Wednesday, December 2, 1998
Speaking Up
MUSIC: Spoken-word artists restore interest
in poetry, bring
stagnant art-form back to mainstream
By Nerissa Pacio
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
If Walt Whitman came to Hollywood’s Lucy Florence Coffeehouse on
Wednesday nights, he would be proud of the spoken word artists
sounding their barbaric yawps. Allen Ginsburg would howl loudly and
Maya Angelou would applaud those letting their caged birds
sing.
These poets would be relieved to see that poetry is not dead. It
has just reincarnated in the form of spoken word, ebbing and
flowing its way back into public interest by adding the new
dimension of performance to the written words on the page.
Because people view poetry as a ghettoized art form devoid of
any literary standards, spoken word poetry (or performance poetry)
has renewed interest in and even sparked a debate about this
stigmatized art.
"I saw this comedian one time up at the Comedy Store who said
that his girlfriend asked, ‘Why don’t we go to a poetry reading?
And he said, why don’t we just break up right now?," recalls
Derrick Gilbert (a.k.a. D Knowledge), a published poet and a
professor of sociology at UCLA. "This kind of joke shows you that
there’s a really negative perception of poetry – and this is from
people who have never attended a poetry reading. It has been
contrived in their consciousness well before."
But with the added performance dimension of spoken word,
sometimes including musical or dance accompaniment (and even the
competitive element of poetry slams where poets vie for cash and
prizes), poetry is moving into the dimension of entertainment. But
not all poets agree that this movement is necessarily true to
poetry as art.
"When people make the proclamation that they’re a poet, that
brings with it a responsibility to the page," Gilbert says. "I love
performing and I would be a hypocrite to say you shouldn’t work on
your performance. But situations like slams where poetry is put
into such a firmly capitalistic economic model and people are
winning by writing a poem about their sock with a hole in it and
running around screaming, because you only have three minutes,
people are performing and being extreme for extreme’s sake."
Michael Datcher, director of the World Stage Anansi Writer’s
Workshop in the black arts enclave of Leimert Park, agrees with
Gilbert’s sentiment of the need for an awareness of poetry’s
history and tradition.
"Like most things subjective, there are few standards in the
poetry world. So people can get on stage and say anything, try to
make a cool little rhyme, or wear a goatee and hat, and say they
represent poetry," Datcher says. "But that’s not poetry … Slams
are an ill concept. Poets compete to impress judges who aren’t even
poets themselves. And what that lends itself to is a
hyper-concentration of performance above substance."
Even competitors themselves find the atmosphere of slams to be
contradictory of the purpose of poetry as a unifying mode of
expression.
Ellen Maybe, a semifinalist for the Austin, Texas team in the
poetry slam nationals and employee at Beyond Baroque, L.A.’s
Westside literary arts epicenter, has mixed feelings about her slam
experience.
"I found it to be surreal," Maybe says. "I’ve been to these slam
festivals and it’s a strange feeling to see how competition brings
out pain in people, especially in poetry where there are a lot of
vulnerable people putting out their work. Sometimes you get very
performance-oriented people who aren’t as solid as writers,
too."
However, on the flip side of the debate, spoken word and slams
are also a window of opportunity for those uninterested in poetry
to become exposed to and drawn into the poetry scene.
"(Slams) take away from poetry as an art form when poets allow
winning and losing to interfere with what they write and say on
stage," says Beau Sia, a published New York-based poet and actor in
the recent film "Slam." "As far as an audience is concerned, it
doesn’t ruin poetry at all. It gets people involved in poetry when
they normally wouldn’t be. Frankly, poetry readings can, at times,
be very boring."
While the addition of "extras," such as the relaxed chords and
beats of a jazz trio improvising in the backdrop to the poet’s own
rhythmic cadences, may seem to be purely decorative to the poem,
the musicians themselves see this addition as necessary.
"If you were to go to a movie and there was no music playing in
the background, you’d probably just walk out," says Giovanna
Moraga, a fourth-year music major at UCLA and cellist for Lucy
Florence’s spoken word night. "Music creates an aura. The poetry is
not as intense without it."
Whether the words of a poem appear in its "purist" form –
written on a blank, unadorned page – or spoken, sung or yawped
aloud, what seems to matter to most of these poets is that their
words reach the people. Whether or not one means of expression is
any better or worse than the other doesn’t appear to matter in the
end, so long as poetry is brought to life.
"My goal is to get my message to the masses," says Deep Red, MC
and director of Lucy Florence’s spoken word night. "Masses read
books and masses see performances, so I don’t see anything wrong
with giving the best of both worlds. When you’re giving from the
soul, I don’t think the medium or genre should matter."
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