If the vocalized poetry you’ve experienced has been uttered in spaces where nods and “mmm”s are quiet and profound, where the poet rests a published book in her hand and offers a pregnant pause between each line, then maybe you haven’t experienced poetry. If you think poetry is about being understated and obscure, then slam might seem strange to you, perhaps even invasive. It may seem a pedestrian version of literary poetry.
Slam is made not only to express but to provoke, to elicit natural sounds and embodied responses, to sway our convictions and stimulate critical thinking in a setting that intertwines the audience and poet and insists on laying bare the complexities of community. Susan B.A. Somers-Willett (2009) wrote: “What makes slam poetry popular is that it brings verse to be performed in certain ways: expressed with and through particular dialects, formats, gestures, and renegade attitudes that underscore its sense of urgency and authenticity” (p. 17). In Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (1994), Miguel Algarín and Bob Holman collected poetry from the 1990s New York slam scene, when adult slams were really hitting their groove. In his invocation to the anthology, Holman described poetry as “a contact sport” (p. 1). His verve for poetry leaps from the page: “Poetry is no longer an exhibit in a Dust Museum. Poetry is alive; poetry is allowed” (p. 2). Holman distinguished between slam poetry and the formal poetry of literary circles, with their elite readership.
Algarín depicted slam as fiercely political. In his introduction to the anthology, he wrote that “the aim is to dissolve the social, cultural, and political boundaries that generalize the human experience and make it meaningless,” and he claimed that the poems coming out of this era “yield new patterns of trust, creating intercultural links” (p. 9). Somers-Willett (2009) argued that poetry slams are “places where the possibilities of identity are explored…Instead of being windows on culture, poetry slams are culture; they are places where interracial exchanges are made and marginalized identities are invented, reflected, affirmed, and refigured” (p. 9). These exchanges become public arguments. Jerry Blitefield (2004) claimed that “slam poetry is overwhelmingly interventionist, exigent to its core” (p. 111) and that its primary function is rhetorical. This rhetorical function supports Algarín’s belief that at the heart of slam is social change.
Contemporary slam emerged most directly through the Nuyorican Poets Café, which began in Miguel Algarín’s living room in 1973. The Nuyorican Poets Café hosts competitive slams and remains one of the most respected slam establishments in the US. In the 1980s, Marc Kelly Smith’s working-class response to the need for expression resulted in the well-known Green Mill slams. Slam poetry is also said to have emerged from poets’ focus on spoken word, as with Walt Whitman, who viewed the speaking and performing of poetry to be essential to its democratic nature and purpose (Hoffman, 2011, pp. 21–54). In the twentieth century, Beat poets such as Gary Snyder vocalized a desire for a public, accessible poetry off the page (pp. 126–127), while Anne Waldman committed to a poetics that, through embodied performance, focused on naming and revising the “norms of identity and nation” (p. 151). Black Arts movement poets such as Nikki Giovanni continued to bring identity to the forefront through oral performance and resisted “the whiteness of the page”—most notably the white publishing industry that controls who gets published and how (p. 166).
DJ spinning at the TYPS 2013 Championship in Tucson, Arizona
photo by Adela C. Licona
The most evident connection of U.S. poetics to contemporary slam is through its relationship with hip-hop. Hip-hop, understood as a sociocultural project at the intersection of artistic production and a critical worldview, emerged from what Priya Parmar (2009) and other scholars of hip-hop have identified as “the poverty-stricken area of the South Bronx, New York in the late 1970s” (p. 28). In response to the severe racial, class, and gender inequalities produced in the South Bronx when negligent urban planning and the construction of a controversial expressway divided the community geographically, hip-hop developed as a multifaceted effort by people of color to challenge and make meaning of these inequalities. Thus, those who participate in hip-hop studies, such as Parmar and Bronwen Low (2011), understand hip-hop as a critical pedagogy or a method of engagement through which truth claims are openly and radically analyzed not only for their relationships to personal experience and other truth claims, but also for their relationships to larger systems of knowledge production. Such a hip-hop critical pedagogy unfolds through a combination of four elements which Parmar, as well as hip-hop scholars like Gwendolyn D. Pough (2007), identified as graffiti art, deejaying, emceeing, and break-dancing. In her introduction to the groundbreaking text Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology, Pough asserted “knowledge” as the “often forgotten fifth element,” and she noted hip-hop's growth into other “genres such as film, spoken word, autobiographies, literature, journalism and activism” (p. vi). Moreover, and at the center of the anthology's purpose, Pough argued that histories of hip-hop too often erase the contributions of women who actively participated in the birth and development of hip-hop culture; critiques such as these assert more firmly the place of gender and sexuality within the critical pedagogy of hip-hop.
Yet, despite hip-hop culture's roots in social resistance, rap and other genres that have grown from hip-hop are not always oriented toward social justice and are often critiqued for commercialism as well as sexist and homophobic perspectives. On the other hand, slam, another outgrowth of hip-hop, is given a kinder breadth in that it is often seen as democratic and diverse in its population of poets and in its functions and intentions. And slam, like hip-hop, can be seen as a fluid genre in that, as Hoffman (2011) claimed, “lives a double life: even as it appeals to the masses through a slick commercialism, much of its poetry defines itself against commodification, and often in sharply satirical ways” (p. 205).
Critics of slam note that the genre can be restrictive because its identity politics can limit the poet’s capacity to speak and perform beyond his/her apparent identity. Responding to this dilemma, Karma R. Chávez (2010) offered a theoretical framework for a poetic polemic that is dialogic for poets who identify in multiple ways. A poetic polemic does not rely on conventional notions of logic and evidence but, rather, is dependent on rattling the audience, which Chávez argued is a way for slam to be at its best, as it generates dialogue. Further, Chávez suggested that learning to read slam poetry as a polemic can stimulate agencyThose interested in understanding the discourses of and capacities for social change, how it is produced (enabled and constrained), under what conditions, who animates it, and to what end/s, often find themselves grappling with the concept of AGENCY. At the Crossroads Collaborative, we begin with Radha S. Hegde’s (1998) reference to agency as “the coming together of subjectivity and the potential for action” (p. 288). We then draw significantly from Carl G. Herndl and Adela C. Licona’s (2007) understanding of agency as a “diffuse and shifting social location in time and space, into and out of which rhetors [read: social actors] move uncertainly” (p. 133). Like Herndl and Licona, we, too, are interested in the opportunities, as well as the constraints, for those engaged in change-making discourses, practices, and relationships. We extend this interest with a focus on how such change-making relates to youth, sexuality, health, and rights. We find Herndl and Licona’s concepts of constrained agency and agent function, as well as their considerations of the relationship between authority and agency, particularly useful to our work as we, too, understand the possibility for social action to be sometimes but not always reproducible across social contexts, practices, and relations, and neither entirely determined by structures nor entirely bound by the neoliberal illusion of a fully autonomous individual. for listeners. Chávez’s argument urges us to avoid immediately interpreting slam performances as evidence of democratic empowerment and to be cognizant of the ways in which a community may encourage certain types of identity performances, while recognizing opportunities for evoking exchanges among audiences and poets.
In order to address stratification as well as slam poetry as a political and countercultural act, we have engaged with Susan C. Jarratt’s work (2002) to reconsider the function of archaic lyric poetry, and particularly the poetry of Sappho, to study how such poetry provides “opportunities for reflection on civic power and community values” (p. 11). Contemplating memory, and its functions, as well as the role of the personal as it is represented in Sappho’s poetry, Jarratt argued that the “needs of a group” are made visible and knowable in such verse (p. 24). As in the slam poetry we consider here, recollection and the personal in Sappho’s archaic lyric poetry have a civic function. We recognize one further connection between the rhetorical functions and potentials in slam and Sappho’s archaic verse; each is relational in intent and, as Jarratt stated, “attuned to their movements in and out of shared space, their desires, and the ways of remembering that will contribute to their well-being” (p. 24).
Most slam scholarship and published examples are focused on adults, but the descriptors here are apropos of the youth slam scene. The poems performed in this text reflect Algarín’s insistence on intercultural links, Blitefield’s claims for the rhetorical significance of slam, Chávez’s hope for a poetic polemic, and Somers-Willett’s focus on the complex expression of identities in a space where audience engagement and judgment are arguably as significant as the poem itself. All of these slam sources have a common purpose: democratizing a system of poetry that has often been closed off to all but an elite audience, and often through the institution of education. Slam can be seen as a response to such elitist practices and has always been associated with a counter-narrative and often with polemic. Slam counters the increasingly closed-off tendencies of the kind of poetry that has been swept into the university—its academic systems of criticism and appropriation of writers. Slam poetry aims to take back certain forms of literacy, too, from associations with stratification.
Background images in this section from the TYPS logo designed by Logan Phillips.
Zack Taylor’s poem, “You Are Poetry”
In reviewing a few of the narratives of slam, we understood how crucial it is for youth slam poets to facilitate a space where the reshaping of common narratives, genres, and themes is welcomed, where such activities function to build community and well-being for youth. The above poem by Zack Taylor reflects upon and attempts to shift the ways his audience understands the genre of poetry. Taylor personifies poetry as a female with multiple and powerful characteristics. While poetry is almost always characterized as a female muse, in this case the poem is not about the muse but about the agencyAcademics interested in understanding the discourses of and capacities for social change, how it is produced (enabled and constrained), under what conditions, who animates it, and to what end/s, often find themselves grappling with the concept of AGENCY. In our work at the Crossroads Collaborative, we begin with Radha S. Hegde’s (1998) reference to agency as “the coming together of subjectivity and the potential for action” (p. 288). We then draw significantly from Carl G. Herndl and Adela C. Licona’s (2007) tracings and treatment of agency. For them, agency is a “diffuse and shifting social location in time and space, into and out of which rhetors [read: social actors] move uncertainly” (p. 133) and “self-conscious action that effects change in the social world . . . contingent on a matrix of material and social conditions” (p. 138). Like Herndl and Licona, we, too, are interested in the opportunities, as well as the constraints, for those engaged in change-making discourses, practices, and relationships. We extend this interest with a focus on how such change-making relates to youth, sexuality, health, and rights. We find Herndl and Licona’s concepts of constrained agency and agent function, as well as their considerations of the relationship between authority and agency, particularly useful to our work as we, too, understand the possibility for social action to be sometimes but not always reproducible across social contexts, practices, and relations, and neither entirely determined by structures nor entirely bound by the neoliberal illusion of a fully autonomous individual. of the genre. The poem can also be put in conversation with the idea of spoken-word poetry as a masculine endeavor. Taylor’s poem throws out gender binaries; poetry, though assigned feminine pronouns, seems both masculine and feminine in this poem. And, most importantly, Taylor’s depiction of poetry demonstrates the power he attributes to slam.
Characteristics of slam that include judging by the audience and the use of public venues for performances have lent slam the badge of democracy. As Susan B.A. Somers-Willett (2009) wrote in The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America, “In addition to fostering a countercultural atmosphere disseminating poetry in unconventional venues, the slam has thrived through the exercise of certain democratic ideals meant to contrast with exclusive academic conventions” (p. 5). The ideal of a democratic slam is complicated by context, so we have to be careful about idealizing slam or the effects of poetry in general. What seems certain from the scholarship on slams, however, is that content addressing the complexities of identity is key to the reception of the poet and the poet’s work, and the particular nature and tone of this content is driven by the local and larger context of a slam, from national competitions to coffeehouse slams.
In our study of poetry performed at the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam over a period of two months in 2011, identity was a frequent subject, and TYPS has clearly become one of the several venues in Tucson where youth feel a certain freedom to express and confront social injustice and multiply situated subjectivities. What is emerging from TYPS material is local youth commitment to identifying and engaging with social problems both in and beyond the monthly slam. One of the functions of such youth organizations is to encourage agency. Academics interested in understanding the discourses of and capacities for social change, how it is produced (enabled and constrained), under what conditions, who animates it, and to what end/s, often find themselves grappling with the concept of agency; in the case of TYPS, while poets are free to write and perform topics of their choosing, many gravitate toward commentary on social issues. The genre of poetry itself, far from being an obscure form of artistry protected by an elite minority, is recognized in this youth-oriented space as an effective vehicle for the expression and confrontation of social problems.
Background images in this section from the TYPS logo designed by Logan Phillips.
We offer these poems as examples of youth poets recognizing and performing moments of agencyAcademics interested in understanding the discourses of and capacities for social change, how it is produced (enabled and constrained), under what conditions, who animates it, and to what end/s, often find themselves grappling with the concept of AGENCY. In our work at the Crossroads Collaborative, we begin with Radha S. Hegde’s (1998) reference to agency as “the coming together of subjectivity and the potential for action” (p. 288). We then draw significantly from Carl G. Herndl and Adela C. Licona’s (2007) tracings and treatment of agency. For them, agency is a “diffuse and shifting social location in time and space, into and out of which rhetors [read: social actors] move uncertainly” (p. 133) and “self-conscious action that effects change in the social world . . . contingent on a matrix of material and social conditions” (p. 138). Like Herndl and Licona, we, too, are interested in the opportunities, as well as the constraints, for those engaged in change-making discourses, practices, and relationships. We extend this interest with a focus on how such change-making relates to youth, sexuality, health, and rights. We find Herndl and Licona’s concepts of constrained agency and agent function, as well as their considerations of the relationship between authority and agency, particularly useful to our work as we, too, understand the possibility for social action to be sometimes but not always reproducible across social contexts, practices, and relations, and neither entirely determined by structures nor entirely bound by the neoliberal illusion of a fully autonomous individual.. The two poems included here are about seemingly different subjects, but both reflect how crucial it is for youth slam poets in this Arizona space to work sideways against predominant narratives to declare who they are, to confirm solidarity with others who share these experiences, and to speak back to outsiders.
José Martinez’s poem, “10 Commandments of Being Mexican”
Themes emerging from this poem include class, labor, gender, (counter) history, culture, and the everyday. José Martinez’s poem relies on community-centered knowledgesWe deploy the term KNOWLEDGES rather than “knowledge” to be explicit about the different—sometimes competing, sometimes complementary—knowledges that circulate in the communities in which we are engaged. These range from academic knowledges across disciplinary boundaries, to youth knowledges, to broader community knowledges. Recognizing that different knowledge systems are at play in and from distinct locations, we can also recognize that such knowledges are valid and can inform our research. When we position ourselves as learners who can be informed by the lived knowledges guiding everyday decisions, we open ourselves to deeper understandings of youth practices, interests, needs, strengths, dreams, and desires. In the Crossroads Collaborative, we also work to ensure that differing knowledges are translated, so that those of us involved in local collaborations are legible to one another as collaborators who share interests around youth, sexuality, health, and rights. of geography, events (the swap meet), and archetypes (the short grandmother), as well as the everyday events that translate as culture for many in his audience. The poem moves back and forth from addressing an audience of insiders (e.g., “you’ll always be brown”) to an audience of outsiders (e.g., “try not to choke on your tomatoes”)—implicating and invoking a diverse audience. One of the main themes of the poem is labor. The poem begins with an insider line and stereotype about food and culture but quickly transitions to a call for change, a call for young people to recognize a context in which parents labor in inequitable situations to create opportunities for their children. One of the most powerful lines—“try not to choke on your tomatoes”—is an implicit reference to the labor that becomes invisible when packaged and consumed as cellophane-wrapped tomatoes, which “taste” like “hard-working Mexican hands.”
Through imagery that resonates with his audience (evidenced by the loud snaps, claps, and cheers with which they shower Martinez's performance), Martinez weaves a tapestry of cultural references in order to make recognizable the beauty, pride, and joy he finds in claiming a Mexican identity: “Always remember,” he tells us, his voice at its quietest since the beginning of his performance, “you will always be brown.” Adela C. Licona (2012) considered the rhetorical deployment of brown as a third-space location in countercultural performances and practice as well as a named coalitional ambiguity that intervenes in a Black–White binary—contested by some and used strategically by others to build community and forge coalitions. Martinez's coalitional performance resonated deeply with the Collaborative, particularly when we considered it in the larger context of TYPS performances focused on recognizing what has been marginalized and, in so doing, opening up the radical potential held in everyday spaces. Just as Martinez recites a litany of names—“Briseño, Dominguez, Cruz, Garcia, Lopez, Montaño, Martinez, Vasquez”—in order to insist on visibility and encourage coalition, Sammy Dominguez and Zack Taylor, who performed “Boom” at Brave New Voices 2012 (an international slam competition in Berkeley, California), recite the names of LGBTQ youth who have died by suicide. These poems, like many others performed by TYPS poets, also suggest that everyday spaces—school, in “Boom,” or the swap meet in Martinez’s poem—are sites of radical resistance and transformation. Both poems also make use of counterstory: Martinez names and critiques stereotypes while Dominguez and Taylor repurpose statistics about youth. These two poems show that TYPS poets identify intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and economic justice as important slam subjects. However, as we noted in our discussion of the themes that emerged across our collection of TYPS poems, fewer poets chose to engage sexuality explicitly in their performances, making Dominguez and Taylor's “Boom” an important site for glimpsing the kinds of sexuality and gender knowledges that circulate within the TYPS community.
Sammy Dominguez and Zack Taylor’s poem, “Boom”
The poets creatively and forcefully narrate the isolation and desperation that many LGBTQ students feel in unsupportive educational contexts. The poem chronicles these experiences from more than one point of view. Bringing together stories and numbers, these poets integrate statistics about LGBTQ youth with the voices of such youth to reveal the horrors of bullying as everyday violence and the corresponding desire for self-harm and even death that some bullied youth express. Like Martinez’s poem, this poem gains strength from the litanies of names, statistics, and experiences; but, in the case of “Boom,” the setting is a school where support for LGBTQ youth is often weak or altogether absent. These poets shed light on the fact that many people—peers, teachers, and administrators—are responsible for the painful experiences that Dominguez and Taylor identify in their poem as “just another day at school.”
Background images in this section from the TYPS logo designed by Logan Phillips.