It's My Blog and I'll Critique If I Want To ...
Very sorry to anyone who's annoyed at the sheer amount of navel-gazing poetry slam theory I've been spewing lately. I'm working on writing something, and the blog's always been my best sounding board, and frequently, I find myself arguing against myself, just to test things out in my head.
Still, I understand slam's more than an academic concept to a good many people on my list. It's something they're deeply invested in, and which they are extremely passionate about. But with all the intellectual flotsam and jetsam bouncing around the Internet these days pertaining to slam, I find myself both revisiting new ideas, and looking at a few things from a fresh perspective.
My current bugaboo is a blog post by one Ted Burke, of whom I'm unfamiliar, entitled, "Slam is Dead, They Say." I only bring it up because it's gotten a good deal of attention, and I'm a follower. (: Actually, he makes some interesting points, although, in the final analysis, I'm afraid I disagree with him. (No devil's advocate on that one. That's me being straightforward.) For one, I'm wary if declaring anything dead. I think movements degenerate, stagnate, lose power and genrefy to the point of inability, but I've rarely found them to die. There's still remnants of Beat walking around, after all, and punk. There's new confessional poets all the time, and god help us, new romantics, too. (And not just the '80s hangovers.) I'm not saying all these things are good, I'm just acknowledging their existence. I'm not entirely sure any artistic movement really dies. It just recedes. (to be fair, the blogger seems to know this, too.)
But let's harken to Mr. Burke, who writes: The anger, rage, the colloquial playfulness and in-your-face strategy that had made these bracing bards a phenomenon worth considering has become predictable. A large cause of slam’s deadening is the monotony of presentation-choppy, click-track, scratch-popping momentum, hip-hop style, almost invariably defines the poets ‘performance style. One tires of being exhorted to, waved at, lectured, or otherwise badgered to show the poet some love. The School of Quietude could offer a lesson to the young, the eager, the impatient: dial it down, quiet it down, don’t forget to breathe.
And he continues: One poet after another seem to ape the maneuvers of the one who’d been on stage before them, only with their gestures, nonsensical accelerations and ramping down of recitation temp, their whoops and hollers, their sudden gushes of near rhymes and forced analogies pouring forth, unguided by nothing but gravity, like a collected detritus falling from a crowded closet. As with listening to streaming heavy metal rock on satellite radio, might have spent their time listening to the machines in a laundry mat. At least some clothes could get washed in the bargain.
Some of which, I'll confess, I've complained of myself, although I'll hope that I've done so with more affection, and more of a desire to see young poets succeed. Because I do, even when I see the weaknesses in their work. But for me, it all comes back to a conversation I had with the poet Jerry Quickley many years ago, were he pointed out to me that slam's one of the few genres that's been measured largely by its worst, and not its best. That's an idea I try to keep at the forethought of my thinking. Because, in the final analysis, is it more worthwhile to measure slam by the many, many clones of Patricia Smith, Buddy Wakefield, Saul Williams, Rachel McKibbens, Jeff McDaniels and Andrea Gibson, or is it better to measure it by, well, Patricia Smith, Buddy Wakefield, Saul Williams, Rachel McKibbens, Jeff McDaniels and Andrea Gibson? And does it matter if some of these or other bellwether poets have either left slam or are only involved involved peripherally? Does that mean that they're no longer a standard to compare to? That seems nonsensical to me. Allen Ginsberg never stopped being a Beat poet, T.S. Eliot never stopped being a Modernist.
But then, I suppose it all depends on what definition of "slam" you're using. As I've said elsewhere, we have a tendency to use the term to describe three separate things: 1.) the act of competing in a poetry slam; 2.) the movement of performance poetry, for which the competition became a central pole, but hardly defined the entirety of most of its participants' work ; and 3.) the genrefied style of younger poets whose careers began in the slam, and who, through the process of imitation, developed one of a set of homogenized traits. It's this last that Burke seems most irked by, and frankly, to me, it's the least worthy of discussion. I'm of the opinion that serious discussion of poetry should focus on the masters of a genre, not on the acolytes. Yes, I'm admitting that I view the vast majority of the poets competing in the slam on a national level as students of poetry. I also think many of them still have their best days ahead of them. The competition itself has made a shift from being a marketing gimmick for established writers to being a training ground for new writers. And you know what? I think I'm OK with that. As poets emerge out of that particular kiln and find their own voices, that's when they become interesting to me. (Yes, even if they still slam after their voice has developed. It's not an exact science.) Eventually, as a poet develops, artistic and financial concerns begin to separate them from frequent competition. The evidence of this is ample. They might still compete, but it becomes less and less of a personal priority.
Personally, I'm more concerned with slam as a movement. Wikipedia (I'll find a more authoritative source later) defines an artistic movement as "a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement more or less strictly so restricted (usually a few months, years or decades)."
As I've said before, I remember the days before the advent of slam well, that weird grey zone when Beat was played out and impotent, and a very dry academia had once again seized control of poetry. And no one was listening or reading. It was airy and dry, and people read poems like they hated them. My god, it was terrible.
Slam -- along with other, parallel performance poetry efforts -- was a breath of fresh air. But most of all, I remember how exciting that sense of purpose was, that idea that poetry could be live and exciting, that it could and should electrify an audience. And the idea that normal, every day people were allowed to care about poetry, to have opinions about it. That was exciting. Hell, it was magnificent.
It was clearly the time for that idea -- it was kicking around L.A., New York, Chicago and pretty much everywhere at about the same time. Marc Smith gets credit for the gimmick that made it all work in the mainstream consciousness, but that time, that shared ambition ... that was definitely a movement. Call it the slam movement or the performance poetry movement, whatever works for you, but whatever you call it, it was real, and it was important. Maybe we've become a bit jaded to that idea these days., maybe it's become all too ordinary. But at the time, it was magic.
Still, I understand slam's more than an academic concept to a good many people on my list. It's something they're deeply invested in, and which they are extremely passionate about. But with all the intellectual flotsam and jetsam bouncing around the Internet these days pertaining to slam, I find myself both revisiting new ideas, and looking at a few things from a fresh perspective.
My current bugaboo is a blog post by one Ted Burke, of whom I'm unfamiliar, entitled, "Slam is Dead, They Say." I only bring it up because it's gotten a good deal of attention, and I'm a follower. (: Actually, he makes some interesting points, although, in the final analysis, I'm afraid I disagree with him. (No devil's advocate on that one. That's me being straightforward.) For one, I'm wary if declaring anything dead. I think movements degenerate, stagnate, lose power and genrefy to the point of inability, but I've rarely found them to die. There's still remnants of Beat walking around, after all, and punk. There's new confessional poets all the time, and god help us, new romantics, too. (And not just the '80s hangovers.) I'm not saying all these things are good, I'm just acknowledging their existence. I'm not entirely sure any artistic movement really dies. It just recedes. (to be fair, the blogger seems to know this, too.)
But let's harken to Mr. Burke, who writes: The anger, rage, the colloquial playfulness and in-your-face strategy that had made these bracing bards a phenomenon worth considering has become predictable. A large cause of slam’s deadening is the monotony of presentation-choppy, click-track, scratch-popping momentum, hip-hop style, almost invariably defines the poets ‘performance style. One tires of being exhorted to, waved at, lectured, or otherwise badgered to show the poet some love. The School of Quietude could offer a lesson to the young, the eager, the impatient: dial it down, quiet it down, don’t forget to breathe.
And he continues: One poet after another seem to ape the maneuvers of the one who’d been on stage before them, only with their gestures, nonsensical accelerations and ramping down of recitation temp, their whoops and hollers, their sudden gushes of near rhymes and forced analogies pouring forth, unguided by nothing but gravity, like a collected detritus falling from a crowded closet. As with listening to streaming heavy metal rock on satellite radio, might have spent their time listening to the machines in a laundry mat. At least some clothes could get washed in the bargain.
Some of which, I'll confess, I've complained of myself, although I'll hope that I've done so with more affection, and more of a desire to see young poets succeed. Because I do, even when I see the weaknesses in their work. But for me, it all comes back to a conversation I had with the poet Jerry Quickley many years ago, were he pointed out to me that slam's one of the few genres that's been measured largely by its worst, and not its best. That's an idea I try to keep at the forethought of my thinking. Because, in the final analysis, is it more worthwhile to measure slam by the many, many clones of Patricia Smith, Buddy Wakefield, Saul Williams, Rachel McKibbens, Jeff McDaniels and Andrea Gibson, or is it better to measure it by, well, Patricia Smith, Buddy Wakefield, Saul Williams, Rachel McKibbens, Jeff McDaniels and Andrea Gibson? And does it matter if some of these or other bellwether poets have either left slam or are only involved involved peripherally? Does that mean that they're no longer a standard to compare to? That seems nonsensical to me. Allen Ginsberg never stopped being a Beat poet, T.S. Eliot never stopped being a Modernist.
But then, I suppose it all depends on what definition of "slam" you're using. As I've said elsewhere, we have a tendency to use the term to describe three separate things: 1.) the act of competing in a poetry slam; 2.) the movement of performance poetry, for which the competition became a central pole, but hardly defined the entirety of most of its participants' work ; and 3.) the genrefied style of younger poets whose careers began in the slam, and who, through the process of imitation, developed one of a set of homogenized traits. It's this last that Burke seems most irked by, and frankly, to me, it's the least worthy of discussion. I'm of the opinion that serious discussion of poetry should focus on the masters of a genre, not on the acolytes. Yes, I'm admitting that I view the vast majority of the poets competing in the slam on a national level as students of poetry. I also think many of them still have their best days ahead of them. The competition itself has made a shift from being a marketing gimmick for established writers to being a training ground for new writers. And you know what? I think I'm OK with that. As poets emerge out of that particular kiln and find their own voices, that's when they become interesting to me. (Yes, even if they still slam after their voice has developed. It's not an exact science.) Eventually, as a poet develops, artistic and financial concerns begin to separate them from frequent competition. The evidence of this is ample. They might still compete, but it becomes less and less of a personal priority.
Personally, I'm more concerned with slam as a movement. Wikipedia (I'll find a more authoritative source later) defines an artistic movement as "a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement more or less strictly so restricted (usually a few months, years or decades)."
As I've said before, I remember the days before the advent of slam well, that weird grey zone when Beat was played out and impotent, and a very dry academia had once again seized control of poetry. And no one was listening or reading. It was airy and dry, and people read poems like they hated them. My god, it was terrible.
Slam -- along with other, parallel performance poetry efforts -- was a breath of fresh air. But most of all, I remember how exciting that sense of purpose was, that idea that poetry could be live and exciting, that it could and should electrify an audience. And the idea that normal, every day people were allowed to care about poetry, to have opinions about it. That was exciting. Hell, it was magnificent.
It was clearly the time for that idea -- it was kicking around L.A., New York, Chicago and pretty much everywhere at about the same time. Marc Smith gets credit for the gimmick that made it all work in the mainstream consciousness, but that time, that shared ambition ... that was definitely a movement. Call it the slam movement or the performance poetry movement, whatever works for you, but whatever you call it, it was real, and it was important. Maybe we've become a bit jaded to that idea these days., maybe it's become all too ordinary. But at the time, it was magic.