What is Writing?

So I am writing an "academic poem" for my writing studies class. It will be a very long poem/academic paper, although we don't really speak of epic poems anymore, since this won't really tell an epic kind of story. But it will include a lot of little stories about Cixous and Kristeva and Derrida and Barthes and many others. Here is the beginning of it, which is just kind of a riff for now.




Prologue: What is writing?

What is writing? Writing is everything. Writing is
communication, imagination, learning, history, memory, language, there is
nothing outside the text says Derrida, and I believe it and I don't there are moments,
says the artist Kiam Marcelo Junio, an artist from Chicago, says that there are moments
when we forget ourselves, they are only moments but they are perfect
moments when we forget ourselves drop our facades because writing although
it is expression is also an unnatural act . We do not naturally create texts – only now
we do. We do because it is all we know, so perhaps Derrida, loathe
as I am to admit it might be wait for it . . .
right. Maybe there is nothing outside the text because we can't remember
anything outside the text it's almost the way we can't remember
(according to the god people anyway) paradise eden there are
no perfect moments only text. But I digress . . .
Kiam Marcelo Junio . . . Chicago artist . . . says that there are moments when we forget ourselves
and lose our sense of self- consciousness and just exist

But writing is all the knowledge and creativity and creation and evolution and revolution and punk rock and heavy metal music and hymns and poems and treatises and manifestos and novels and academic articles and everything that we have learned and try to learn and strive to learn and know and catalogue and categorize and put into boxes marked kingdom phylum genre order class marxist proletariat species human and text and chora and Oedipus and his daddy Freud and his Mama Jocasta and Hamlet and Cleopatra the queen and the movie the woman(en) and the myth(s). How can you not be self-conscious with the weight of all that history upon you and all that knowledge and that was only half a paragraph or six stanzas if you will.

There is something outside the text. Unnamable feelings and joy and wild ecstatic movement and birds songs but the minute we identify it as anything at all, it moves inside the textual fence as it moves into consciousness from unconsciousness and there it sits until it becomes text and writing.

And so again, I will say, what is writing? Like Amiri Baraka once said, I think, of what use is
poetry? At least, a poet friend of mine in Minneapolis, J.
Otis Powell! With an exclamation point in his last name
used to recite a poem that he said was based upon Amiri Baraka's question of what
use is poetry ? Or as Paul McCartney, in the song Mrs. Vanderbilt,
(which is on the album Band on the Run) says “what's the use of anything?”
What's the use of the text? If we can't get outside of the text anymore,
then that makes the text a kind of . . . ideology since theory tell us
that it is impossible to get outside of our own ideologies, outside of our own heads, outside of
the text. Stupid Derrida. I hate it when he's right (write)(rite).
Death of the Author:
God and Mother

Think of the “death of the author” in terms of religion and childbirth,
which are not so far apart and which have been in the West,
uniquely masculine / feminine realms.

Death of the Author:

A Parable

In Christianity, Jesus (the author) must die and be resurrected so that believers (readers) can have safe passage to heaven (the text). This is the male-centered conception of the author as the all-knowing keeper of the text and of meaning. And in fact, Barthes speaks of “the ‘message’ of the Author-God” and says that “to refuse to fix its meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” .

Women, however, have historically had a different relationship to birth and death, with many medieval women dying in childbirth. In this model, the woman (author) dies so that her child (the reader) may be born, but that child will be orphaned, with no one to guide her through life (the text). There is a “death/not death,” a voluntary withdrawal that happens here that can be seen as Cixous’ metaphor for the author. In her manifesto “Coming to Writing,” there are extended passages that are about losing yourself in mad love (amour fou, as Andre Breton wrote of), to writing, to a feminine writing. This is not a nihilistic death, as might be seen in Foucault or Barthes, but a joyous celebration of what it is to write. “Text: not a detour, but the flesh at work in a labor of love” (42). As if she were taking the death of the author literally, then, she says “in the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh” (41).

A Joyous Nonsense/Non-sense: The speech of schizophrenics

Jameson called Surrealism “schizophrenic speech.” Jameson, like Freud before him, was baffled by both Dada and Surrealism and their attempts at nonlinear thought and speech to express the unconscious and to get at the unconscious, to free us all, particularly from the confines of so-called rational scientific thought .

I want to write something meaningful about
Surrealism something academically valid not to make myself a known entity employable or a respected scholar but because surrealism is meaningful to me, it makes me happy and it makes me feel liberated and I want other(s), maybe even big Others to feel liberated and feel the healing hands of Hannah Hoch or Hugo Ball or Raoul Hausmann and some other Dadaist or Surrealist with an H name so I can get good aliteration at the same time, be poetic, while I also tell you some very smart things about Surrealism.
They say writing about Surrealism is like dancing about architecture except that once I looked it up on Google the actual quote is that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. I could try to make the connection between music and Surrealism. They both work on an unconscious level. See, it didn't even take me long. But I am a lousy dancer and I don't know how to dance about architecture, although I know many good dancers and they tell me that dancing about architecture is actually a pretty good thing to do. I trust them.

Notes on my preliminary statement on spoken word poetry, politics and postmodernism

Feedback is greatly appreciated!



Of all literary and written theatrical forms, including plays, monologues, short stories, novels, creative nonfiction, etc. poetry has the most freedom to be non-linear in form. It is not tied to a plot or a theme and is not even tied to sense-making, as seen in Jabberwocky and in Dada and zaum poetry.

In a culture such as the United States in which almost (if not) all communication is intended to persuade such as advertising, partisan political campaigns, the politicizing of television news, or even to colonize the mind, as in highly normative television shows and media that portray wealth, money, and power as the greatest value, are the messages of performance poets who attempt to present “political” or “social” themes in their work really getting through? Or are they just preaching to the converted? What would happen if instead, performance poets in trying to be political, focused on liberating the minds/consciousness of their listeners by taking the freedom that poetry affords: not by presenting what is already known or thought to be known through narrative, but in presenting the unknown through the use of form and language.

1. I will look at the goals of several avant-gardes, specifically Russian Formalism, Surrealism, and the Language Poets for practices that might be adapted to contemporary spoken word performance, by which I mean specifically the performance of poetry. I will be looking specifically at Surrealism and the Language Poets through the lens of postmodern theory, contending that these two avant-gardes have the most to contribute to performance poetry in their experimentation with language.

a. One of my contentions is that Dada/Surrealism was postmodern from the very beginning, hence the Marxist rejection of their work as well as their failure to mobilize revolutionaries until the Negritude Poets in Haiti. Jameson referred to the Surrealists and duplicating schizophrenic speech, but he also said the schizophrenic speeches was one of the markers of the postmodern era or condition, which would seem to suggest, whether he meant to or not, that Surrealism itself is inherently postmodern.

b. I will talk about the goal of Russian Formalists’ goal of defamiliarization, using poetry to make strange that which we take for granted, as Barthes would say, that which has become naturalized.

c. The Language Poets have a little more straightforward lineage with Kristeva and postmodernism and take semiotics as the subject itself of much of their poetry.

d. My point is not to proscribe one type of writing to be used in performance poetry, but to suggest some goals and ways those goals have been achieved by poets who seek to have a political end to their poetry.


2. While it is not possible to prove a political effect, I will use semiotics, with the cornerstone being the theories of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, to talk about the politics of resistance in poetry. I will talk about Kristeva’s four signifying systems. I will discuss Barthes’ use of myth and the power of poetry to confront myth as well as his discussions of the reader/audience as a shared creator in meaning in an open text.

a. I will also do some extrapolating of psycho-linguistic theories, which would have appealed to the Surrealists and which, although as-yet untested, might shed some light on the effect of non-sense to reshape our thinking .


3. I will look at Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle as the backdrop to talk about aspects of an image-based culture and the ways in which poetry plays into this and also the ways in which poetry can confront Spectacle.


4. Finally, I will look at some examples of contemporary performance poetry through all of these lenses. Because poetry slam is the most dominant form of spoken word poetry, and because it is not possible to talk about spoken word without being asked about poetry slam, I will look at some slam poems that have won the national slam over the years that have a political or social theme to them as well as to some contemporary avant-garde performance poets.

a. I will look at the potential of performance poetry to keep the text of a poem open rather than fixed, allowing for a kind of experimentation and continual rewriting consistent with postmodern theory. One poet that I will rely on heavily for this is Tracie Morris, whose poetry is different with nearly every performance and who, herself, came up through slam poetry.

b. I will look at several modernist assumptions underlie much current spoken word, including the question of authenticity in poetry slam “voice” which often assumes a unified, authentic self as a form of “truth telling” and the solitary genius of the poet which is manifested in the largely 1-way communication from poet to audience. While there are attempts at reversing this through audience response and the points given at poetry slams, the truth is that there is an emphasis on “showing your love” to the poet onstage (especially since the poet has apparently “poured their guts out” on stage) and the fact that there are rarely poems that receive less than an 8 in a 10 point scale. This would seem to indicate that the “communication” from audience to performer is not really so reciprocal. I will look at how the avant-gardes mentioned above can complicate these assumptions.

The Liberation of the Imagination as a Political Act and Spoken Word Poetry: Introduction

This is one possible intro to what will be my dissertation/book on the liberation of the imagination as a political act in spoken word poetry. Please feel free to comment liberally, tell me what I've missed/overlooked, what's not clear, etc. I've tried to answer all of the criticisms my committee has made of my work and I'm a little bit fighting for my academic future here.

Thank you. Please drive through.



Many artists and writers want their work to be political in some fashion, to change the world, to have an impact. Moreover, most, if not all, artists and writers, want their work, their art form, to be relevant. There have all kinds of warnings over the past 15 (or 300) years that poetry is in danger of becoming irrelevant. No one reads anymore, no one reads poetry anymore, etc. etc. These questions – of the relevance of poetry, of the political relevance of poetry, have been one of my major obsessions of the past 15 years. What is it that poetry offers that no other artform does? Why read and write poetry in an age of novels, short fiction, flash fiction, of creative nonfiction, memoir or autobiography, biography, journalism, etc. What separates poetry from these forms in and what way poetry can poetry do something that no other artform is capable of doing make it a) relevant and b) political, ie, c) politically relevant?


Over the past 15 years, I have devoted myself to studying these questions, both formally in graduate school, and informally, through my own studies, through talking to poets in person at open mics and online through blogs and email exchanges.


I don’t mean to proscribe creativity here, although I’m going to inevitable sound like I do. There are a lot of good and useful goals to poetry. There are many reasons and many arguments for all kinds of poetry. I myself like the occasional love poem, lyric poem, or epic poems. But what I am going to discuss here is how poetry can liberate the imagination and in so doing, make itself politically relevant. I feel strongly about this and so I will at times make pronouncements (which I will try to back up with theory) which may sound exclusionary, showing work which fails in specific ways. For example, work that is easily read. While some may argue that such work has layers of meaning to it, which it no doubt does, it is on the surface easy grasped and most people will not delve any further into it, simply enjoying it on a surface level. This is doubly so when the work is read outloud or even performed, as in spoken word poetry, which is the style or incidence of poetry that I am investigating.


Some may argue that spoken word poetry itself does not have “a” style, something with which I am also inclined to agree. However, I will argue here that spoken word poetry has a “dominant style,” particularly that which has been influenced by poetry slam. As the dominant style of spoken word poetry, then, I will deal in part with poetry slam and poetry slam style as it tends to show itself, recognizing, once again, that are always exceptions to the rule. It will be some of these exceptions that I will be exploring, in contrast to the rule.


What I will be arguing for instead, is work that automatically, immediately confounds rationality and may or may not be something that the reader can “figure out,” but cannot be immediately grasped in any way at all. As such, I am not really interested in what the message or meaning of poetry is, but the way in which it subverts expectation in meaning, either in the writing of it or in its performance. Thus, for example, much of Tracie Morris’ work may seem to be straightforward and “readable” on the page, but in performance, she disrupts those meanings. It is the disruption of meaning that I am interested in, rather than the meaning itself. Edwin Torres’ work, which I will be investigating in some depth, is a particularly rich site, as both writes work that is not immediately graspable and performs it in a sometimes equally befuddling manner.


One of goals is to suggest one future path for spoken word poetry in general, for spoken word poets who desire for their work to have a political edge. And part of that is to identify what is and to point out how the past (in the form of these avant gardes) may be prologue in terms of what could come next in spoken word poetry. One of the mythologies of spoken word poets is that they are “street poets,” unschooled in formal or “academic” poetry. This is most heavily promoted by Bob Holman of the Bowery Poetry Club and Marc Smith of the Green Mill in Chicago. The truth is that there is both truth and falsehood to the premise. Many many poetry slam participants, past and future, either had their MFA’s at the time they were competing in slam. Many others went to school to get an MFA after being introduced to poetry through the slams and so did not study poetry initially but were turned on to it through the slams. And still others remain “street poets” eschewing any kind of training or education in poetry, preferring to learn from other poets “on the scene”. Whatever the case, I would encourage spoken word poets to investigate these avant gardes. Tracie Morris herself has said that she was introduced to Kurt Schwitters, author of the Ur Sonate, by Torres and found Dadaism to be particularly fruitful as a spoken word performer.


In the course of my work I am going to refer to several avant-garde schools of poetry, including Formalism, Surrealism, and the Language Poets. I have been challenged and asked why these avant-gardes and why subject yourself to the baggage that the avant-garde carries. My response is that these particular avant-garde poetry movements have articulated things which are useful and yet which have not been fully employed or investigated. It seems that every 20 or 30 years a group of writers goes back and tries to rehabilitate the avant gardes that came before them, never really gaining widespread acceptance and remaining a marginalized voice in the wilderness, crying out for revolutionary poetics and making moderate headway at best. I’ve always been interested in what I consider to be incomplete revolutions in literature, asking myself what aspects of this or that particular theory of literature has failed to be “pulled forward,” or put another way, what was ignored or left behind, but which still has relevance. This has been my quest for probably 20 years or more and continues to be the focus of my work.


To critics who would say the avant-garde is a white institution, I would argue that is more a “whitewashing” of literary history than anything, on “both” sides of the literary aisle. There have been a number of people of color involved with the goals and practices of these avant garde movements, as I will show. Clarence Major and Russell Atkins were doing work that was very similar to what the Language Poets were doing. There were any number of artists, particular in Latin America and the Francophone Caribbean (such as the negritude poets) that were in line with the politically liberatory aspects of Surrealism. And contemporary poets like Edwin Torres continue to keep alive the work of the Russian Formalism while working within the framework of “spoken word,” having come up through the Nuyorican Poets Café in the 1990s.


It has taken me a long time to realize what my methodology was, to see what it was that I was doing instinctively, and make it conscious. My methodology is multivarious, with one part being less prominent than the others. First, I am looking at the claims of these three avant-gardes, particularly through the lens of Barthes and his piece “Myth Today.” Next, I am looking at specific poems and poets, adding to Barthes, Kristeva and her four types of signifying practices: the metanarrative, which is close to Barthes’ conception of myth, the contemplative, narrative, and the text. Along the way, I will be referring to theories of how language is processed, drawing on theories of cognition, both linguistic and psychological, to think about how disrupting the normal processes of language and understanding can, in fact, get us out of what is known and easily processed and move us forward in our imaginations. Sometimes I will be taking, for example, cognitive theories of how language does work and thinking about how we might subvert the working models of language and understanding and what that might accomplish. It is not my goal here to undertake new experiments at this time, but to work with what currently exists and apply to semiotic understandings of language.


Finally, I will be to a very small degree, reporting on “ethnographies” of the dominant places of spoken word poetry. It is not possible to be at every poetry reading on every occasion, but having attending the seminal, or germinal, if you will, places of poetry (the Bowery Poetry Club and the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York and the Green Mill in Chicago) as well as a number of other site in Minneapolis, Chicago and New York, I feel that I can report on what are some dominant streams of Spoken Word poetry and some aspects of the hosting and the audience reactions, as well as how those two things work in tandem with each other. This is the limit, however, of my ethnographic inquiry and I make no claims, nor do I find any claims possible, as to the “completeness” of this research.