It may be a dog's life,
but the new poetry is hissing back
For the poet, life has always been
rough. Why should that be any different in hard times? But as television and
video drive literary arts further from the public's interest, poets are ranting
and slamming their way into national awareness. Poetry has survived by adapting,
by making itself a means for us to comprehend and resist in a fearful era. The
new 90s performance poetry is wild and nasty and fun. It has, as the New York
Observer said about the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, "the vitality of vulgarity."
I knew that poetry had gotten bolder when, two years ago, my friend Claudia
and I found ourselves under a spotlight, slathering red and black paint on poet
Gerardo Navarro's body while he ripped off his clothes and shouted the crescendo
lines of his Borders of the Mind spoken word performance. I don't know if it
was a profound moment in the literary universe, but we remember it with a smile.
Groups such as the Nuyorican Poets, who inhabit a cafe in New York's Lower East
Side, earn attention with their aggressive street style. They don't just read
poems, they scream them on stage, in videos and CDs. They host national poetry
slams-kind of poetic "Gong Shows"- where poets try to outdo each other
before they get ushered off the stage. Meanwhile, the transnational Taco Shop
Poets have declared they are "taking over taco shops" from Tijuana
to San Francisco. "We didn't like the usual space for poetry, coffee shops,"
says founder Adolfo Guzmán, "so we combined the spaces where people
go for a product, food, and the space where they go for another product, poetry.
We advertised and the people came to places like Roberto's Taquería (in
San Diego) to see us. So we started a traveling group of poets." Then there's
intellectual sound byter Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who calls himself
an "intercultural interpreter and reverse anthropologist." Nuyorican
Maggie Estep, the "snarling tutu" and post-Madonna feminist who rants
with a rock band, has been called the leader of the spoken word pack.
Across the US, the press hails the new performance poetry
as "exuberantly alive," "immediate," and "unpretentious,
articulate and tremendous fun." The media don't seem to care if the writing
is any good or not; they're just enjoying the show. Bob Holman, a founder of
the Nuyorican Poets, explained in a recent interview that the definition of
poetry is "continually opening up Rap is poetry. Cowboy poets are poets.
American Sign Language is just as much a poem as a Nobel poem," Holman
says. "The business of poetry, my dear, is busting frames."
Holman is director of the PBS documentary on spoken word performance, "Words
in Your Face," as well as last spring's popular five-part public TV series,
"The United States of Poetry." "For poetry to survive,"
Holman told Associated Press, "it's got to kick itself into the next millennium-and
television is the perfect medium for it."
"Written poetry is in crisis," claims Gómez-Peña. "People
are not that excited about the written word. It no longer appeals to our perceptual
challenges. So I do performance. Video, CD-ROMs, cable, the internet, 'zines-whatever
it takes-that is the challenge."
This is not the first time
in the modern era that poetry has hissed back at its stodgy reputation.
In the 1950s, San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote, "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."
California poet Adrienne Rich explains that poetry "has long been a
way for communities to come together. In the 60s, poetry played a very important
role. The African-American community used poetry and jazz a great deal,
and in the 70s, the women's movement was bursting forth with poetry. This
kind of thing [the performance movement] has been around before. But now
the media is engaged. The younger generation of performance poets who have
been influenced by MTV and TV can be very good in dealing with that media."
Most likely the media is engaged because television can admire its own reflection
and see it validated as art.
Not everyone wants to get their words off the printed
page. Poets like Rich who want their work read are still with us. "When
I got into it," says San Francisco poet Victor Martínez, "it
wasn't through performance, it was from reading, even poets who are dead.
I never improvise, but I do like to get up and read. Some poets really like
the performing. Juan Felipe [Herrera] is a master. Victor Hernández
Cruz has the heavyweight title."
"When people read from pieces of paper, we tend to call them poets,"
says performer John S. Hall. "When some people memorize their stuff,
we call them performance artists." (Hall's band, King Missile, is known
for their hit spoken word recording, Detachable Penis.)
Because of their rap and punk origins, and an immediacy that writer Thomas
Swiss sees in the "poetics of presence," the performance poets
have a forcefulness and urgency that the printed page rarely conveys. The
performers often use angry, violent imagery: Bob Holman talks about the
"fist of poetry." "Words burning crisp with anger,"
reads the self-promotion for New York's Reg E. Gaines. Gómez-Peña
is the "warrior for Gringostroika," Maggie Estep "throws
it back in your face," and the Taco Shop Poets are "cultural guerrillas."
The very nature of the poetry slam, where poets have to be fast and clever
or face the taunts of the audience, has a gladiator end-of-the-millennium
harshness. "To me, slams are grueling and frightening," says Martínez.
A lot like life in the 90s, and a lot like the new poetry itself.
Even when their poems speak of forceful ideas, due to their method of delivery
the paper poets will always appear quieter and gentler. This is not to say
that poets who write are out of style. They're making a strong comeback,
and plain old poetry readings are on the increase: a recent San Francisco
Bay Guardian listed several dozen readings and open mic poetry events during
one week. "This is an incredibly rich time for poetry in the US,"
says Adrienne Rich. "We are hearing so many rich, diverse voices. Anyone
who cares about poetry should be elated." Maybe the revival of live
poetry has come about because some people long to hear someone say something,
out loud, with words; something that doesn't hide behind the jerky obscure
video images of MTV and all its offspring. Of course, to others like Holman
and Gómez-Peña, those video images often are the poetry.
We're at a reading in San Francisco,
part of a series called "Los Bohemios" at Cafe La Boheme, the
soul of the Mission district. There's one of everything, or everybody, here:
old grey poets, stylish young poets, and dried-up leftist kind of poets.
There are a lot of black berets in this room. Nobody in the place ever shuts
up. There is a clanking of wine glasses and coffee cups and conversation
that never ceases, even as the featured poet, Neeli Cherkovsky, reads from
his new book, Animal. And he's good. The ambient sound becomes a murmur
beneath the poetry that makes it friendly: it's okay to be human in the
presence of this art-drink, walk around, say hi to your friends.
Besides poets, there's Tony Santiago, sax player. Tony tells the audience
that he's "happy to see the Bohemian intelligencia" and someone
in the crowd yells out, "Three generations!" During a break, Tony
tells me that he used to be a jazz musician, and he's out of work. He's
"forced to play with poets. Someday the poets will catch on, some day,"
he complains, "They don't even give me bus fare." As Tony says
this, someone offers to buy him a burrito. "Hey, I'm gettin' paid!
Honey, this conversation is over!" he says, as he tears down the street.
Guitarist Ignacio Reyes plays and Lupe Román sings, along with a
guy in the audience who drums. There is an altar for San Francisco sculptor/poet
Manuel Martín, who died just days before. The whole evening is dedicated
to him. The poet Carlos "Rumberos" Ramírez sings kids'
songs in Spanish that have everybody cracking up.
Max Schwarz does a fast improv rap. It's about
himself, a white guy, and a black poet friend, Bill Strond, asking the Newark,
New Jersey Police for directions one night in the "wrong" part
of town:
When "Los Bohemios" is over, we step outside to six screaming sirens in the rain at 24th and
Mission: there's been a shooting. We can't go further, because the cops
haven't grabbed the guy yet. He's running up the street with a gun. So we
huddle in front of the cafe and wait. A woman tells us she just left her
friends at the corner of Capp St., where the shooting occured. She hopes
they're all right. Another woman, María Rosa Galdamez, tells me that
the week before, transportation Secretary Federico Peña was at that
corner celebrating the installation of new street lights. They're supposed
to prevent crime.
rappin' / a English we make up as we go along
turnin' nouns into verbs / braids into crowns
and always fetchin' dreams from a horizon
strewn with bones and flesh of those of us
who didn't make it / whose smiles and deep
dark eyes / help us to continue to see
there's so much life here.
-ntozake shange
Thank God poetry is kicking and screaming its way into our awareness. It
makes this decade bearable. It reminds us: this corner, this night, this
rain, these friends, our lives, have meaning. And it's a privilege to be
alive.
Excerpt from PEOPLE OF WATTS by ntozake shange, from Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, published by Henry Holt
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