Poetry and Pop


Page 6



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As these excerpts suggest, what Ferlinghetti meant by "street"
poetry in the 50s and what "street" means today has changed. For one
thing, the contemporary spoken word movement includes many women writers and
writers of color, and thus expands the possibilities for self-expression, as well
as for individual and collective gender, racial, and ethnic identifications. The Beat movement, of
course, was something of a closed shop. But what these movements have in common
with each other -- and with rock and rap as well -- is a tendency toward
autobiography and the confessional mode. Spoken word is aptly characterized by
what Simon Reynolds and Joy Press writing about
rock have called the "dear-diary syndrome." Still, whose diary we
are reading (or listening to) matters. If Beat poetry, like sixites rock, was the
culture of the sensitive or angry white man, spoken word is more like rock and rap today -- a
hard-won, sometimes home for African-/Latino-/Asian- American and female anger,
irony, expression. 






Perhaps the biggest challenge this anthology brings readers is trying to fill
in what's missing from its pages -- that is, the poets' performances. Since
spoken word is composed to be spoken, this new oral poetry, when confined to the
page, over-emphasizes the literary elements of the text and makes unavailable
readings that account for the collaborative involvement of audience in shaping
the poetic text. 
A companion CD , recorded "live," or a companion
multimedia Internet site with sound and video samples could have enriched
Aloud.  (The current site is skeletal, out-of-date, and print-based.
) These "documents" might have also given readers a better sense of the
communicative roles of these often fragmented, multi-voiced texts. 
Finally, they
might have helped readers better understand the music/literature connection, and
shown the ways in which performance poems, which are unconditionally public,
challenge the concept of poems as closed systems. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. notes
in a recent New Yorker article (June 19, 1995), " the scene isn't so much
rap meets poetry as rap versus poetry." For all of this anthology's
strengths, a sense of that scene's complications and competitions is missing
here. 







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