Poetry and Pop


Page 4



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Spoken word is a poetry characterized by a poetics of
presence. The terms of address here, as in most of the poems in this collection,
invoke the tropes of "spontaneity" and "immediacy" -- familiar features of the
rhetoric of pop. And it is in part because of this association that spoken word's
speech-based poetics has emerged recently in the commercial spotlight of music
television and the rock press. 





 Click for a brief Real Audio sample (36k)
or an aiff sample (767k) 
of Reggie Gaines doing his version of spoken word







Despite the recent media attention, however, the spoken word movement
continues to profess its independence. Self-consciously "oppositional,"
spoken word has developed a number of manifestos as well as a do-it-yourself
infrastructure of promotion and sales that rivals the "indie" marketing
of rock and rap. With a few exceptions (including this anthology, published by a
large commercial press), spoken word artists rely on a network of distribution
that includes performances in local clubs and coffee-houses, recordings made for
independent record labels, and periodicals and books self-published or printed by
small, private presses in editions of several hundred copies. 



Spoken word is a poetry characterized by a poetics of
presence. The terms of address here, as in most of the poems in this collection,
invoke the tropes of "spontaneity" and "immediacy" --
familiar features of the rhetoric of pop. 


The notion of a local "scene," where locality is
seen as a kind of network, brings the poets represented in Aloud together.
The title of the anthology informs us that these are "Voices from the
Nuyorican Poets Cafe"--
a club located in New York City. Although the poems collected here do indeed
suggest a new kind of American cafe poem, they nevertheless owe something not
only to the current crop of American rappers, but to the Beat poets who read
nightly (sometimes accompanied by jazz) at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco
in the 1950s. What was important to the literary bohemia of that time is
apparently still important to the bohemia of the moment -- the notion that poetry
should reach a large audience and be "democratic." Writing in the
mid-1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti sounds a lot like Miguel Algarin, co-editor of
Aloud, writing in the mid-1990s. Here's Ferlinghetti:





 
"The poetry which has been making itself heard here of late should be
called street poetry.... It amounts to getting poetry back into the street where
it once was, out of the classroom, out of speech departments, and off the printed
page."


 And here's Algarin, nearly forty years later: 

"Poetry is not
finding its way, it has found its way, back into everyday life. It is not only
meaningful, it is also fun....We have, at the end of the millennium, brought it
to life and televised it to the masses." 










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