedro Pietri, toured the state of
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slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in 1989 (he brought the slam to New York after
attending the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill Lounge in Chicago in September
1987), an event he hosted for seven years. 12 He has twice served as Master of
Ceremonies at the World Heavyweight Poetry Championship Bout at the Taos Poetry
Circus (once in 1995 and again in 1996), and in 2000 will battle Sherman Alexie as the
Challenger. In 1998 he was commissioned to write a birthday poem for the fiftieth
anniversary of the Frankfurt Bookfair in Frankfurt, Germany, which became his fourpoet, polyglot "SemiCento." [Click for Appendix C: Bob Holman Bibliography,
Discography, and Videography 1976-2000]
The Double Talk Show and the Panic*DJ! performance series presage Holman's
later interest in synthesizing poetry with the "multilayered technologies" of television and
the record industry. These two performance poetry projects reflect Holman's multimedia
poetics, a poetry-technology hybrid that developed inside the audiovisual landscape of
media/entertainment products such as the television talk show, the pop music album, and
the concert film/rockumentary. The Double Talk Show (1985-1987), the live poetry
performance series that Holman cofounded with fellow CETA poet Reverend Pedro
Pietri, satirized late-night television talk shows such as The Tonight Show or Late Night
with David Letterman. 13 Subtitled "The Only Television Talk Show Not on T.V.," this
New York in 1981. At present, Holman serves as the artistic director of the Real Live Poetry
touring troupe.
12 During Holman's tenure as emcee, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe became the most famous
slam venue in the United States. According to Kurt Heintz, Holman's departure from the Cafe
was instigated by the Cafe's board of directors, who wished to reaffirm the cafe's focus on Latino
arts and culture. For a discussion of Holman's role as slam ambassador and founder of the Friday
night slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, see Kurt Heintz's An Incomplete History of the Poetry
Slam. See also "Bob Holman Kicks the History of Slams" in Slam, the companion book to the
1998 movie of the same name, and Schmid, "Spreading the Word: A History of the Poetry Slam,"
in The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1970-2000.
13 CETA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1975-1982), was a
federally funded employment program which was founded in order to provide unemployed or
underemployed workers with job retraining. The State of New York set up the CETA Artists
113
performance series blurred the boundary between poetry and popular culture, the poet
and the audience, and the live event and the recorded performance. The series, which was
cohosted by Holman (in character as the Plain White Rapper) and Pietri, integrated the
T.V. variety-show format with the absurdist style of Dada cabaret performances. It
included performances by featured poets and bands and "premiers" of poetry-videos, as
well as guest appearances from "Walt Whitman," "Emily Dickinson" (who appeared on
various shows to write Valentine's Day poems for the other guest poets and to discuss her
lovelife--or lack thereof--with the audience), and "Vladimir Mayakovsky." 14
The Double Talk Show's two-year run coincides with Marc Smith's early
experiments with poetry and performance, including his founding of the Uptown Poetry
Slam at the Green Mill Lounge in Chicago. Although Holman did not attend his first slam
until 1988, The Double Talk Show reflects a similar emphasis on the aesthetics of
Program at the Cultural Council Foundation as a means to employ artists and writers by setting up
residencies in schools and community organizations. The program was defunded in 1982 when it
was replaced by Senator Dan Quayle's brainchild, the JPTA (Jobs Program Training Act). In an
E-mail to the author dated June 9, 1999, Holman provides a short history of the local CETA
artists' program, describing the role it had in shaping his career, when he writes:
There were 350 artists in the program: dancers, painters, poets, musicians,
theater, the gamut. We met as a group every two weeks to get paid, and there I
made lasting friendships, collaborators across the genres. Marc Levin, the
director of Slam. Pedro Pietri, who introduced me to the inner workings of the
[Nuyorican Poets] Cafe. . . Rolando Legiardi-Laura, who would end up being a
co-director at the Cafe. Dana Reitz and Kenneth King, dancers I worked with. . . .
Of course, because the country in '77 was still so polarized from VietNam that I'd
never have mentioned that I was "working for the Feds." But still, CETA showed
me that Federal Arts funding could work, that I could work (arts administering,
etc.), and that there was a place for poetry in the culture, as long as it didn't cost
anything.
14The series featured poets included Amiri Baraka, Jessica Hagedorn, Quincy Troupe,
and Miguel Algarín. One of the early shows in the series featured a showing of Holman's first
video-poem,"Sweat&Sex&Politics!," Anne Waldman's video-poem, "Uh Oh, Plutonium," and
Allen Ginsberg's video-poem "Father Death Blues," all three of which were included in the
Manhattan Poetry Video Project (1985). These video-poems were produced by poet/video artist
Rose Lesniak, who also produced The Double Talk Show. For further discussion of these video
poems, see Holman's endnotes to The Collect Call of the Wild, 152.
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performance and a healthy irreverance for what Charles Bernstein has termed "official
verse culture." 15 Moreover, like other performance poetry projects with which he has
been involved, The Double Talk Show emphasized what Holman has described
elsewhere as the democratizing force of "audience interactivity." 16 Newspaper reviews
and fliers from the show describe performances in which audience members are
transformed from passive spectators into active participants. As with Marc Smith's
Uptown Poetry Slam where audience participation is a necessary component of the
performance, The Double Talk Show encouraged audience involvement in the show via
cue cards that instructed the audience to "Laugh," "Applaud," or "Heckle>" As such, The
Double Talk Show exemplifies what I have theorized in Chapter One as the role of the
performance in the articulation of a ritualized counterpoetic sphere. 17
15 In APoetics, Charles Bernstein uses the term "official verse culture" to describe poetry
that in both form and content reinforces "coercive economic and political hierarchies" (6). He
goes on to define official verse culture as a poetic system that "edits out" or marginalizes poetic
voices that do not reproduce the dominant culture's world view. For a more developed discussion
of official verse culture, see "State of the Art," the chapter that opens Apoetics.
16 In his June 29, 1999 column for the Mining Co.'s poetry page, Holman defines the
democratizing force of "audience interactivity" as one of the most important legacies of the
poetry slam movemment. This column is devoted to the upcoming history of the National Grand
Slam. It includes Holman's "The Top 10 Things That Blew My Mind About Slam Ten Years Ago
And Which Continue To Today," which index the ways in which the poetry slam has
revolutionized the contemporary poetic landscape. Number seven on the list reads, " Audience
interactivity is encouraged. The audience is part of the show. Heckles are poems. Democratizing"
(www.poetry.about.com/library/weekly/aa062999). Marc Smith makes similar point in his
"Slampapi's Slam Philosophy," when he states, "The purpose of poetry (and indeed all art) [is] not
to glorify the poet but rather to celebrate the community to which the poet belongs" (www.
slampapi.com/slamphil.htm).
17 My research on The Double Talk Show emphasizes some of the difficulty facing
literary historians who want to document these ephemeral performance events. There have been
no previous scholarly articles published about these events, so much of my information on The
Double Talk Show comes from Holman's unpublished notes and fliers for and newspaper articles
about the show that he sent me. Other sources include Bob Holman's E-mail to me, dated June 15,
1999; Timothy McDarrah's "This East Village Talk Show Is Done Without a Camera;" The New
York Times' "Going Out Guide" for Saturday, April 6, 1985; and Jeffrey Wright's "There's No Biz
Like Po Biz."
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While The Double Talk Show synthesized poetry and television (an interest that
Holman returns to with such projects as WNYC-TV's interstitial Poetry Spots, the
"Words in Your Face" poetry video series for Twin Cities Public Television, and The
United States of Poetry series), projects such as his Panic*DJ! audio cassette and film
and his poetry CD, In With the Out Crowd, emphasize the influence that the popular
music industry in general and the hip-hop revolution specifically has had on Holman's
poetry. 18 Holman, who also performed under the stage name The Plain White Rapper,
began touring and performing as the Panic*DJ! in 1980. In 1984, he recorded his
SWEAT&SEX&POLITICS!, an audio cassette that included the title track and "(The New)
Death Valley Days," both of which are rap/poems from his Panic*DJ! performances. This
was followed with the publication of Panic*DJ(1987), a "script" of the poems, raps, and
songs from the performance series, which--according to the text's endnotes--is to be
treated as a template for the creation of the reader's own Panic*DJ! performance rather
than as a definitive record of Holman's work. 19 In 1988, Holman's Panic Productions
18 In a quote in "Sudden Def," Henry Louis Gates's article on the Rap Meets Poetry
series, Holman discusses the impact that the hip-hop revolution had his work. Referring back an
experience on the dance floor of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the early 1980s, Holman states:
I stopped dead, because I was listening to a poem you could dance to. I was
hearing Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks," and it was so clear to me that these words
were a poem. There was music, but there was no singing. He was talking. . . . The
form was a densely rhymed, highly rhythmic, densely verbal construct that
played off all the vernaculars" (in Gates 35).
Holman reiterates this point in the endnotes to "1990," a poem from his final Panic DJ
performance which was published in Collect Call of the Wild. In this endnote Holman describes
the impetus behind his decade-long Panic DJ performance series as his "work in defining 'Rap is
poetry'--in using musical accompaniment to set a poem familiarly into the ear" (155-156).
19 In an endnote to Panic*DJ, Holman provides instructions for constructing your own
Panic DJ performance. According to Holman,
A PANIC*DJ! performance can be devised by making a selection from these
works that integrates "RegPo" and "PerfPo," as Ed Sanders has dubbed regular
and performance poetries. Arrange them in a form as comfortable and exciting to
the performer as it is entertaining and enlightening to the audience. (90)
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produced Panic*DJ! audio cassette and in 1990 he collaborated with Carl Teitelbaum of
Five Quarters Productions on the rockumentary-style Panic DJ! performance film. The
final Panic*DJ! performance took place at the Great Hall at Cooper Union in 1990.
However, Holman has included new arrangements of several of his Panic*DJ! rap/poems
on his CD In With the Out Crowd (1998). 20
Holman's Panic*DJ! performances reflect what Dick Hebdidge has named a cutand-mix aesthetic, the integrating of musical phrases and lyrics sampled from a variety of
sources. These live and recorded performances, which include some combination of
Holman on vocals, music and backup vocals by Vito Ricci (who also collaborated with
Holman and Pietri on The Double Talk Show) and Jon Mann on the DMX drum machine,
integrate hip-hop rhythms and rhyme schemes with references to/samples from Surrealist
and Dada poets (as in "Sex & Sweat & Politics"); reggae, rock n' roll, and country musics
(as in "Pasta Mon", "Levitatin' in Levittown" and "I'd Rather Be Crazy Than Stupid");
and the Nicaraguan Modernismo and Vanguardismo poetic movements (see for instance,
"Ode to Rubñén Darío," "It Is Time," and "Massaya"). Moreover, the Panic*DJ!
performances, like the rap songs from which they draw their impetus, fuse vernacular
culture with contemporary technology. As such, they exemplify what Tricia Rose has
theorized as "postliterate orality" (85). Drawing on Walter Ong's groundbreaking work on
secondary orality, Rose writes:
. . . [Ong's] conceptualization of postliterate orality is an innovative
analytical tool for understanding contemporary developments in
African-American culture. The concept of postliterate orality
merges orally influenced traditions that are created and embedded
in a postliterate, technologically sophisticated cultural context.
Postliterate orality describes the way oral traditions are revised and
presented in a technologically sophisticated context. It also has the
capacity to explain the way literate-based technology is made to
articulate sounds, images and practices associated with orally
based forms. (86)
20 For a brief discussion of that last performance and the rationale behind the Panic*DJ!'s
retirement, see Holman's endnote for "1990" in Collect Call of the Wild, 155-156.
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Rose goes on to argue that postliterate forms such as rap, which are informed by black
vernacular traditions and integrate digital samples from other musical and popular culture
sources, challenge the "institutional apparatuses that define property, technological
innovation, and authorship" (85). Although significant to Holman's Panic*DJ!
performances, the aesthetic and political implications of postliterate technology and
collaboration will be particularly important in my discussion of Holman's work as a
record and video producer in the final section of this chapter.
Holman's performance of "Sex & Sweat & Politics" from the Panic DJ! film
exemplifies this deliberate fusion of orality and technology. "Sex & Sweat & Politics" is
(along with "Rock N' Roll Mythology" and "The Impossible Rap") one of his signature
performance pieces from the Panic*DJ! performance series. Like these other poems, this
rap/poem has been made public via live performance, audio and video recordings, and
print. "Sex & Sweat & Politics," a version of which was recorded for the Manhattan
Poetry Video Project's Rapp It Up! poetry-video festival, was originally published as a
limited edition chapbook in 1984, the same year that it was released as an audio casette.
Like other poems from his Panic*DJ! peformances, it was included in Holman's
Panic*DJ collection and was reprinted in The Collect Call of the Wild. In 1988, Holman
performed Amparo Leon's translation of this poem at the Ruben Dario festival in
Managua, Nicaragua. In this poem Holman integrates the bass line from Vito Ricci's
electric guitar, the rhythm line from a DMX (an early drum machine) with lyrics that
reference black vernacular culture, Dada, and the Bible and articulates a new rap-spoken
word hybrid, one that, in his words, "us[es] musical accompaniment to set a poem
familiarly into the ear" (Collect Call of the Wild 156) [Click for Video File 3. Bob
Holman: "Sweat & Sex & Politics!"]:
Sweat & sex & politics.
Sweat & sex & politics?
Sweat & sex & politics!
That's the way I get my kicks!
Thought is made in the mouth
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You don't think of it--until you rap it out
You gotta raprap till everything gets said
You gotta raprap--are you living in yr head?
Pondering, wandering
Floundering aroundering
Communicate! Reciprocate!
Conversate! Don't hesitate.
In the beginning . . . was the Rap!
Get the beat with the beat
That's the beat beat beat
Quietude, solitude
Gratitude to multitude
Yr mama's calling up to you
She wants to do--what'd she say to do?-Rap it up!
(Collect Call of the Wild 34)
Like David Hernández, whose work is discussed in Chapter Two, Holman's
development as a poet-activist and a performer is inseparable from his involvement in
grassroots oppositional movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, specifically the
antiwar movement at Columbia University during his years as a student there and the
student rebellions in Paris in 1968. 21 Rap/poems such as "The Impossible Rap," his antifascist protest poem which explores "how fascism begins at home"; "1990,"which
documents the major political events of the late-twentieth century, including Nelson
Mandela's release from prison, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen Square
uprising, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and protests American cultural
21 In an E-mail to me dated July 20, 1999, Holman documents the connection between
his poetic and political development. Describing how he became involved in the Big Mouth Poets
for Peace, he writes:
[It was] a natural progression from my radicalization at Columbia and Paris in
'68--to commune--to St. Marks, where Artists Call (with Kimiko Hahn at the
helm) held readings. Also, the Poetry Calendar linked us all. Roland LegiardiLaura had been a CETA poet and we kepts the Words to Go troupe from there
alive with P.O.E.T. (Poets' Overland Expeditionary Troop) till Roland split for
Nicaragua to make his sensational poetry film, Azul. Upon his return I fundraised
to get Diane Burns and Pedro Pietri to join with eight other poets and invade
Nicaragua.
To read a more thorough analysis of the position of poetry vis-a-vis politics in the 1960s and 70s,
see Cary Nelson's Our Last First Poets, especially the first chapter, and James Sullivan's On the
Walls and in the Streets. Both of these books are discussed in the introduction to this study.
119
imperialism and the effect of global capitalism on developing nations; and his translation
of José Coronel Urtecho's "Ode to Rubén Darío" reflect the effect that these radical
political movements have had on his poetry. 22
Holman's involvement in political/poetic performance events throughout the
early- and mid-1980s underscores they ways in which the live performance can intervene
in the public sphere. In 1984, Holman and Ricci integrated a voter registration drive into
their Panic DJ performance for the Countdown the Countdowns [sic] event at PS 1. 23
Moreover, during their tenure as hosts of The Double Talk Show, Holman and Pietri
organized and/or participated in a number of political events, including Hearings Aid, a
benefit event to raise money for the Lower East Side Hearings, and The Big Mouth Poets
for Peace in Central America readings, which raised funds to bring the Sandafarian poet
Carlos Rigby to the United States to read.
22 Holman addresses the antifascist message of "The Impossible Rap" in both the
endnotes for The Collect Call of the Wild and in the liner notes for In With the Out Crowd.
Holman debuted "1990" at his final Panic*DJ! performance in 1990. This long poem, which
suggested the working title for the manuscript that was later published as The Collect Call of the
Wild is written in an antiphonal structure--verses separated by the chorus "It's 1990/& Nelson
Mandela is free!" Holman's translation of "Ode to Rubén Darío,"Urtecho's tribute to the founding
father of the Modernismo movement, is just one of the poems from the Panic*DJ! performance
series that protests the United States' continued repression of the Sandanista revolution in
Nicaragua. Others include "Masaya," "Night," "It Is Time," "Barrio Edgard Mungia," and
"Bluefields," all of which were written while Holman was in Nicaragua in 1986. For an
explanation of the political impetus behind these poems, see the endnotes to Panic*DJ and The
Collect Call of the Wild.
23 For a discussion of the Countdown the Countdowns performance see the endnotes to
"Due to the Political Nature of this Piece/Please applaud Now" in Panic*DJ.
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Figure 2 Fliers from the Double Talk Show and The Big Mouth Poets for Peace
As a result of his work with the Big Mouth Poets, Holman also organized a
fundraiser/reading to send poets from the U.S. to perform in Nicaragua. In 1986, The Big
Mouth Poets for Peace "invaded" Nicaragua and performed at the Rubén Darío Festival
in Managua, where Holman performed a translation of his rap/poem "Sweat & Sex &
Politics!" 24 These political/performance events reflect Holman's desire to use the
performance to forge new coalitions of resistance across ethnic, class, and national
boundaries, a desire he articulates in his foreword to Poetry Nation when he describes
performance poetry as "a grenade to borders between generations, gender, sexual
orientation, race, class, formal training, academic degrees, aesthetics" (23). These events
also reflect his ongoing commitment to reclaiming poetry's place in the national
consciousness.
24 For information on Holman's visit to Nicaragua and his performance in Managua, see
the endnotes to "Sweat & Sex & Politics!" and "Masaya" in Panic*DJ. See also his endnotes to
"Sweat & Sex & Politics!" and "Night" in The Collect Call of the Wild and his "Roland LegiardiLaura Interview" in BOMB.
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Holman addresses the interface of performance and political action in "57
Gazillion Lung-Tongue Varieties." This poem, which is dedicated to poet/activist Bob
Carroll, takes its title from a line from a version of Mayakovsky's Mystery Bouffe that
Holman wrote for the Shaliko Theater Company. 25 Holman included this poem in the "I
Can't Believe It's Not a Poem!" section of his 1995 Collect Call of the Wild and, like the
other poems collected in this section, "57 Gazillion Lung-Tongue Varieties" draws on the
audiovisual landscape of information age technologies such as the television, the personal
computer, and the modem. 26 A recent performance of this poem is also included on the
Poets of Generation X poetry video under the title/homage to Bob Marley "Get Up! Stand
Up!". In this poem, Holman explores the relationship between a nation's cultural
production and its collective identity:
Hey US!
Get up!
Stand up!
Pay up
The Bill of Writes!
Hey, Poets!
Time to fill up
Swirling Void Hole
At empty center
Of National Consciousness Doughnut!
Our Whole's got a hole in it!
From which Soul of the Nation is leaking-25 Mayakovsky finished his first draft of Mystery Bouffe, which he wrote to
commemorate the October Revolution, in October of 1918. It was first produced at Meyerhold's
theater in Moscow. The play, written entirely in verse, synthesizes the medieval morality play and
Futurist theater and portrays a Bolshevik utopia where the workers inherit a new paradise on
earth. Given his own interest in the synthesis of the poetic and the political, it is easy to
understand why this play would have captured Holman's attention. For a discussion of this poem's
genesis, see the endnotes to "57 Gazillion Lung-Tongue Varieties" in The Collect Call of the
Wild, 157.
26 Other poems included in this final section of Collect Call of the Wild include "What
You Can't Understand Is Poetry Is Connected to the Body Again," a poem dedicated to Chicago
slam poet and video artist Jean Howard; "The Head of Kovacs," which, according to Holman's
endnote to the poem, was commissioned by "TV producer and friend Diggins" to run at the head
of Ernie Kovacs Show reruns on a New York cable channel (156); and "Deacon," an elegy to
Deacon Lunchbox, one of the poets who appeared on the "Words in Your Face" episode that
Holman co-produced for PBS's Alive TV series.
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Hey, US!
It's time to Re-soul!
Poets of the World, re-write!
Rewrite History as
57 Gazillion
Lung-Tongue
Varieties
Crack the dazed
The bored
The goofed-off with
The dazzling,
The boring as in "Laser-zapping,"
Collaborative, co-conspiritorial
Chchch turn the beat around
And stick to it, Love Magnet!
I will now read you your 1st Ammendment Writes, to wit:
"This imminently transferrable,
Readily assumable Poetic License
Is yours immediately free-for-all,
But-You gotta speak it up to keep it up!
You have the Right to Noisy!"
(Uh, I don't uh really unnerstand. What is it exactly?)
"Tag, you are it!"
Japan's annual Tree Poem celebration of
Everybody writes Tree Poems.
Tree Poem seeds, planted in brains,
Nurtured through arborious fertilizing rituals.
Citizens read "Trees in Poems' Breeze,"
Chchch returning leaves to trees they sprang from.
In US,
We sing rock'n'opera in the shower.
Who's all wet?
This just in: News Bullet-in,
Name of country chchchchanges
To United States of Poetry!
Creates CD-ROM instaccess to Who We Are!
Physicallizes First Amendment Rites!
Guarantees Po-for-All! 57 Gazillion Varieties
Of newly-free voices raised as one
From top shelves of Dust Museums!
Poets of the US, Rewrite!
You have nothing to lose but your place in line
At the Unified Lifetime Checkout Counter
(Collect Call of the Wild 121-123, author's emphasis)
Written in disjunctive, staccato lines that suggest the experience of channel
surfing or scrolling through hits on a search engine, "57 Gazillion Lung-Tongue
Varieties" enacts the post-Personism poetics that Holman calls for in his
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invocation/introduction to Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. 27 And like that
short essay, this poem reclaims poetry as an exoteric, revolutionary artform. It is, as the
"Get up!/Stand up!" of the first stanza suggests, a call to action. The poem opens with a
description of a national identity crisis, the "Swirling Void Hole/at empty center/of
National Consciousness Doughnut." Throughout the poem Holman recruits his
auditor/readers into a nationwide grassroots poetry movement, one that brings together
poets from diverse ethnic, racial, and language groups in order to create a hybrid poetic
tradition and a new national identity (reflected in the image of the Heinz fifty-seven
combination of languages and cultures). He confers poetic licenses on these new
crosscultural recruits and exhorts them to give up their role as passive consumers and
become active participants in this process of political and poetic renewal.
This poem insists on the political efficacy of the speech act. Lines such as "You
gotta speak it up to keep it up!/You have a Right to Noisy!" and ". . .57 Gazillion
Varieties/Of newly-free voices raised as one" and the pun on writes/rites/rights that runs
throughout the poem suggest that the acts of writing and performing poetry are the
ultimate manifestations of the First Ammendment. In the penultimate stanza, Holman
revisits to the political/poetic vision that he first introduced in his 1991 "The United
States of Poetry" video-poem. He envisions a nation of poets connected to one another
via networks of circulation and distribution such as CD-ROMs, videotapes, and the
World Wide Web and celebrates the heterotopic potential of these poetry-technology
hybrids. Keeping in mind Holman's interest in postliterate technologies, the
27 Holman directly addresses the influence of Frank O'Hara's work on postliterate
poetries in his 1998 interview with me when he states: "In 'Personism: A Manifesto' O'Hara
predicts that the invention of the telephone marks the end of poetry as we know it. Now all you
have to do is call the person up and read the poem to them! It's not the tension, it's the lack of
tension, that made the voice the fullest transmitter of the poem at the Cafe, or at the full-tilt
Ginsberg perf, or a Fugs performance." Moreover, the title of Holman's most recent poetry collect
(Collect Call of the Wild) as well as the inclusion of poems such as "Creeley's Answering
Machine" suggests a debt to O'Hara's manifesto and audiotechnology in general.
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physicalization of politics, and the construction of a shared national identity, I would like
to turn to a discussion of "Words in Your Face" and The United States of Poetry, the
video-poetry series that Holman and his partner Josh Blum produced for PBS.
One Nation Under the Groove: Washington Square Films
and the Construction of a Virtual Public Sphere
My work as a producer is part of my job as poet.
-Bob Holman, Interview with the author, 1998
Poetry should be at least as interesting as, and a whole lot more
unexpected than, television.
--Charles Bernstein, Apoetics, 1992
At some point a poetry video--this won't happen in our lifetime-will cease to be called a poetry video. Just like a poem on the page
at one point was called the written poem. Eventually that just
became the poem. And I think that will happen with video, too. . . .
[T]here might come a time when a poet would be sitting there
reading and all of a sudden say, "Hey, how come there's not more
light over there?"
--Bob Holman from Hyphen's "I See a Voice!" roundtable
interview, 1995
"Words in Your Face" and The United States of Poetry, Holman's most recent
forays into poetry-video, exemplify the "collaborationist, co-conspiratorial" performancebased poetics that he calls for in the above poem. The product of Holman's partnership
with Josh Blum and MTV-video producer Mark Pellington, these two poetry-video series
emphasize the role that postliterate technologies have played in shaping the contemporary
performance poetry movement. These two series emphasize what Ron Silliman has
described as the distinction between poetry scenes and networks. In The New Sentence,
Silliman addresses the social economy of poetry. Describing the poetic communities that
develop on the edges of the American economy, he writes, ". . .the social organization of
contemporary poetry occurs in two primary structures: the network and the scene" (28,
author's emphasis). The difference between these two poetic structures is fuzzy (Silliman
describes them as "fluid and fragile"). The major distinction that Silliman draws between
the two has to do with the relationship between the poetic community and location: the
scene is, in Silliman's words "specific to place" while the network is "transgeographic."
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Because they are, along with Bill Moyer's Voices and Visions, the only poetry-video
series to achieve national viewing audiences, these two series introduce a diverse range of
poetic voices and styles to a large, geographically dispersed viewing audience. Moreover,
like hip-hop, the poetry slam, and the other spoken word forms that served as an impetus
for their production, these two shows reclaim poetry as a dynamic, culturally relevant art
form.
Like Holman's other multimedia poetry projects, "Words" syncretizes a variety of
expressive forms, from slam poetry to rap, avant-garde art, and music video. As I
mentioned in the opening section of this chapter, "Words" first aired on PBS in 1991.
"Words" was directed by ex-MTV video producer and music video director Mark
Pellington and the show references an MTV-video aesthetic in order to capture the
vitality of this performance-based poetry. 28 The half-hour long show included twenty
poetry-videos, most of which run between one or two minutes and are much shorter than
the typical music video. The show was hosted by ex-front-man for Black Flag turned
spoken word artist Henry Rollins and loosely follows the format of an MTV music video
show such as Buzz (also created by Pellington) or Yo! MTV Raps. Like these poetrymusic shows, "Words" intersperses poetry videos with Rollins's commentary, short clips
from interviews with the poets, and P.O.V. (Point of View) segments, which feature the
average man or woman on the street. The similarities between the spoken word
movement and popular music is underscored by the show's edgy style--the rapid edits
between images, the show's soundtrack (which includes a driving electric guitar riff), and
the exhortations to "turn up the volume and play it loud."
28 Pellington began working at MTV as a producer in the mid-1980s. During his tenure
there, he createdBuzz (1988-present) and 120 Minutes (1986-present), two of the network's most
popular music-video shows. He has directed short films and music videos for De La Soul, Alice
in Chains, Jon Bon Jovi, and Pearl Jam. In 1993, he was awarded the MTV Best Video of the
Year award for the music video for Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" (1992). In 1997, he directed Going All
the Way, a feature-length indie film that was shown at Sundance Film Festival in 1997. His first
feature-length film for a major Hollywood studio, Arlington Road was released in spring 1999.
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Unlike its more encyclopedic successor, "Words" documents the fusion of styles
and rhythms associated with the poetry scene at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe during the
mid- to late-1980s. In his 1996 essay, "Welcome to the United States of Poetry," Holman
traces the episode's genesis back to his tenure as emcee of the Cafe's Friday Night Poetry
Slam. Recalling his first meeting with Josh Blum, Holman writes:
When Josh walked into the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe in spring 1990,
collaring me at the Slam to say that "this ought to be on TV," he
set in motion an extraordinary chain of events. . . . From Josh's and
my connection came a demo "Smokin' Word." . . . MTV turned it
down (although allowing, "We think you're right. Meaning is
making a comeback. Content will be big in the 90s. but poetry will
never be on MTV!"), but the people at Public Television's "Alive
from Off Center" were enthusiastic. "Words in Your Face" was
born. (12)
While the Cafe is never directly referenced, "Words" recreates this spoken word venue's
edgy, urban style. The show features Cafe regulars such as Maggie Estep, Nicole
Breedlove, Willie Perdomo, and Holman himself, all of whom performed at the Cafe on a
regular basis. The episode's title suggests the mock-competitiveness of the slam, its "in
your face" attitude. Moreover, the show's visual field--shots of streetcorners, highrises,
newspaper kiosks, and Central Park--the incorporation of traffic and street construction
noise into the sound track contextualizes these poetries within the sights and sounds of
the city.
The episode's title also suggests the producers' desire to construct spoken word
poetry as an oppositional art form, one that challenges not only traditional uses of poetry
but also traditional uses of the media. "Words" was filmed in winter 1991 and reflects a
post-Rodney-King distrust of the mainstream news media. Rollins's interstitial
commentary, the comments of the men and women interviewed in the P.O.V. segments,
and Nicole Breedlove's, Sekou Sundiata's, and Deacon Lunchbox's performances all
comment on and critique the mainstream news media. (Sekou Sundiata's "Blink Your
Eyes," a poem about racial profiling, closes with the video footage of the Rodney King
beating). Moreover, the show's structure with its inclusion of a diverse range of
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expressive forms and poets from a range of ethnic and racial backgrounds posits poetry as
a viable countercultural space. The insistance on the unity of the poet's body and voice
can also be read as an alternative representation of "marginalized" voices, an "in your
face" challenge to the mainstream news network's exploitation of the soundless eightytwo-second videotape loop. 29
The most ambitious of Holman's forrays into poetry-video, The United States of
Poetry is the first poetry-video series to document the national poetic landscape. The
series first aired on local PBS affiliates around the nation in February 1995 and since that
time it has been disseminated as a videotape series by KQED videos. 30 As Kurt Heintz
points out his 1996 round table discussion with other poet-videographers, the series
established Holman as the founding father of the emergent genre of poetry-video. 31 This
poetry-video series is the follow-up to "Words in Your Face," and like its precursor The
United States of Poetry it reclaims poetry as a lively, culturally relevant art form. The
United States of Poetry is the product of a collaborative effort that invovled sixty-eight
29 For a more developed discussion of the Rodney King beating and performance poetry,
see Chapter Three of this study. In that chapter I discuss Patricia Smith's performance poems in
relationship to the Rodney King event and the silencing of King's voice in the mainstream news
media.
30 The United States of Poetry was not broadcast on unified national airtime. Its
broadcast history speaks legions about how local PBS affiliates around the nation pander to
political conservatives. These events also illustrate the power of grassroots activism in cities like
Nashville and Rochester, New York. Even though the series was critically well-received, PBS
was unwilling to commit national air time for its broadcast. Due to the lack of support that the
show received from PBS, it ultimately aired on little more than fifty percent of PBS's local
affiliates. As Holman points out in a 1995 interview, the show was "just too hot, too much
content. . . without [PBS's] imprimatur, local stations had no incentive to take a chance with the
kind of edgy, controversial themes and language we had in the show" (in Cummings-Yeates 12).
While the show's national reception was less than ideal, the response to The USOP on the local
level emphasizes the effect that grassroots poetic movements can have on community politics. In
Nashville, where the show wasn't aired on PBS due to "community standards" issues, a
performance poetry group called the Beatlicks was able to screen the series on their public access
television show. Likewise, when the PBS affiliate in Rochester decided not to air the series, local
poets there staged a protest and ultimately got the station to reverse its decision.
31 See the introduction to Heintz's "I See a Voice--Poetry and Video: A Roundtable
Discussion" in volume 12 of Hyphen magazine.
128
poets, a production team, a director, and numerous production and post-production staff.
The series synthesizes performances by contemporary poets with Pellington's MTV-video
aesthetic and captures the vitality of live performance poetry events such as the open mic,
the poetry slam, and The Ayatollah's Granola/Rap Meets Poetry performance series.
Throughout this five-part series, the hand-held camera, rapid edits, the shot-reverse shot
style, and the overdubbing of ambient noises suggest the experience of attending a live
poetry event at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Green Mill Lounge, or other performance
poetry venues around the nation.
The United States of Poetry replaces these local poetry venues and the
community-based crosscultural coalition building that typifies events in these locales
with the shared cultural space of the television. Throughout this series, Holman calls for a
new counterpoetic sphere, a virtual heterotopia that brings together poets from diverse
geographical regions, ages, ethnic and racial groups in order to reconstruct the body
politic. 32 Holman addresses the political and poetic impetus behind The United States of
Poetry in "Welcome to the United States of Poetry," the introductory essay to the series'
companion book. In language that resonates with Whitman's 1855 introduction to Leaves
of Grass, he states: 33
The U.S. has become a nation divided, splintered into a hundred
nations. Without exception, the poetry of these cultures has been
passed on within the individual cultures, defiantly, from voice to
ear, often without being written down, and generally without being
thought of as poetry. These traditions have been locked out of
literature, while poetry itself has been relegated to a corner, painted
in by definitions that have reduced an art to a footnote. . . . It is
within television's power to reach into the nation's living room
32 I've borrowed the term "heterotopia from Michel Foucault. In "Of Other Places," For a
discussion of this term, please see Chapter Two.
33 In the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass Whitman defines the poet's role as synthesizer
of the diverse races, classes, religions, and geographical regions that comprise America, when he
writes, "The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them
a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents arrive as contributions. .
.he gives them reception for their sake and his own sake." (713)
129
and reclaim our country's soul with poetry. (8, Holman's
emphasis)
This two and one-half hour long series underscores the heterotopic potential of
poetry-media hybrids. It introduces vernacular poetic forms to new listening/reading
audiences by using the airwaves and the VCR to literally transport these expressive
cultures into living rooms across the nation. The series also uses the audiovisual
landscape of the medium--particularly the video montage style of the MTV video-music
show--to bring together diverse range of poets and emphasize the visual and sonic
resonances between the variety of performance styles and expressive cultures
represented. The USOP is divided into five episodes, "The Land and the People," "A Day
in the Life," "The American Dream," "Love and Sex," and "The Word." Each episode
focuses on a "universal" theme such as work, race and ethnicity, and love and includes a
variety of poets--from poets laureate to slam poets, pidgin poets, street poets, and
members of a rural Montana poetry writing workshop--and poetic styles. Each episode
also incorporates video montages of stanzas from the works of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury poets as well footage of contemporary popular expressive forms. The second
episode, for instance, includes performances by Thylias Moss, Czeslaw Milosz, Peter
Spriro, Reverand Pedro Pietri, Ismail Azim El, Sheryl Noethe, slam poet Matt Cook, Dan
Powers, Hal Sirowitz, hip hop poet Paul Beatty, C.D. Wright, Dennis Cooper, and Derek
Walcott. Interspersed between these performances are video-epigraphs excerpted from
poems by Richard Henry Dana, Ezra Pound, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. These
interstitial video-montages also portray the practice of poetry in the everyday lives of the
nation's citizens. These interludes include footage of soldiers at Fort Bliss singing a
marching song, cheerleaders performing at a high school football game, and young
children jumping rope to a double dutch jump rope song in East L.A. The incorporation
of these mundane poetry events emphasizes the populist aesthetics that undergirds events
like the poetry slam or the open mic night. It erodes the division between literary and
130
vernacular culture and maps a national poetic field that is inclusive of a wide variety of
voices, rhythms, and styles.
As the title suggests, The United States of Poetry not only documents and
celebrates the diversity of American poetry; it uses the medium of television to articulate
the relationship between geographical place and poetic production. The series is a cross
between Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie and MTV's Road Rules. It is loosely organized
around the 13,400 mile journey that the crew undertook while filming, a point which is
reinforced by the video montage that opens every episode of the series. This opening
montage of maps, interstate highway markers, railroad tracks, and the open road and the
footage of an eye superimposed over a map of the continental United States suggests the
role of the television viewer as virtual traveler and further cements the conflation of
geographical place and discursive space in this series [Click for Video File 4. Opening
footage from The United States of Poetry video series]. Throughout the show images of
the vastness and variation of the physical landscape visually echo the diverse poetries that
the show includes. Moreover, the overdubbing of ambient noises such as the surf in Lois
Ann Yamanaka's "Boss of the Food" [Click for Video File 5. Footage from Lois Ann
Yamanaka's "Boss of the Food" from The United States of Poetry video series], traffic in
Sparrow's "A Testimonial" [Click for Video File 6. Footage from Sparrow's "A
Testimonial" from The United States of Poetry video series], and woodland song birds in
Besmilr Brigham's "Tell Our Daughters" [Click for Video File 7. Footage of Besmilr
Brigham's "Tell Our Daughters" from The United States of Poetry video series], makes
manifest the relationship between text and context. We hear, for instance, the rhythms of
the surf in Yamanaka's pidgin poetry and the cacophony of rush hour traffic in midtown
Manhattan in Sparrow's lyrics. The extratextual elements of these performances suggest
that these poetries are products of their place.
Throughout The United States of Poetry, production and post-production
processes such as the visual fade, superimposition of video footage, and sound editing
131
and overdubbing perform the ritualized coalition building experience integral to the
community poetry events I've discussed earlier in this study. These digitial composition
processes bring together performers from diverse geographical regions, socio-economic
classes, and ethnic groups and use the audiovisual landscape to recreate the melding of
voices, rhythms, and poetic styles that one hears at an event at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe,
a slam at the Green Mill, or a David Hernández and Street Sounds performance. This
series, like "Words" and Holman's work with poetry CDs, underscores the problematic
relationship between the contemporary performance poetry scene--to return to Silliman's
terminology--and this emergent poetry network. Poetry-technology hybrids such as
poetry-video are changing what it means to write poetry. They are also profoundly
transforming notions of audience and community. As my earlier chapters on Marc Smith
and David Hernández suggest, the extratextual elements of the live performance are an
integral component of the community building function of these poetry performances.
Can there be a poetry community connected primarily to the virtual space of the
television and/or the computer monitor? What do we gain by reimagining this new
national poetic community? What do we lose? Given the newness of this hybrid poetic
form, these questions are difficult, if not impossible, to answer. But they are not, I hope,
merely rhetorical. They raise important issues regarding community, identity, and
commodification. They also point one of the ongoing debates among members the slam
family collective and other local poetry communities. With this in mind, I would like to
turn to the study's conclusion.
132
CONCLUSION
POETRY, COMMUNITY, AND COMMODIFICATION--SOME
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
A few days before I finished writing this dissertation, two events occurred.
Because they bring into focus some of the difficulties inherent in writing this kind of
dissertation as well as the responsibilities of and pleasures for the writer, I would like to
conclude with a short description of both.
Recently, slampapi Marc Smith posted a letter on his web site announcing his
leave of absence from the poetry slam family. In this letter, Smith turns over the keys to
the kingdom to Steve Marsh, the Business Manager for Poetry Slam, Inc. and details the
problems he sees with the direction the poetry slam has taken in recent years. He calls for
a renewed commitment to performance as a medium for establishing a connection
between poet and community and suggests that Poetry Slam, Inc. include within "its
governing constituency a group made up purely of audience members" in order to enact
this commitment (www.slampapi.com/LOA.htm). He calls for the poetry slam--which he
describes as a "rag tag revolutionary impulse"--to become an institution and ennumerates
ongoing developments within the slam family that will lead to its institutionalization. He
writes:
Great strides are being made to use the Slam reputation as the
foundation for fresh creative ways of introducing poetry and
performance poetry to a wider audience. This is what I see as the
most important direction for PSI [Poetry Slam, Inc.] to take. Gary
Glazner's Poet Plaza [sic] project, the Slam bus idea, Paul Seres'
Word TV project, and the other ideas being proposed are our
future. The Slam was never meant to be stuck within the limits of a
competition. . . . If the Slam Family wants to continue to rock the
world of poetry and make a difference, use PSI as a foundation to
create the next "wild idea that works" to bring words and voices
that matter to a public that needs them. (ibid.) 1
1 In "Archipoetry 101," Gary Mex Glazner details the impetus behind the new Poet's
Plaza in Albuquerque, NM. He describes the meetings between himself, a number of
133
The examples that Smith lists above--the building of a poet's plaza in
Albuquerque, the traveling poetry bus (!), and poetry on television--suggest that the
performance poetry movement is in the process of transforming itself from a network of
local poetry scenes into a literary establishment. While Smith's comments hardly indicate
that the slam and other local performance poetry movements have gone mainstream, they
do raise important questions regarding institutionalization and the continuing growth and
spread of this antiestablishment, grassroots poetry movement. Just how the slam family
collective deals with these issues remains to be seen.
In what can only be called serendipty, the same week that I read and downloaded
Smith's letter to the slam community, I received an email from Bob Holman announcing
the opening on his new poetry club on The Bowery and his return to emceeing live poetry
shows. This project is going forward full-throttle and, according to Holman, he expects to
be hosting live poetry events there in time for National Poetry Month next year (E-mails
to the author, March 19 & April 4, 00).
I end this dissertation with these two vignettes because they illustrate the ongoing,
unpredictable evolution of this vibrant, contemporary poetry movement. It probably goes
without saying that multimedia poetry forms such as "Words in Your Face," the World of
Poetry web site, or the film Slam have introduced performance poetry to a larger viewing
audience than, say, such local poetry venues as the Green Mill Lounge in Chicago or the
Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, MA. At the same time, new performance poetry venues
continue to be founded around the U.S. and in Europe, established venues continue to
Albuquerque poets, and the students in Professor Mark Childs's architecture class to design a
public space devoted to poetry. To the surprise of everyone involved, the Harwood Center for the
Arts has agreed to donate the land behind their building for this Poet's Plaza. According to
Professor Childs, the purpose of this space is "(1) to help educate the students in [his] architecture
studio, (2) to help organize the 'civic sector' of poets, and (3) to provide a 'home base' for poetry
in the city." For more information about the Poet's Plaza project, see his Nov. 23, 1999 posted on
About.Com's Guide to Poetry web site
(www.poetry.about.com/arts/poetry/library/weekly/99112399.htm).
134
draw crowds, and each year the National Grand Slam receives more entries than the year
before. The ongoing spread of contemporary performance poetries suggests that the
impact of this lively grassroots poetry movement on the American poetic landscape is
only just beginning to be felt.
This is an emergent poetry movement, a movement that, as Smith's letter
suggests, is still in the process of defining itself. Since I began researching this
dissertation in 1996, Marc Smith has published a collection of poetry, begun work on a
CD with his band Pong Unit, and overseen the slam family collective's transition from an
oppositional poetry movement to a nonprofit corporation. David Hernández's band, Street
Sounds, has gone through three different incarnations--from Afro-Latin conjunto with a
brass section, to a four-piece group, to an all-strings ensemble. Patricia Smith resigned
from the Boston Globe after being accused of inventing interviewees, left Boston and,
stepped down from her position as co-emcee of the slam at the Cantab Lounge in
Cambridge. These events seemed to point to her demise as a poet and a journalist.
Instead, she has begun working as a columnist for Ms. magazine and has reclaimed her
position as the first lady of slam poetry. Washington Square Films, the independent
poetry-video company that Bob Holman cofounded with Josh Blum, has been reborn as
Washington Square Arts and shifted focus from film and video to the World Wide Web
and to representing other poetry talent. Moreover, Mouth Almighty, the spoken word
recording label that Holman helped to cofound, disbanded in 1999 after
Mercury/Polygram, its parent company, was bought out by Sony.
The ongoing changes within this poetry movement raise important questions
about how to study, write about, and teach vernacular poetry. Because poetic terrain is in
the process of being mapped out, critical mastery over this material remains impossible.
Just as a David Hernández and Street Sounds performance or an Uptown Poetry Slam at
the Green Mill demands active engagement on the part of the audience, the study of these
performance poetries also demands active participation on the part of the critic, a
135
willingness to engage in a certain amount of spontaneity and play. As such, these poetries
not only demand that we rethink the place of the poetry in contemporary American
culture. They also call on us to rethink the role of the critic and the teacher of poetry.
136
APPENDIX A
DAVID HERNÁNDEZ BIBLIOGRAPHY, DISCOGRAPHY,
ANDVIDEOGRAPHY 1971-2000
Poetry Collections
Despertando/Waking Up. Chapbook, 1971.
Collected Words for a Dusty Shelf. Chapbook, 1973.
Satin City Lullaby. Chapbook, 1987.
Automaton Amok. Chicago: Artists Book Works, 1989.
Rooftop Piper. Chicago: Tía Chucha Press, 1991.
Elvis Is Dead but at Least He's Not Gaining Any Weight. Chicago: Mary Kuntz Press,
1995.
Anthologized Poems
"Señora Mendelez." From the Belly of the Shark. Walter Lowenfels, ed. New York:
Vintage, 1973. 212-213.
"If I Could Perform in a Folk Club." Stray Bullets. Jablanovec, James & Chavez, eds.
Chicago: Tía Chucha Press, 1991. 36-37.
"Armitage Street." Unsettling America. Gillan & Gillan, eds. New York: Viking, 1994.
271-272.
"Martin and my Father." Unsettling America. Gillan & Gillan, eds. New York: Viking,
1994. 349-350.
"Pigeons." Unsettling America. Gillan & Gillan, eds. New York: Viking, 1994. 160-161.
"Welcome." Unsettling America. Gillan & Gillan, eds. New York: Viking, 1994. 107108.
Plays
Rooftop Piper. Body Politic Theater. Chicago, 1990.
Prose Non-Fiction
"Introduction: Puerto Ricans in the U.S.A." From the Belly of the Shark. Walter
Lowenfels, ed. New York: Vintage, 1973. 191-196.
137
"Brown Baggit: Uh Oh! There Goes the Neighborhood!." U-Direct 2 & 3 (1995): 4-6.
"Brown Baggit: Equal Opportunity Hatred." U-Direct 4 (1995): 15-16.
"Brown Baggit: On Writing a Diatribe." U-Direct 5 (1995): 9.
"Brown Baggit: Coming Home Again." U-Direct 7 (1996): 4-5.
"Brown Baggit: Mike Royko? I Think He's Afraid of the Moon." U-Direct 8 (1996): 5-6.
Editorial
Nosotros Anthology. Special Issue of Revista Chicano-Riqueña. (Winter: 1977).
Nuestras almas son bittersweet: Poems be Jahn School Students. Chapbook. 1997.
Audio and Video Recordings
David Hernández: Street Poet. Prod. Rick Martin, Northeastern Illinois University. Film.
WZRD, 1971.
David Hernández and Street Sounds. LP. Sparrow Sound Design, (1981).
David Hernández and Street Sounds, Volumes I & II. Audiocassette. Lakeside Studios,
(1989).
"Liquid Thoughts." A Snake in the Heart: Poems and Music by Spoken Word Performers.
CD. Tía Chucha Press, 1994.
David Hernández and Street Sounds: A Retrospective. CD. Sparrow Sound Design,
Forthcoming.
138
APPENDIX B
PATRICIA SMITH BIBLIOGRAPHY, DISCOGRAPHY, AND
VIDEOGRAPHY 1989-2000
Poetry Collections
Life According to Motown. Chicago: Tía Chucha Press, 1991.
Big Towns, Big Talk. Boston: Zoland Books, 1992.
Close to Death. Boston: Zoland Books, 1993.
Anthologized Poems
"The Devil's Dance." Stray Bullets: A Celelbration of Chicago Saloon Poetry.
Jablanovec, James & Chavez, eds. Chicago: Tía Chucha Press, 1991. 83.
"Blonde White Women." Unsettling America. Mazziotti & Mazziotti, eds. New York:
Penguin, 1994. 77-78. Also anthologized in An Anthology of Modern American
Poetry. Nelson, ed. New York: Norton, 2000. 1198-1200.
from "Sweet Daddy." Unsettling America. Mazziotti & Mazziotti, eds. New York:
Penguin, 1994. 100-101.
"What It's Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren't)." Unsettling America.
Mazziotti & Mazziotti, eds. New York: Penguin, 1994. 102-103. Also anthologized in
An Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Nelson, ed. New York: Norton, 2000.
1198.
"Building Nicole's Mama." Spirit and Flame. Gilyard, ed. Syracuse: Syracuse U. Press,
1997. 211-213.
"Finding His Fist." Spirit and Flame. Gilyard, ed. Syracuse: Syracuse U. Press, 1997.
213.
"Meanwhile, in Rwanda." Spirit and Flame. Gilyard, ed. Syracuse: Syracuse U. Press,
1997. 213-214.
"The Woman Who Died in Line." Spirit and Flame. Gilyard, ed. Syracuse: Syracuse U.
Press, 1997. 214-215.
"Asking for a Heart Attack." Catch the Fire!!! Gilbert, ed. New York: Riverhead Books,
1998. 214-215.
"Biting Back." Poetry Nation. Cabico & Swift, eds. Montréal: Véhicule Press, 1998. 7172.
"The Deer." Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex. ParsonNesbitt, Rodriguez & Warr, eds. Chicago: Tía Chucha Press, 1999. 165.
139
"Skinhead." An Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Nelson, ed. New York: Norton,
2000. 1200-1201.
Plays & One-Woman Shows
Life According to Motown. Chicago, 1989-1990.
Life After to Motown. Boston University's Playwright's Theater, 1994.
Non-Fiction
Africans in America: American's Journey Through Slavery. With Charles Johnson &
WGBH Research Staff. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998.
Audio & Video Recordings
Patricia Smith Performs Always in the Head and Selected Poems. Audiocassette.
Zoldand Books, (1993).
"Spinning Till You Get Dizzy." A Snake in the Heart: Poems and Music by Spoken Word
Performers. CD. Tía Chucha Press, (1994).
"The Ultimate Blues Bar." A Snake in the Heart: Poems and Music by Spoken Word
Performers. CD. Tía Chucha Press, (1994).
"Undertaker." A Snake in the Heart: Poems and Music by Spoken Word Performers. CD.
Tía Chucha Press, (1994). Also included on Grand Slam: Best of the National Poetry
Slam Volume 1. CD. NuYo Records, (1994).
Chinese Cucumbers. Dir. Kurt Heintz. Perf. Patricia Smith. Video, (1994).
Undertaker. Dir. Rachel Libert. Perf. Patricia Smith. Video. Tied to the Tracks, (1996).
140
APPENDIX C
BOB HOLMAN BIBLIOGRAPHY, DISCOGRAPHY, AND
VIDEOGRAPHY 1976-2000
Poetry Collections
Tear to Open: This, This, This, This, This, This. New York: Power Mad Press, 1979.
Eight Chinese Poems. East Falmouth, MA: PeKa Boo Press, 1980.
Sweat & Sex & Politics: A Rap Poem. East Falmouth, MA: PeKa Boo Press, 1984.
Panic*DJ: Performance Text Poems, Raps, Songs. New York: Larry Qualls, 1987.
Cupid's Cashbox. Imperial Beach, CA: Jordan Davies, 1988. Written with Elizabeth
Murray.
Collect Call of the Wild. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.
Plays
The Cause of Gravity. Written with Bob Rosenthal.
The Wizard of Oz (an adpatation of the novel by Frank O. Baus).
The Whore of the Alpines. Written with Bob Rosenthal.
Bicentennial Suicide: A Novel to Be Performed. New York: Frontward Books, 1976.
Written with Bob Rosenthal.
Clear the Range (an adpatation of the play by Ted Berrigan). Written with Bob
Rosenthal.
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (an Iroquois creation story). Lyrics by Holman.
Edited Collections
Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Cafe. New York: Henry Holt, 1994. Edited with
Miguel Algarín.
The United States of Poetry. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. Edited with Josh Blum
and Mark Pellington.
Interviews and Essays
"Roland Legiardi-Laura Interview." BOMB 28 (Summer 1989): 22-24.
141
"Congratulations. You Have Found the Hidden Book. Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican
Poets Cafe.Ed. Miguel Algarín & Bob Holman. New York: Henry Holt, 1994. 1-2
"Nuyorican Poets Cafe". Du 4 (April 1994): 71-73.
"Welcome to the United States of Poetry!" The United States of Poetry. Ed. Josh Blum,
Bob Holman & Mark Pellington. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996: 6-15.
Audio Recordings
"Rock n' Roll Mythology." Backed with "Made in Japan." Words on 45, 1981.
Sweat & Sex & Politics! With Vito Ricci. Rap It Up! Productions, 1984.
Panic*DJ! With Vito Ricci. Panic Productions, 1988.
Nuyorican Symphony: Poetry Live at the Knitting Factory. With others. Knitting Factory
Works, 1992.
"Introduction." Flippin the Script: Rap Meets Poetry. Mouth Almighty/Mercury, 1996.
"Night Fears." Flippin the Script: Rap Meets Poetry. Mouth Almighty/Mercury, 1996.
In with the Out Crowd. Mouth Almighty/Mercury, 1998.
Video Recordings
"Sweat & Sex & Politics!" Dir. Rose Lesniak for The Manhattan Poetry Project. 1985.
Panic DJ! Dir. Carl Teitelbaum. Perf. Bob Holman & Vito Ricci. Five Quarters
Productions, 1990.
"The United States of Poetry." Perf. on "Words in Your Face." Alive TV. Narr. Henry
Rollins. Dir. Mark Pellington. PBS. 1991.
"Welcome to the United States of Poetry!" Perf. on Spoken Word Unplugged I. MTV.
1994.
142
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