Poetry meant to be spoken, sung, or otherwise blended with theatre has a long tradition of tackling social and political issues. This article explores the history of socially conscious performance poetry. A linked article, Spoken Word as Revolution, considers common themes and relevance to the present day.
In an essay “The Future of Language”, poet Saul Williams observes that “a Latin transcription of the word 'person' is 'being of sound'.” (In Mark Eleveld's [editor] The Spoken Word Revolution. Naperville: Sourcebooks, 2003). Williams remarks on practices such as the eastern “OM” chant, and reciting the Hail Mary prayer, which draw upon “the belief that change will come about through voicing sacred words aloud”.
That is the faith that underlies socially-conscious performance poetry, which traces its origins to ancient times but which perhaps found its first modern incarnation in the early twentieth century. While in America, Harriet Monroe was establishing Poetry Magazine, Dada poets and artists were emerging in Europe, testing boundaries of form and meaning partially as a reaction to the First World War.
Not all performance poetry of a political nature has been on the left-wing or revolutionary side. For example, Robert Frost read The Gift Outright (the gift a metaphor for the history of the United States) at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961, and was considered a Kennedy liberal with an individualist tinge.
But more commonly, performance poets have spoken out for the disenfranchised, or to express criticism of mainstream poetry and their society.
Beat through Hip-Hop to the Present Day
Beat poetry may have arisen in part as a reaction to the technique-focused efforts of the New Critics , who according to Eleveld had changed the poetic question from “What does it mean to be human now”, to “What is a well-crafted poem?” Jack Kerouac and the Beats were anti-materialistic, pro-spiritual exploration and critical of the 1950s stereotype of the “perfect family”. In Eleveld’s view, “more than any other link to the present-day era, Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 Gallery Six Reading of Howl leads into today’s performance poetry.
Between Beat and modern performance poetry came rapping and hip-hop. Influenced by Jamaican DJ music, the first rappers in the early seventies developed the story-telling spoken word in the African-American community.
Jerry Quickley in the Eleveld book puts to rest any idea that Hip Hop is not poetry, commenting that it “incorporates many of the technical devices of other forms, including slant rhymes, enjambment, A-B rhyme schemes….[It is] usually parsed in 16-bar stanzas, and generally followed by four-to-eight-bar hooks”.
Slam (often rap or Hip Hop poetry, performed in competition) appears to have had its American origins in Chicago, was “grown” by a poetry festival in Taos, New Mexico and has now spread around the world. Quickley describes the landmark arrival of Saul Williams on the slam scene, with his adoption of “the full hiphop style, using human beat box sounds, simulating and miming DJ techniques, and weaving hardware verbiage and rhyme schemes into poems…” In the same book Terry Jacobus comments that slams “brought poetry back to the streets in massive doses”.
The huge popularity of Hip Hop and slam no doubt helped to create an audience for other types of performance poetry, which first became “popular” in the 1970s. Laurie Anderson’s sound experiments, such as her successful O Superman song, were an early example. Another is Tattoo, Taboo, a show produced and directed by Jean Howard of the Chicago Poetry Ensemble, which combined poetry with dance, theatre, projection, lighting, body art, photography, music and sound. The show investigated the “historical, sexual and spiritual world of tattooing”.
More information about the social and political dimension of performance poetry and the work of present-day performance poets can be found in the Suite article “Spoken Word as Revolution”.
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