Growing up is the realization
that you've outlived all your tragic idols.
Dead poets, rock stars
make you lose yourself in their myths
until one day jade and disgust
stain you like mud splashed
by speeding thoughtless passersby
driving drunken
busloads of once-dreamers
like the trains to Auschwitz
these fenced with white picket not wire barbs
no literal death torture unspeakable horrors
wait you now but the cattle call
life laid out neatly like a child's first school clothes
souldeath numb endless days waiting for the call
the bell the thing that brings this to an end
expect no future
hope for no future
fear any future offered
in a slick salesman's smile or a politician's
promisory paper--
kill time until
you'll-know-it-when-you-see-it
shows up, wags its ass in your face
and says i'm here now. what?
now what? now
what took you so long?
It's not too late.
Let's go back
before the days when
it was open season on our hopes
and we had to shelter them like cold shivering refugees,
before we counted time backwards from the end
of history.
Let's be audacious. Let's remember that
the right song can still save us
from the world,
shout dirty limericks in the museum
brown bag it to the opera,
sit on the floor in lavish hotel lobbies
in tie-dye evening gowns
eating french fries and debating dead
German philosophers as if we
understood them,
make snide comments to rude overeducated
art snob ticket takers and rabble removing
doormen, disgruntled security guards with
inert toy guns
without feeling the pressure
to make apologies we don't mean
let's jump off the drunken bus
clean ourselves up
and walk home together.
Surrealist Doodle
This was used as the cover of Karawane in 2006 and I have included it in on a number of bags and postcards over the years. Someone on the subway asked me if it was a Miro. I was very flattered!
Showing posts with label performance poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label performance poetry. Show all posts
Friday, April 08, 2011
Dustbowl (a poem)
who will mark the day
when you've been dead longer than you were alive
the chickens have come home to roost and the cock
cannot stop crowing his lungs burst as they strain to summon the day
teach a man to farm teach him to march in rows stand straight when ordered and hide among the crops during the hunt and his napalmed hands will fertilize soft baby skulls, tattoo plaid and pastel flowers onto flimsy flesh hammers and anvils and drums make music more pleasing than a funeral march the unfamiliar streets will swallow you up before you can build your myth epic by epic before your tasks are finished and the stables are cleared
the prophet saw huge metal birds and resurrected monsters, how we burn ourselves up inside brick and steel solid structures the pyramids will outlive our bleached bones muscle by muscle I melt pulled apart like a wishbone my empty ribcage still moves by habit after my head flies off
there are not enough hands to cover all of your shameful parts
the kevorkian babies cry all night chase pigeons with fat pink faces not born of sand and rice paddies their pictures play in courtrooms the playground becomes a tragic mecca outlined at ground zero, a pinata full of scorpions burn down your temples and churches
your god no longer lives there
when you've been dead longer than you were alive
the chickens have come home to roost and the cock
cannot stop crowing his lungs burst as they strain to summon the day
teach a man to farm teach him to march in rows stand straight when ordered and hide among the crops during the hunt and his napalmed hands will fertilize soft baby skulls, tattoo plaid and pastel flowers onto flimsy flesh hammers and anvils and drums make music more pleasing than a funeral march the unfamiliar streets will swallow you up before you can build your myth epic by epic before your tasks are finished and the stables are cleared
the prophet saw huge metal birds and resurrected monsters, how we burn ourselves up inside brick and steel solid structures the pyramids will outlive our bleached bones muscle by muscle I melt pulled apart like a wishbone my empty ribcage still moves by habit after my head flies off
there are not enough hands to cover all of your shameful parts
the kevorkian babies cry all night chase pigeons with fat pink faces not born of sand and rice paddies their pictures play in courtrooms the playground becomes a tragic mecca outlined at ground zero, a pinata full of scorpions burn down your temples and churches
your god no longer lives there
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
More thoughts on (performance) poetry and the avant-garde
I've gotten criticsms about my dissertation because I keep talking about how poetry that talks about race and gender as giving us what we already know and that the most revolutionary of poetry is that which gives us what is unknown. I pick on these things because they are among the most frequent topics of contemporary performance poetry. But let me clarify -- and be perfectly clear about it -- I am arguing "against" poetry that is about anything.
My point is, and always has been, that there are plenty of forms for describing things or telling people about things -- fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, reviews, blogs, manifestos, etc. Literary critics often go around wringing their hands that no one reads poetry anymore, that poetry is irrelevant. But few people ask -- what is it that poetry does, can do, that no other form of writing can do. What is it that makes poetry relevant?
What I am interested in is poetry that is not, then, about things, that does not talk about things directly, describe them precisely, get at them. I'm interested in poetry that talks around things, so to speak, talks through them. Nonsense poetry, interesting or weird juxtapositions of words and phrases, things that don't seem to make any sense. I'm interested in the moment where a listener hears this poetry (because I am also interested in the performance of poetry) and it ceases to be mere music, but it is also strange, undecipherable, a cipher, a complete unknown -- not just because the person doesn't understand the conventions of poetry or metaphor, but because the poem isn't meant to be understood on the conscious level. Maybe it is written using cut-up techniques and therefore was never meant to be understood. Maybe it is syllabic, or zaum poetry which as Craig Dworkin has pointed out, can potentially be deciphered, but only after much thought. Maybe it is written from the subconscious as with Surrealist poetry and has the potential to be deciphered, but never with any kind of certainty. But I'm interested in this kind of poetry, the kind of poetry that the avant-garde has practiced for over a century, as the most politically liberatory because this is the kind of poetry that scrambles our rational thought and can produce new types of thoughts, new possibilities, not what is already known. Sol Lewitt said that rational thought repeats rational thought. When we scramble rational thought, we get out of the known and that is where the unique, political potential of poetry truly exists.
More to come . . .
My point is, and always has been, that there are plenty of forms for describing things or telling people about things -- fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, reviews, blogs, manifestos, etc. Literary critics often go around wringing their hands that no one reads poetry anymore, that poetry is irrelevant. But few people ask -- what is it that poetry does, can do, that no other form of writing can do. What is it that makes poetry relevant?
What I am interested in is poetry that is not, then, about things, that does not talk about things directly, describe them precisely, get at them. I'm interested in poetry that talks around things, so to speak, talks through them. Nonsense poetry, interesting or weird juxtapositions of words and phrases, things that don't seem to make any sense. I'm interested in the moment where a listener hears this poetry (because I am also interested in the performance of poetry) and it ceases to be mere music, but it is also strange, undecipherable, a cipher, a complete unknown -- not just because the person doesn't understand the conventions of poetry or metaphor, but because the poem isn't meant to be understood on the conscious level. Maybe it is written using cut-up techniques and therefore was never meant to be understood. Maybe it is syllabic, or zaum poetry which as Craig Dworkin has pointed out, can potentially be deciphered, but only after much thought. Maybe it is written from the subconscious as with Surrealist poetry and has the potential to be deciphered, but never with any kind of certainty. But I'm interested in this kind of poetry, the kind of poetry that the avant-garde has practiced for over a century, as the most politically liberatory because this is the kind of poetry that scrambles our rational thought and can produce new types of thoughts, new possibilities, not what is already known. Sol Lewitt said that rational thought repeats rational thought. When we scramble rational thought, we get out of the known and that is where the unique, political potential of poetry truly exists.
More to come . . .
Thursday, January 03, 2008
SENTIMENT AND MEMORY: POLITICS OF POETRY SLAM
This is from a paper I wrote for a seminar this semester and is going to work into my dissertation. The idea is to look at the roots of sentimentalist philosophy and politics as it informs contemporary artistic practice and in particular, poetry slam.
THE POLITICS OF POETRY SLAM
There is an approach to poetry that takes inspiration from the idea that “the personal is political” and combined with a trend toward confessionalism in contemporary poetry, posits itself as political in showing and celebrating the lives of “ordinary" people or marginalized groups and individuals. The most highly visible form of performance poetry these days is poetry slam, and in the vernacular understanding, poetry slam is in fact, synonymous with performance poetry. If spoken word and performance poetry, specifically the work seen at poetry slams, can be said to have a consistent political activity to it, it is in the maintenance of what is known as identity politics. It is a common lament that “playing the race card” or the “gender card” or pulling out a sentimental story will win you a slam. That lament is often uttered as a contrast that “good poetry” rarely wins slams as much as sentimentalism and identification with the plight of the poet. Regardless of your aesthetic or political bent, it is obvious to even the most casual observer or attendee of these events that the conventional logic does ring true. The “cliché” then is that identity politics rule the day—that poems dealing with race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or angry politics in general will do better in poetry slams than a piece of surrealism or a poem about flowers or puppy dogs. (Unless the puppy dogs are owned by a Latina lesbian who was just released from prison after a long sentence for drug charges, in which case the puppy dog poem may do quite well.) Through the baring of deeply personal experiences, even trauma then, the politics of these works draws on a sentimentalist assumption that social change can be brought about by empathy, by affective identifications.
There are some inherent dangers of misusing sources within this project. One way in which this manifests is the danger of citing anthologies whose editors and “spokespeople” attempt to place context and offer commentary and that ultimately both intentionally and unintentionally lead to reification of the works themselves. We might end up giving the appearance of a unified ideology where none exits. There is also the problem of attempting to cite a few particular poems or lines out of the thousands of slam and performance poems that have been written and circulated over the years, whether from performances, websites, or anthologies vs. that of citing none and being seen as too vague or general. Will four lines of one poem within this paper lend credence to the claims herein? Will ten? Will five lines from six different poems? Trying to find something that is “representative” in this way can be a dangerous venture. Out of the wealth of material published and performed, available in anthologies, at open mics, on public access television, internet blogs, MySpace sites, CDs, etc., there are any number of pieces that could be used to justify many, if not all possible theses on politics, aesthetics, identity, etc.
What does exist is a largely unspoken, subterranean set of assumptions by which the culture at large of performance poetry (particularly in its easily identified category of slam) can be seen to operate, to adhere and which plays itself out between performers and audiences in relationships of identification, affect and satisfaction. Talk to anyone who has been to a poetry slam and there is a knowing nod that there is not only a reified form that the work takes, but that there are certain predictable themes that will emerge and that these themes center on identity and on trauma. And so instead of citing poems, I have decided to refer to a vernacular reference point, Poetry Slam Bingo. This parodic piece, playing off of popular knowledge of slam has been widely distributed throughout the internet and can be found at the site BrokenWord.org, which also features the work “Def Poet” Big Poppa E. The “bingo sheets” contain a variety of poetry slam “clichés”, including:
Feminist Rant
Therapy
The Revolution
Guilty White Guy
Didactic Poem
Gay Marriage Reference
I am . . . I am . . . I am . . .
Preach!
Anti-Bush Poem
Pimping Pain for Points
Blame
Popular Culture Reference
Identity Poem
White Guy Trying to Prove He’s “Down”
Conspiracy Theory
Poet Cries
My pain! My pain! My pain!
Current Events Reference
Slam as Religion
Childhood Sucks
Victim
Politicians are Bad
Didactic Poem
History Lesson
Represented here are a variety of themes that involve history, politics, identity, and sentimentalism, many, if not all, of which may overlap and intersect throughout a given piece. In other words, the clichés do not fit into discrete categories, which the “rules” for poetry slam bingo reinforces:
THE RULES:
1] When a poet fulfills one of the above categories, mark out the square. When you fill a row, shout “BINGO!” If you black out the entire card, shout “SUPER BINGO!”
2] Do not ever shout “BINGO” during someone’s poem. That would be rude. Wait until the host has returned to the stage after a performance to shout “BINGO!”
3] Keep track of who does what and when because you will have to defend your categories in front of the audience. If the audience does not agree with your choices, you will be disqualified from Slam Bingo, so be sure you can defend your choices.
A BRIEF DISCUSSION OF IDENTITY IN PROGRESSIVE POLITICS
Central to contemporary progressive politics is the concept of identity—those groups and subcultures the individual identifies with in any given situation—which plays out in both of these realms—sentiment and memory. The individual’s self-identification will determine how effective the affective forms of address will be and the shared assumptions, history, memories, etc. they will engage in. Political organizing along lines of identity remains a common practice, reinforced by commonly held beliefs about art and political efficacy. 1970s feminist consciousness-raising groups operated on the assumption that the act of telling one’s story was an inherently political act, one that would empower others to come forward, to bring injustices into the light of day. The belief was that once these stories were told, they would inspire compassion and lead to social change. This belief continues 30+ years later as activists and artists alike speak of the “power of story.”
Nonetheless, identity politics has taken a hit at the hands of many theorists from a variety of fields. It is has been criticized as highly limited, reifying and re-essentializing notions of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. It has been cited by a number of theorists, including Peggy Phelan, as falling into capitalist commodity fetishism. And yet, in his own critique of identity politics, Is Identity a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept? Richard Handler suggests that:
“to distance ourselves epistemologically from ideologies of identity is a politically delicate task, for many of the claimants to collective identity whose cultural philosophy we may dispute are nonetheless peoples whose struggles for social justice we support.” [1]
While critics of identity politics question the reification of identities, it is possible for our purposes to talk about a politics of identity in which identity is not necessarily a fixed category, but fluid and multiple. In fact, acknowledging the fluidity of categories may be more useful, as this fluidity allows us to approach the very sense of “community” that is presumed in this type of work. If, for example, an audience member can identify as Black and Latina, as a feminist and as a lesbian, for example, then her subject position allows her to cross lines and borders, to empathize with a wider range of “other” identities. While multiple identifications may also impede political progress at times by creating conflicts of interest where “discrete” identity categories come into conflict, the concept of fluid identities may also facilitate sentimental identifications and their moral and political exhortations.
FROM SENSIBILITY TO MELODRAMA:
A SHORT HISTORY OF SENTIMENTAL POLITICS
“[T]he heritage of tragedy may well be more effective than that of triumph: suffering in common unifies more than joy does.”[2]
In The Culture of Sensibility, G. J. Barker-Benfield traces the rise of sentiment in 18th century England through medical and scientific theories (based largely on gender) through moral reform, and the rise of sentiment(ality) in the then newly-emerging genre of the novel. Barker-Benfield discusses the use of sentimental(ist) theories in reforming male manners and behavior and improving the “morals” of English men. These reforms included trying to keep men out of ale houses and other locations of “ill repute” and discouraging wanton male sexual behavior. Reforms such as these were seen to benefit women, particularly by improving conditions for women within home and family life, arguments which will find some resonance a century later in the domestic melodrama. For my purposes in looking at the political uses of sentiment, Barker-Benfield’s discussion of religion and ethics are of particular interest. This passage from The Spectator offers an insight into early assumptions about the role of sentimentality in religious and moral conversion that still has echoes today in assumptions about the nature of story and narrative in their capacity to evoke empathy:
“[S]tories of calamities . . . melt our hearts with compassion . . . since we can neither see nor hear of, nor imagine another’s grief without being afflicted ourselves.”[3]
In her work on a politics of compassion, Lauren Berlant describes the way in which such “testifying moral functions of suffering” are assumed to “authorize the reader to imagine changing the world.”[4] Preachers of the day, including John Wesley, utilized such stories as well as particularly emotional styles of preaching, which Barker-Benfield characterizes as “[t]he first revolutionary technique” which Wesley (and others) employed to:
“produce emotional effects in his listeners. . . . Whitefield wept at nearly every sermon. Tennent writhed and fainted. They wrought their spellbinding speech with a mastery of ‘stylized emotionalism.’ Whitefield’s oratorical ‘pathos,’ his ability to get his congregation sobbing, was admired by [actor David] Garrick. Implementing very similar techniques in the theatre now aiming to reform its audience by making them weep, Garrick invoked similar responses. . . . Edwards, having read sentimental fiction, in his sermons used ‘all the weapons, conscious and subconscious, verbal, emotional and sensuous, of the [sentimental] author at his best.”[5]
The relationship here between religion and literature is undeniable. The sentimental novels of the day prepared audiences for the type of emotional appeal that Wesley and his contemporaries employed. Religion and literature at this time worked together to unite emotion and compassion with moral, ethical and religious conversion, a kind of intertextual citationality. Centuries later, in the realm of politics, civil rights movements from Gandhi to Martin Luther King to Malcolm X, have appealed inherently to the moral imperatives of their causes while also employing the language of their respective religions.
Now, think back to our Poetry Slam Bingo for a moment. One of the bingo boxes is “Poet Cries” while others include “Preach!” and “Poetry Slam As Religion,” bringing together at the very least, the performative and the evangelical aspects of 18th century moral and religious sentimentalism. Alex Ogg’s history of rap cites “linguistics of signifying, testifying, schoolyard and jailhouse rhyming”[6] and John Szwed locates the sermons of black preachers among the roots of rap performance in the way they would “sing the word” and also in what he calls the “high” oratory of black leaders from Martin Luther King to Muhammad Ali. [7] Dr. King himself employed a very rousing and emotional oratory style that was intended to appeal to the morality of his listeners, much as Wesley and his fellow evangelicals. Given the large numbers of African Americans in Methodist and evangelical denominations in America (including the African Methodist Episcopal Church), the link between 18th century sentimental preaching and 21st century “slamming” cannot be easily ignored or dismissed.
In the 19th century, the relationship between sentiment and politics continued to be played out through the theatrical form of melodrama. In particular, melodrama was used to tell the story of the working class in England and in both England and the United States and the domestic melodrama was pressed into service for the women’s suffrage movement. One of the unifying goals or ideologies behind melodrama is the creation of a group identity and the exhortation toward the theatre’s audience to understand, sympathize, or even identify with that group. Pulled to the right or the left, for revolutionary or conservative ends, melodrama is never outside of the politics of identity nor is it ever without ideology.
“[T]the melodrama served as a crucial space in which the cultural, political, and economic exigencies of the century were played out and transformed into public discourses about issues ranging from the gender-specific dimensions of individual station and behavior to the role and status of ‘the nation’ in local as well as imperial politics.” [8]
Berlant interrogates the imperative placed upon “the modern incitement to feel compassionately – even while being entertained.”[9] While melodrama may attempt to “authorize the reader to imagine changing in the world,”[10] Berlant sees the risk of replacing social transformation with a “civic-minded but passive idea of empathy.”[11] The criticisms leveled against melodrama’s political potential focus on ideas of escapism, arguing that the neat and tidy endings of melodrama satisfy the audience’s desires in a way that allows life outside the theatre to continue unchanged—admittedly, a common complaint against many forms of political theatre. For Ilsemann, melodrama’s crime is the irrationality it produces in the audience’s response, the emphasis on clear cut ideas of hero/villain and good/evil which forecloses the kind of rational response that would be required for create political consciousness and ultimately inspire action. What we see in this critique of melodrama is not the pairing of sentiment with rationalism that Barker-Benfield describes as the foundation of early 18th century theories of sentimentalism, but the squaring off of these attributes as opposites that neutralize the power and potential of both. Instead, what the audience experiences (according to Ilsemann) is “a corrective dream world . . . that confirm[s] the integrity of the spectator’s moral feel and the self-esteem derived from the wholeness of being.”[12] And so, if we are to believe Islemann, the moral imperatives directed at the audience do not inspire conversion or change as Wesley and his fellow evangelicals sought, but mere complacency.
Peter Brooks is more optimistic about melodrama, asserting that “[w]hile its social implications may be variously revolutionary or conservative, it is in all cases radically democratic, striving to make its representations clear and legible to everyone.”[13] Melodrama’s apologists and critics alike have debated and interrogated claims that melodrama helped to spread ideas about modern subjectivity and even expand our ideas about how the identity of modern “subject” is constituted through ideas of compassion and representation found in the forms and subgenres of melodrama.
For Brooks, the “social melodrama,” elevates the quotidian and gives it a heightened importance with its focus on “representation of man’s social existence, the way he lives in the ordinary, and with the moral drama implicated by and in his existence.”[14] He sees social melodrama as an attempt to make “the ‘real’ and the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘private life’ interesting through heightened dramatic utterance and gestures that lay bare the true stakes.”[15] In doing so, the personal does in fact, become political. For women denied full access to participation in public life and whose domain had been identified as the private sphere, bringing the home, the private, the domestic interior, into the very public space of the stage serves to blur the two, foregrounding the role and concerns of women. The stakes of (female) representation are not only laid bare, but are also heightened. Whether or not genuine social and political change necessarily follows is a more contentious question. The more important question here is the way in which the domestic melodrama would become an attractive vehicle for feminists seeking to represent their (heretofore hidden) struggles within the public sphere. Suffragists like Harriet Stanton Blatch were very willing and eager to adopt the tendencies of melodrama to the suffragist cause, believing that “the actress’s powers of persuasion – her capacity to move the hearts and minds of the audience – made her vital to the suffragist cause. . . . ‘People must be appealed to through their emotions.’”[16] A case in point is that of the British actress and playwright Elizabeth Robins, who used her work in the 1891 production of Hedda Gabler in London to construct “a new female political subject in her campaigning on behalf of the suffrage movement.”[17] Robins also wrote her own plays, including one entitled Votes for Women, illustrating what Berlant suggests as the “particular place that femininity has played in maintaining optimism around sentimental pedagogy in and about the U.S.”[18]
While the domestic melodrama was seen as appealing primarily to women, for suffragists and political crusaders, the audience was much more expansive. Garnering sympathy from male audience members, who could vote and who could turn the tide for the cause of suffrage, often meant “translating the display of female political assertion into theatrical images that were palatable to male members of the audience, the press and the Broadway establishment.””[19] Given the ultimate success of the women’s suffrage movement itself and the movement’s use of sentiment on the stage and in the political arena, it’s easy to see why tactics that combine affect with an appeal to morality would be remain attractive within the political and aesthetic imagination, through second wave feminism and the liberatory movements of the 1960s and 70s and into today. Indeed, according to Brooks melodrama remains a “central fact of the modern sensibility. . . the search for meanings and symbolic systems [that] provides a model for the making of meaning in fictional dramatization of existence.”[20]
TO POETRY SLAM AND BACK
“The possibility that through identification with alterity you will never be the same remains the radical threat and great promise of this affective aesthetic.”[21]
The Nuyorican Poets’ Café on New York’s Lower East Side represents itself as the “Real McCoy” of spoken word. It is the “Mecca” that all traveling spoken word and slam poets must make pilgrimage to when they go to New York. Both in the “Open Room” and at the poetry slams, the work at the Nuyorican draws heavily upon sentimental politics in a variety of ways, self-consciously contrasting personal identity to national or citizen identity or social/political power. For example, one of the poems the night I attended the slam began with:
“I do not pledge allegiance to a dream deferred.
Anti-American? There is no America.
Money rules.”[22]
The second piece focused on a woman’s story of teaching a struggling inner city student:
“Her eyes are filled with the hope of Amazonian warriors. . . .
“Her soul must have tripped over her words . . .
“I told her, ‘You are special.’”[23]
Another piece that night told the very moving and disturbing story of a rape. A poem from the open mic night started with “I am not your Spic” and went through a litany of racial stereotypes (of various levels of offensiveness) about Latinos. Each of these assumes some level of identification with or sympathy for the poet and/or the subject of the poem and possibly shame or embarrassment on the part of those whose racial identities would align them with the “oppressor.” (Remember the “Guilty White Guy” from our Poetry Slam Bingo.) While “warming up” the audience and giving the judges their rules or criteria for judging the slam, the host the night I attended asked “How do you put a number on someone’s pain and expression?” Regardless of the scoring of the pieces, the highly individualized and sensitive soul of the author/performer, combined with the politically and socially charged subject matter of the pieces, leaves the audience with only one appropriate emotional response. On a ten-point scale, no poems that night scored below an 8.5.
Finally, perhaps because of the close identification of the performer with the text in performed poetry, the use of sentiment also leans toward a “confessional” ethos. For Foucault the confessional mode is “one of the West's most highly valued techniques for producing truth,"[24] and indeed, many spoken word poets cite “truth telling” as an aspect to what they do, whether the work is overtly political or whether it leans more toward personal details. David P. Terry elaborates:
"For Foucault, the impulse to reveal our "true" selves stands as one of the central figures of Western civilization and one of the central ways in which power enacted in micro relationships produces and reinforces macro socio/political structures."[25]
Terry sees in this confessional mode, “a . . . kind of self-expression that is supposed to bear a special stamp of sincerity and authenticity and to bear witness to the truth of the individual personality . . giv[ing] the illusion of addressing broader social/political ills . . . .”[26]
MEMORY, IDENTITY AND SENTIMENT
“The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide.”[27]
Many memory theorists such as Olick, Beim and Zellizer discuss the relationship of memory to identity construction both within the contexts of maintaining ethnic and cultural identities and within the context of creating a nationalistic American identity. On the surface, these might look like dissimilar, even opposite operations. Yet I believe it might be argued that these are in fact, similar complementary operations in which one is a step in the process toward the other. In this case, it may be seen that the collectivity, although maintaining its group identity, seeks to be brought into citizenship together as a whole, rather than merely through its individual members. This is, in fact, the underlying assumption behind mass movements – civil rights, feminism, etc. Thus, the presumed American tension between the group and the individual is here erased, effaced, resolved dialectically, at least for the duration of the struggle for acceptance, acclimation and ultimately assimilation – ie citizenship.
Toward this end, these collective identities of race, culture ethnicity and ultimately national citizen identity, are constructed through shared experiences and shared memories – shared understandings and expressions of collective memories. Some of these may be specific incidents – such as the shooting of Amadou Diallo by the New York Police Department—and others may be more general—as in memories of growing up in Harlem or the description of a sexual assault, which others may relate to. In the rubric of The Personal is Political, it is assumed that the personal story will touch off a collective memory, which will help unify the community from which the speaker comes and at the same time, create sympathy, possible even a form of affective identification, from those outside of that community, spurring all of those who have been addressed by the work to act for social change.
In our highly mediated world, the sense of belonging created by shared (cultural) memory no longer belongs exclusively to any one group. Through film and television, any audience member may believe that they understand, for example, what it is to grow up poor in Harlem, and when this mediated memory is combined with the presence of a live performer speaking passionately about the experience, (and with the skill of the evangelical preacher or the weeping poet, moving the audience to tears) the sentiment that is felt from the performance may combine with that mediated “memory” so that the person in the audience may come to believe that they fully understand how it feels to grow up in Harlem. The memory and the identification may no longer be particular to the community from which the performer originates, and from which he or she speaks. This may sound “inauthentic,” and the irony here is that while authenticity is one of the most highly valued attributes of identity politics, this type of empathetic identification is critical to sentimentalist political assumptions. Is this experience, then, a mis-identification? For a sentimental or affective politics to be effective, there must be a degree of universalism, an understanding that no one can be excluded from the moral charge that is presented by this work.
Aaron Beim explains such an operation when he describes Jeffrey Shandler’s work on Holocaust images in television. “Shandler argues that since television has brought the Holocaust into the homes of millions of Americans, it transformed the event from a deeply disturbing yet otherworldly event into a personal tragedy. Television transformed watching the Holocaust into the morally changed act of witnessing the Holocaust.[28] He continues:
“Now let us say that some . . . Jews . . wanted to produce a documentary about the Holocaust. To produce the object, they would by default call on their Holocaust collective memory schemata to make sense of the Holocaust for themselves and thus to operationalize the topic for film production. Once produced, this film would in turn influence how other groups give meaning to the historical event and thus would begin anew the cycle of Holocaust collective memory production.”[29]
Sentimental politics combines here with first person confessionalism here through the sharing of memories that might be either personal or individual (being called a racial epithet at school) or collective (the riots after the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles).
One of the claims of poetry slam is that it builds community, and if this can in fact be the case, it is not simply by bringing a collection of people together into one room (that would merely be a crowd, and not a community), but through creating a sense of identification that can transcend the boundaries of identity and create, perhaps, a new identity within the particular space and time of the event. Beim discusses the idea of collective memory, which he describes as “largely the cognitive by-product of social interaction. . . . Collective memory . . . naturally stems from social structure through the interaction of individuals with institutionalized collective memory objects (like a memorial, film or a reputation).”[30] It’s not that the audience members are having false or inauthentic memories necessarily, but that they are brought into the community through the hearing of stories that have become familiar to them through mediated forms or popular culture rather than through the actual experience of the event. A large, mediated tragedy such as September 11th offers one of the best examples of this. Even people who were not directly involved in the events of that day (ie on the planes or in the World Trade Center or Pentagon) have intense memories of that day through television news and documentaries. Most people who witnessed the event in this way can be said to have a memory of the event and an emotional response to the event. Does if follow that one can have a memory of a smaller or less traumatic event, such as growing up poor in the 1950s, through repeatedly watching documentaries? Many memory theorists describe the importance of collectivities in generating and stimulating memory. If as Olick suggests, “only individuals remember, though they may do so alone or together,”[31] we do so in conversation with what Barbie Zellizer calls a “community of memory”[32]. She cites George Lipsitz in suggesting that “popular culture has precipitated a crisis of memory, in which all identity construction comes to rest at least in part on memory work.”[33]
According to Zellizer, collective memory is always political and is always about the establishment of identity and community before issues of “truth” or accuracy:”
“[C]ollective memory refers to recollections that are instantiated beyond the individual by and for the collective. . . the collective memory comprises recollections of the past that are determined and shaped by the group. By definition, collective memory thereby presumes activities of sharing, discussion, negotiation, and often, contestation. Remembering becomes implicated in a range of other activities having as much to do with identity formation, power and authority, cultural norms, and social interaction as with the simple act of recall. Its full understanding thus requires an appropriation of memory as social, cultural and political action at its broadest level.” [34]
“[C]ollective memories help us fabricate, rearrange or omit details from the past as we thought we knew it. Issues of historical accuracy and authenticity are pushed aside to accommodate other issues, such as those surrounding the establishment of social identity, authority, solidarity, political affiliation.” [35]
If this is the case, then memory, whether it be “personal” (autobiographical or vernacular) or “political” (official), can be a powerful tool in building a sense of community and collective identity, particularly when paired with sentiment.
As a tool for transmitting memory as well as emotion, performance poetry is well-positioned historically. Zellizer points out that:
“ . . . the earliest expressions of a community’s collective memory have tended to be language-based—chants sung by tribes during cattle round-ups, sagas of the Icelanders, Homeric epics of the Ancient Greeks. . . Some scholars have argued for memory’s fundamentally oral nature, and for the fact that early forms of remembering were associated with oral sources and the oral tradition. . . .”[36]
While there are many criticisms of identity politics, the political uses of sentiment, and of the confluence of these factors in performance poetry and poetry slam, it is important to understand where the political assumptions behind this work comes from and the foundation that artists and activists alike seek to build upon. Sentimentalism combined with collective memory has had its political successes, as well as its limitations. In his introduction to Listen Up!, Yusef Komunyakaa asserts that “[t]he voices in Listen Up! are personal and public, and they also speak on behalf of others. . . This is a poetry of engagement and discourse. It celebrates and confronts.”[37] He suggests that the personal is political and vice versa, not in overt didacticism or sloganeering, but in the subtle assumptions that underlie the work, that the “voices” represented therein speak for others (or possibly in some cases, Others).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anglesey, Zoe, Ed. Listen up! New York: One World/Ballantine, 1999.
Barker-Benfield, G. J. The culture of sensibility: sex and society in eighteenth-century Britain. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Beim, A. "The Cognitive Aspects of Collective Memory." Symbolic Interaction 30:1 (2007): 7-26.
Berlant, Lauren Gail Compassion. Essays from the English Institute. New York: Routledge and Net Library, Inc, 2004, http://www.netLibrary.com/summary.asp?id=115387; https://www.lib.umn.edu/slog.phtml?url=http://www.netLibrary.com/summary.asp?id=115387; https://webapps.d.umn.edu:2443/login?url=http://www.netLibrary.com/summary.asp?id=115387.
Berlant, Lauren. “Poor Eliza.” No More Separate Spheres! Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds Durham: Duke University Press , 2002, 291-323.
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination : Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
Glenn, Susan A. Female Spectacle : The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Handler, Richard. "Is Identity' a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept?" Commemorations: the politics of national identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1994, 27-40.
Hays, Michael and Anastasia Nikolopoulou. Melodrama : The Cultural Emergence of a Genre. London: Macmillan, 1996.
Ilsemann, Hartmut. “Radicalism in the Melodrama of the Nineteenth Century,” Melodrama : The Cultural Emergence of a Genre. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, eds. London: Macmillan, 1996, pp. 191-207.
Lowenthal, David. "Identity, Heritage, and History," Commemorations: the politics of national identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1994, 41-57.
Ogg, Alex and David Upshal, The Hip Hop Years: A History of Rap. Philadelphia: Trans-Atlantic Publications, Inc., 1999.
Olick, J. K. "Collective Memory: The Two Cultures." Sociological Theory 17:3 (1999): 333-348.
Olick, Jeffrey K. and Joyce Robbins. "Social Memory Studies: From "Collective Memory" to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices." Annual Review of Sociology 24:1 (1998): 105-140.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked : The Politics of Performance. London ; New York: Routledge, 1993.
Szwed, John F. “The Real Old School,” The Vibe History of Hip Hop, Alan Light, Ed. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999, p. 3-10.
Terry, David P. “Once Blind, Now Seeing: Problematics of Confessional Performance.” Text and Performance Quarterly, 26:3 (July, 2006): 209-228.
Townsend, Joanna. “Elizabeth Robins: Hysteria, Politics and Performance.” Women, Theatre and Performance : New Histories, New Historiographies. Women, Theatre and Performance.
Maggie B. Gale and Vivien Gardner, eds. Manchester ; New York: Manchester University Press,
2000, pp. 102-120.
Zelizer, B. "Reading the past against the grain: The shape of memory studies." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 204-239.
END NOTES
[1] 38
[2]Lowenthall, 50
[3]Barker-Benfield, 68
[4] Berlant, 2002 301
[5] 72.
[6] 39.
[7] It is difficult, if not impossible, to untangle rap and hip hop from contemporary performance poetry and poetry slam. Rap and hip hop are often used interchangeably by scholars and historians, as well as by some practitioners. Likewise, poetry slam and hip hop styles of performance are seen as difficult to distinguish from one another. There is definitely a trajectory from rap into poetry slam and contemporary performance poetry.
[8] Hays and Nikolopoulou, viii
[9]Berlant 2004, 5
[10] Berlant 2002, 301
[11] Berlant 2002, 297
[12] 202
[13] 15
[14] 22
[15] 14
[16] Glenn,135
[17] Townsend, 103
[18] Berlant, 2002, 297
[19] Glenn, 149
[20] 13
[21]Berlant, 2002, 303
[22] Laura Winton research trip notes June, 2006
[23] Laura Winton research trip notes June, 2006
[24] Terry, 210
[25] Terry, 210
[26] Terry, 217
[27] Olick & Robbins, 122
[28] Beim, 2007, 13
[29] Beim, 2007, 20
[30] Beim, 2007, 8
[31] 338
[32] 228
[33] 229
[34] 214
[35] 217
[36] 232-233
[37] xii-xiii
THE POLITICS OF POETRY SLAM
There is an approach to poetry that takes inspiration from the idea that “the personal is political” and combined with a trend toward confessionalism in contemporary poetry, posits itself as political in showing and celebrating the lives of “ordinary" people or marginalized groups and individuals. The most highly visible form of performance poetry these days is poetry slam, and in the vernacular understanding, poetry slam is in fact, synonymous with performance poetry. If spoken word and performance poetry, specifically the work seen at poetry slams, can be said to have a consistent political activity to it, it is in the maintenance of what is known as identity politics. It is a common lament that “playing the race card” or the “gender card” or pulling out a sentimental story will win you a slam. That lament is often uttered as a contrast that “good poetry” rarely wins slams as much as sentimentalism and identification with the plight of the poet. Regardless of your aesthetic or political bent, it is obvious to even the most casual observer or attendee of these events that the conventional logic does ring true. The “cliché” then is that identity politics rule the day—that poems dealing with race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or angry politics in general will do better in poetry slams than a piece of surrealism or a poem about flowers or puppy dogs. (Unless the puppy dogs are owned by a Latina lesbian who was just released from prison after a long sentence for drug charges, in which case the puppy dog poem may do quite well.) Through the baring of deeply personal experiences, even trauma then, the politics of these works draws on a sentimentalist assumption that social change can be brought about by empathy, by affective identifications.
There are some inherent dangers of misusing sources within this project. One way in which this manifests is the danger of citing anthologies whose editors and “spokespeople” attempt to place context and offer commentary and that ultimately both intentionally and unintentionally lead to reification of the works themselves. We might end up giving the appearance of a unified ideology where none exits. There is also the problem of attempting to cite a few particular poems or lines out of the thousands of slam and performance poems that have been written and circulated over the years, whether from performances, websites, or anthologies vs. that of citing none and being seen as too vague or general. Will four lines of one poem within this paper lend credence to the claims herein? Will ten? Will five lines from six different poems? Trying to find something that is “representative” in this way can be a dangerous venture. Out of the wealth of material published and performed, available in anthologies, at open mics, on public access television, internet blogs, MySpace sites, CDs, etc., there are any number of pieces that could be used to justify many, if not all possible theses on politics, aesthetics, identity, etc.
What does exist is a largely unspoken, subterranean set of assumptions by which the culture at large of performance poetry (particularly in its easily identified category of slam) can be seen to operate, to adhere and which plays itself out between performers and audiences in relationships of identification, affect and satisfaction. Talk to anyone who has been to a poetry slam and there is a knowing nod that there is not only a reified form that the work takes, but that there are certain predictable themes that will emerge and that these themes center on identity and on trauma. And so instead of citing poems, I have decided to refer to a vernacular reference point, Poetry Slam Bingo. This parodic piece, playing off of popular knowledge of slam has been widely distributed throughout the internet and can be found at the site BrokenWord.org, which also features the work “Def Poet” Big Poppa E. The “bingo sheets” contain a variety of poetry slam “clichés”, including:
Feminist Rant
Therapy
The Revolution
Guilty White Guy
Didactic Poem
Gay Marriage Reference
I am . . . I am . . . I am . . .
Preach!
Anti-Bush Poem
Pimping Pain for Points
Blame
Popular Culture Reference
Identity Poem
White Guy Trying to Prove He’s “Down”
Conspiracy Theory
Poet Cries
My pain! My pain! My pain!
Current Events Reference
Slam as Religion
Childhood Sucks
Victim
Politicians are Bad
Didactic Poem
History Lesson
Represented here are a variety of themes that involve history, politics, identity, and sentimentalism, many, if not all, of which may overlap and intersect throughout a given piece. In other words, the clichés do not fit into discrete categories, which the “rules” for poetry slam bingo reinforces:
THE RULES:
1] When a poet fulfills one of the above categories, mark out the square. When you fill a row, shout “BINGO!” If you black out the entire card, shout “SUPER BINGO!”
2] Do not ever shout “BINGO” during someone’s poem. That would be rude. Wait until the host has returned to the stage after a performance to shout “BINGO!”
3] Keep track of who does what and when because you will have to defend your categories in front of the audience. If the audience does not agree with your choices, you will be disqualified from Slam Bingo, so be sure you can defend your choices.
A BRIEF DISCUSSION OF IDENTITY IN PROGRESSIVE POLITICS
Central to contemporary progressive politics is the concept of identity—those groups and subcultures the individual identifies with in any given situation—which plays out in both of these realms—sentiment and memory. The individual’s self-identification will determine how effective the affective forms of address will be and the shared assumptions, history, memories, etc. they will engage in. Political organizing along lines of identity remains a common practice, reinforced by commonly held beliefs about art and political efficacy. 1970s feminist consciousness-raising groups operated on the assumption that the act of telling one’s story was an inherently political act, one that would empower others to come forward, to bring injustices into the light of day. The belief was that once these stories were told, they would inspire compassion and lead to social change. This belief continues 30+ years later as activists and artists alike speak of the “power of story.”
Nonetheless, identity politics has taken a hit at the hands of many theorists from a variety of fields. It is has been criticized as highly limited, reifying and re-essentializing notions of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. It has been cited by a number of theorists, including Peggy Phelan, as falling into capitalist commodity fetishism. And yet, in his own critique of identity politics, Is Identity a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept? Richard Handler suggests that:
“to distance ourselves epistemologically from ideologies of identity is a politically delicate task, for many of the claimants to collective identity whose cultural philosophy we may dispute are nonetheless peoples whose struggles for social justice we support.” [1]
While critics of identity politics question the reification of identities, it is possible for our purposes to talk about a politics of identity in which identity is not necessarily a fixed category, but fluid and multiple. In fact, acknowledging the fluidity of categories may be more useful, as this fluidity allows us to approach the very sense of “community” that is presumed in this type of work. If, for example, an audience member can identify as Black and Latina, as a feminist and as a lesbian, for example, then her subject position allows her to cross lines and borders, to empathize with a wider range of “other” identities. While multiple identifications may also impede political progress at times by creating conflicts of interest where “discrete” identity categories come into conflict, the concept of fluid identities may also facilitate sentimental identifications and their moral and political exhortations.
FROM SENSIBILITY TO MELODRAMA:
A SHORT HISTORY OF SENTIMENTAL POLITICS
“[T]he heritage of tragedy may well be more effective than that of triumph: suffering in common unifies more than joy does.”[2]
In The Culture of Sensibility, G. J. Barker-Benfield traces the rise of sentiment in 18th century England through medical and scientific theories (based largely on gender) through moral reform, and the rise of sentiment(ality) in the then newly-emerging genre of the novel. Barker-Benfield discusses the use of sentimental(ist) theories in reforming male manners and behavior and improving the “morals” of English men. These reforms included trying to keep men out of ale houses and other locations of “ill repute” and discouraging wanton male sexual behavior. Reforms such as these were seen to benefit women, particularly by improving conditions for women within home and family life, arguments which will find some resonance a century later in the domestic melodrama. For my purposes in looking at the political uses of sentiment, Barker-Benfield’s discussion of religion and ethics are of particular interest. This passage from The Spectator offers an insight into early assumptions about the role of sentimentality in religious and moral conversion that still has echoes today in assumptions about the nature of story and narrative in their capacity to evoke empathy:
“[S]tories of calamities . . . melt our hearts with compassion . . . since we can neither see nor hear of, nor imagine another’s grief without being afflicted ourselves.”[3]
In her work on a politics of compassion, Lauren Berlant describes the way in which such “testifying moral functions of suffering” are assumed to “authorize the reader to imagine changing the world.”[4] Preachers of the day, including John Wesley, utilized such stories as well as particularly emotional styles of preaching, which Barker-Benfield characterizes as “[t]he first revolutionary technique” which Wesley (and others) employed to:
“produce emotional effects in his listeners. . . . Whitefield wept at nearly every sermon. Tennent writhed and fainted. They wrought their spellbinding speech with a mastery of ‘stylized emotionalism.’ Whitefield’s oratorical ‘pathos,’ his ability to get his congregation sobbing, was admired by [actor David] Garrick. Implementing very similar techniques in the theatre now aiming to reform its audience by making them weep, Garrick invoked similar responses. . . . Edwards, having read sentimental fiction, in his sermons used ‘all the weapons, conscious and subconscious, verbal, emotional and sensuous, of the [sentimental] author at his best.”[5]
The relationship here between religion and literature is undeniable. The sentimental novels of the day prepared audiences for the type of emotional appeal that Wesley and his contemporaries employed. Religion and literature at this time worked together to unite emotion and compassion with moral, ethical and religious conversion, a kind of intertextual citationality. Centuries later, in the realm of politics, civil rights movements from Gandhi to Martin Luther King to Malcolm X, have appealed inherently to the moral imperatives of their causes while also employing the language of their respective religions.
Now, think back to our Poetry Slam Bingo for a moment. One of the bingo boxes is “Poet Cries” while others include “Preach!” and “Poetry Slam As Religion,” bringing together at the very least, the performative and the evangelical aspects of 18th century moral and religious sentimentalism. Alex Ogg’s history of rap cites “linguistics of signifying, testifying, schoolyard and jailhouse rhyming”[6] and John Szwed locates the sermons of black preachers among the roots of rap performance in the way they would “sing the word” and also in what he calls the “high” oratory of black leaders from Martin Luther King to Muhammad Ali. [7] Dr. King himself employed a very rousing and emotional oratory style that was intended to appeal to the morality of his listeners, much as Wesley and his fellow evangelicals. Given the large numbers of African Americans in Methodist and evangelical denominations in America (including the African Methodist Episcopal Church), the link between 18th century sentimental preaching and 21st century “slamming” cannot be easily ignored or dismissed.
In the 19th century, the relationship between sentiment and politics continued to be played out through the theatrical form of melodrama. In particular, melodrama was used to tell the story of the working class in England and in both England and the United States and the domestic melodrama was pressed into service for the women’s suffrage movement. One of the unifying goals or ideologies behind melodrama is the creation of a group identity and the exhortation toward the theatre’s audience to understand, sympathize, or even identify with that group. Pulled to the right or the left, for revolutionary or conservative ends, melodrama is never outside of the politics of identity nor is it ever without ideology.
“[T]the melodrama served as a crucial space in which the cultural, political, and economic exigencies of the century were played out and transformed into public discourses about issues ranging from the gender-specific dimensions of individual station and behavior to the role and status of ‘the nation’ in local as well as imperial politics.” [8]
Berlant interrogates the imperative placed upon “the modern incitement to feel compassionately – even while being entertained.”[9] While melodrama may attempt to “authorize the reader to imagine changing in the world,”[10] Berlant sees the risk of replacing social transformation with a “civic-minded but passive idea of empathy.”[11] The criticisms leveled against melodrama’s political potential focus on ideas of escapism, arguing that the neat and tidy endings of melodrama satisfy the audience’s desires in a way that allows life outside the theatre to continue unchanged—admittedly, a common complaint against many forms of political theatre. For Ilsemann, melodrama’s crime is the irrationality it produces in the audience’s response, the emphasis on clear cut ideas of hero/villain and good/evil which forecloses the kind of rational response that would be required for create political consciousness and ultimately inspire action. What we see in this critique of melodrama is not the pairing of sentiment with rationalism that Barker-Benfield describes as the foundation of early 18th century theories of sentimentalism, but the squaring off of these attributes as opposites that neutralize the power and potential of both. Instead, what the audience experiences (according to Ilsemann) is “a corrective dream world . . . that confirm[s] the integrity of the spectator’s moral feel and the self-esteem derived from the wholeness of being.”[12] And so, if we are to believe Islemann, the moral imperatives directed at the audience do not inspire conversion or change as Wesley and his fellow evangelicals sought, but mere complacency.
Peter Brooks is more optimistic about melodrama, asserting that “[w]hile its social implications may be variously revolutionary or conservative, it is in all cases radically democratic, striving to make its representations clear and legible to everyone.”[13] Melodrama’s apologists and critics alike have debated and interrogated claims that melodrama helped to spread ideas about modern subjectivity and even expand our ideas about how the identity of modern “subject” is constituted through ideas of compassion and representation found in the forms and subgenres of melodrama.
For Brooks, the “social melodrama,” elevates the quotidian and gives it a heightened importance with its focus on “representation of man’s social existence, the way he lives in the ordinary, and with the moral drama implicated by and in his existence.”[14] He sees social melodrama as an attempt to make “the ‘real’ and the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘private life’ interesting through heightened dramatic utterance and gestures that lay bare the true stakes.”[15] In doing so, the personal does in fact, become political. For women denied full access to participation in public life and whose domain had been identified as the private sphere, bringing the home, the private, the domestic interior, into the very public space of the stage serves to blur the two, foregrounding the role and concerns of women. The stakes of (female) representation are not only laid bare, but are also heightened. Whether or not genuine social and political change necessarily follows is a more contentious question. The more important question here is the way in which the domestic melodrama would become an attractive vehicle for feminists seeking to represent their (heretofore hidden) struggles within the public sphere. Suffragists like Harriet Stanton Blatch were very willing and eager to adopt the tendencies of melodrama to the suffragist cause, believing that “the actress’s powers of persuasion – her capacity to move the hearts and minds of the audience – made her vital to the suffragist cause. . . . ‘People must be appealed to through their emotions.’”[16] A case in point is that of the British actress and playwright Elizabeth Robins, who used her work in the 1891 production of Hedda Gabler in London to construct “a new female political subject in her campaigning on behalf of the suffrage movement.”[17] Robins also wrote her own plays, including one entitled Votes for Women, illustrating what Berlant suggests as the “particular place that femininity has played in maintaining optimism around sentimental pedagogy in and about the U.S.”[18]
While the domestic melodrama was seen as appealing primarily to women, for suffragists and political crusaders, the audience was much more expansive. Garnering sympathy from male audience members, who could vote and who could turn the tide for the cause of suffrage, often meant “translating the display of female political assertion into theatrical images that were palatable to male members of the audience, the press and the Broadway establishment.””[19] Given the ultimate success of the women’s suffrage movement itself and the movement’s use of sentiment on the stage and in the political arena, it’s easy to see why tactics that combine affect with an appeal to morality would be remain attractive within the political and aesthetic imagination, through second wave feminism and the liberatory movements of the 1960s and 70s and into today. Indeed, according to Brooks melodrama remains a “central fact of the modern sensibility. . . the search for meanings and symbolic systems [that] provides a model for the making of meaning in fictional dramatization of existence.”[20]
TO POETRY SLAM AND BACK
“The possibility that through identification with alterity you will never be the same remains the radical threat and great promise of this affective aesthetic.”[21]
The Nuyorican Poets’ Café on New York’s Lower East Side represents itself as the “Real McCoy” of spoken word. It is the “Mecca” that all traveling spoken word and slam poets must make pilgrimage to when they go to New York. Both in the “Open Room” and at the poetry slams, the work at the Nuyorican draws heavily upon sentimental politics in a variety of ways, self-consciously contrasting personal identity to national or citizen identity or social/political power. For example, one of the poems the night I attended the slam began with:
“I do not pledge allegiance to a dream deferred.
Anti-American? There is no America.
Money rules.”[22]
The second piece focused on a woman’s story of teaching a struggling inner city student:
“Her eyes are filled with the hope of Amazonian warriors. . . .
“Her soul must have tripped over her words . . .
“I told her, ‘You are special.’”[23]
Another piece that night told the very moving and disturbing story of a rape. A poem from the open mic night started with “I am not your Spic” and went through a litany of racial stereotypes (of various levels of offensiveness) about Latinos. Each of these assumes some level of identification with or sympathy for the poet and/or the subject of the poem and possibly shame or embarrassment on the part of those whose racial identities would align them with the “oppressor.” (Remember the “Guilty White Guy” from our Poetry Slam Bingo.) While “warming up” the audience and giving the judges their rules or criteria for judging the slam, the host the night I attended asked “How do you put a number on someone’s pain and expression?” Regardless of the scoring of the pieces, the highly individualized and sensitive soul of the author/performer, combined with the politically and socially charged subject matter of the pieces, leaves the audience with only one appropriate emotional response. On a ten-point scale, no poems that night scored below an 8.5.
Finally, perhaps because of the close identification of the performer with the text in performed poetry, the use of sentiment also leans toward a “confessional” ethos. For Foucault the confessional mode is “one of the West's most highly valued techniques for producing truth,"[24] and indeed, many spoken word poets cite “truth telling” as an aspect to what they do, whether the work is overtly political or whether it leans more toward personal details. David P. Terry elaborates:
"For Foucault, the impulse to reveal our "true" selves stands as one of the central figures of Western civilization and one of the central ways in which power enacted in micro relationships produces and reinforces macro socio/political structures."[25]
Terry sees in this confessional mode, “a . . . kind of self-expression that is supposed to bear a special stamp of sincerity and authenticity and to bear witness to the truth of the individual personality . . giv[ing] the illusion of addressing broader social/political ills . . . .”[26]
MEMORY, IDENTITY AND SENTIMENT
“The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide.”[27]
Many memory theorists such as Olick, Beim and Zellizer discuss the relationship of memory to identity construction both within the contexts of maintaining ethnic and cultural identities and within the context of creating a nationalistic American identity. On the surface, these might look like dissimilar, even opposite operations. Yet I believe it might be argued that these are in fact, similar complementary operations in which one is a step in the process toward the other. In this case, it may be seen that the collectivity, although maintaining its group identity, seeks to be brought into citizenship together as a whole, rather than merely through its individual members. This is, in fact, the underlying assumption behind mass movements – civil rights, feminism, etc. Thus, the presumed American tension between the group and the individual is here erased, effaced, resolved dialectically, at least for the duration of the struggle for acceptance, acclimation and ultimately assimilation – ie citizenship.
Toward this end, these collective identities of race, culture ethnicity and ultimately national citizen identity, are constructed through shared experiences and shared memories – shared understandings and expressions of collective memories. Some of these may be specific incidents – such as the shooting of Amadou Diallo by the New York Police Department—and others may be more general—as in memories of growing up in Harlem or the description of a sexual assault, which others may relate to. In the rubric of The Personal is Political, it is assumed that the personal story will touch off a collective memory, which will help unify the community from which the speaker comes and at the same time, create sympathy, possible even a form of affective identification, from those outside of that community, spurring all of those who have been addressed by the work to act for social change.
In our highly mediated world, the sense of belonging created by shared (cultural) memory no longer belongs exclusively to any one group. Through film and television, any audience member may believe that they understand, for example, what it is to grow up poor in Harlem, and when this mediated memory is combined with the presence of a live performer speaking passionately about the experience, (and with the skill of the evangelical preacher or the weeping poet, moving the audience to tears) the sentiment that is felt from the performance may combine with that mediated “memory” so that the person in the audience may come to believe that they fully understand how it feels to grow up in Harlem. The memory and the identification may no longer be particular to the community from which the performer originates, and from which he or she speaks. This may sound “inauthentic,” and the irony here is that while authenticity is one of the most highly valued attributes of identity politics, this type of empathetic identification is critical to sentimentalist political assumptions. Is this experience, then, a mis-identification? For a sentimental or affective politics to be effective, there must be a degree of universalism, an understanding that no one can be excluded from the moral charge that is presented by this work.
Aaron Beim explains such an operation when he describes Jeffrey Shandler’s work on Holocaust images in television. “Shandler argues that since television has brought the Holocaust into the homes of millions of Americans, it transformed the event from a deeply disturbing yet otherworldly event into a personal tragedy. Television transformed watching the Holocaust into the morally changed act of witnessing the Holocaust.[28] He continues:
“Now let us say that some . . . Jews . . wanted to produce a documentary about the Holocaust. To produce the object, they would by default call on their Holocaust collective memory schemata to make sense of the Holocaust for themselves and thus to operationalize the topic for film production. Once produced, this film would in turn influence how other groups give meaning to the historical event and thus would begin anew the cycle of Holocaust collective memory production.”[29]
Sentimental politics combines here with first person confessionalism here through the sharing of memories that might be either personal or individual (being called a racial epithet at school) or collective (the riots after the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles).
One of the claims of poetry slam is that it builds community, and if this can in fact be the case, it is not simply by bringing a collection of people together into one room (that would merely be a crowd, and not a community), but through creating a sense of identification that can transcend the boundaries of identity and create, perhaps, a new identity within the particular space and time of the event. Beim discusses the idea of collective memory, which he describes as “largely the cognitive by-product of social interaction. . . . Collective memory . . . naturally stems from social structure through the interaction of individuals with institutionalized collective memory objects (like a memorial, film or a reputation).”[30] It’s not that the audience members are having false or inauthentic memories necessarily, but that they are brought into the community through the hearing of stories that have become familiar to them through mediated forms or popular culture rather than through the actual experience of the event. A large, mediated tragedy such as September 11th offers one of the best examples of this. Even people who were not directly involved in the events of that day (ie on the planes or in the World Trade Center or Pentagon) have intense memories of that day through television news and documentaries. Most people who witnessed the event in this way can be said to have a memory of the event and an emotional response to the event. Does if follow that one can have a memory of a smaller or less traumatic event, such as growing up poor in the 1950s, through repeatedly watching documentaries? Many memory theorists describe the importance of collectivities in generating and stimulating memory. If as Olick suggests, “only individuals remember, though they may do so alone or together,”[31] we do so in conversation with what Barbie Zellizer calls a “community of memory”[32]. She cites George Lipsitz in suggesting that “popular culture has precipitated a crisis of memory, in which all identity construction comes to rest at least in part on memory work.”[33]
According to Zellizer, collective memory is always political and is always about the establishment of identity and community before issues of “truth” or accuracy:”
“[C]ollective memory refers to recollections that are instantiated beyond the individual by and for the collective. . . the collective memory comprises recollections of the past that are determined and shaped by the group. By definition, collective memory thereby presumes activities of sharing, discussion, negotiation, and often, contestation. Remembering becomes implicated in a range of other activities having as much to do with identity formation, power and authority, cultural norms, and social interaction as with the simple act of recall. Its full understanding thus requires an appropriation of memory as social, cultural and political action at its broadest level.” [34]
“[C]ollective memories help us fabricate, rearrange or omit details from the past as we thought we knew it. Issues of historical accuracy and authenticity are pushed aside to accommodate other issues, such as those surrounding the establishment of social identity, authority, solidarity, political affiliation.” [35]
If this is the case, then memory, whether it be “personal” (autobiographical or vernacular) or “political” (official), can be a powerful tool in building a sense of community and collective identity, particularly when paired with sentiment.
As a tool for transmitting memory as well as emotion, performance poetry is well-positioned historically. Zellizer points out that:
“ . . . the earliest expressions of a community’s collective memory have tended to be language-based—chants sung by tribes during cattle round-ups, sagas of the Icelanders, Homeric epics of the Ancient Greeks. . . Some scholars have argued for memory’s fundamentally oral nature, and for the fact that early forms of remembering were associated with oral sources and the oral tradition. . . .”[36]
While there are many criticisms of identity politics, the political uses of sentiment, and of the confluence of these factors in performance poetry and poetry slam, it is important to understand where the political assumptions behind this work comes from and the foundation that artists and activists alike seek to build upon. Sentimentalism combined with collective memory has had its political successes, as well as its limitations. In his introduction to Listen Up!, Yusef Komunyakaa asserts that “[t]he voices in Listen Up! are personal and public, and they also speak on behalf of others. . . This is a poetry of engagement and discourse. It celebrates and confronts.”[37] He suggests that the personal is political and vice versa, not in overt didacticism or sloganeering, but in the subtle assumptions that underlie the work, that the “voices” represented therein speak for others (or possibly in some cases, Others).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anglesey, Zoe, Ed. Listen up! New York: One World/Ballantine, 1999.
Barker-Benfield, G. J. The culture of sensibility: sex and society in eighteenth-century Britain. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Beim, A. "The Cognitive Aspects of Collective Memory." Symbolic Interaction 30:1 (2007): 7-26.
Berlant, Lauren Gail Compassion. Essays from the English Institute. New York: Routledge and Net Library, Inc, 2004, http://www.netLibrary.com/summary.asp?id=115387; https://www.lib.umn.edu/slog.phtml?url=http://www.netLibrary.com/summary.asp?id=115387; https://webapps.d.umn.edu:2443/login?url=http://www.netLibrary.com/summary.asp?id=115387.
Berlant, Lauren. “Poor Eliza.” No More Separate Spheres! Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds Durham: Duke University Press , 2002, 291-323.
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination : Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
Glenn, Susan A. Female Spectacle : The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Handler, Richard. "Is Identity' a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept?" Commemorations: the politics of national identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1994, 27-40.
Hays, Michael and Anastasia Nikolopoulou. Melodrama : The Cultural Emergence of a Genre. London: Macmillan, 1996.
Ilsemann, Hartmut. “Radicalism in the Melodrama of the Nineteenth Century,” Melodrama : The Cultural Emergence of a Genre. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, eds. London: Macmillan, 1996, pp. 191-207.
Lowenthal, David. "Identity, Heritage, and History," Commemorations: the politics of national identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1994, 41-57.
Ogg, Alex and David Upshal, The Hip Hop Years: A History of Rap. Philadelphia: Trans-Atlantic Publications, Inc., 1999.
Olick, J. K. "Collective Memory: The Two Cultures." Sociological Theory 17:3 (1999): 333-348.
Olick, Jeffrey K. and Joyce Robbins. "Social Memory Studies: From "Collective Memory" to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices." Annual Review of Sociology 24:1 (1998): 105-140.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked : The Politics of Performance. London ; New York: Routledge, 1993.
Szwed, John F. “The Real Old School,” The Vibe History of Hip Hop, Alan Light, Ed. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999, p. 3-10.
Terry, David P. “Once Blind, Now Seeing: Problematics of Confessional Performance.” Text and Performance Quarterly, 26:3 (July, 2006): 209-228.
Townsend, Joanna. “Elizabeth Robins: Hysteria, Politics and Performance.” Women, Theatre and Performance : New Histories, New Historiographies. Women, Theatre and Performance.
Maggie B. Gale and Vivien Gardner, eds. Manchester ; New York: Manchester University Press,
2000, pp. 102-120.
Zelizer, B. "Reading the past against the grain: The shape of memory studies." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 204-239.
END NOTES
[1] 38
[2]Lowenthall, 50
[3]Barker-Benfield, 68
[4] Berlant, 2002 301
[5] 72.
[6] 39.
[7] It is difficult, if not impossible, to untangle rap and hip hop from contemporary performance poetry and poetry slam. Rap and hip hop are often used interchangeably by scholars and historians, as well as by some practitioners. Likewise, poetry slam and hip hop styles of performance are seen as difficult to distinguish from one another. There is definitely a trajectory from rap into poetry slam and contemporary performance poetry.
[8] Hays and Nikolopoulou, viii
[9]Berlant 2004, 5
[10] Berlant 2002, 301
[11] Berlant 2002, 297
[12] 202
[13] 15
[14] 22
[15] 14
[16] Glenn,135
[17] Townsend, 103
[18] Berlant, 2002, 297
[19] Glenn, 149
[20] 13
[21]Berlant, 2002, 303
[22] Laura Winton research trip notes June, 2006
[23] Laura Winton research trip notes June, 2006
[24] Terry, 210
[25] Terry, 210
[26] Terry, 217
[27] Olick & Robbins, 122
[28] Beim, 2007, 13
[29] Beim, 2007, 20
[30] Beim, 2007, 8
[31] 338
[32] 228
[33] 229
[34] 214
[35] 217
[36] 232-233
[37] xii-xiii
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Tupac Shakur and Kurt Schwitters
In challenging the "canon," Ishmael Reed poses the question "why can't Tupac Shakur be studied alongside T.S. Eliot?" [ii] I would ask why we don't study Tupac alongside Kurt Schwitters.
Re-appropriating the Avant Garde
One of the most potentially fruitful avant garde movements for spoken word practice is Dada. A collection of artists throughout Europe during and between the two world wars, Dada's literary and performance aspects were deeply intertwined and are difficult to speak of as separate entities, much like current practices of spoken word and performance poetry.
e.g. bailey, writer, performer and one of the founders of the Minnesota Spoken Word Association (MnSWA) once said to me that all spoken word comes from the African diaspora. Obviously any blanket statement like that requires skepticism, and the traditions of performed poetry in Ancient Greece and in Japan, as well as Native American storytelling refute his blanket assertion. But within contemporary practices, built on jazz and bebop in America, and the European avant garde's affinity for African art, there is an idea worth considering here.
"Dadaists recited so-called 'negro songs' . . . Mostly sacral texts from indigenous African and Oceanic cultures meticulously collected from anthropological literature in an attempt to guarantee the highest grade of authenticity" and also "from the slums of the North-American metropolis: Afro-American rag-time, cake walk and jazz." [i]
While poetry slam and hip hop borrow from African (American) rhythms, including bebop and jazz, as well as dealing with issues of ethnicity and racial heritage, we rarely see in contemporary practice the kind of language experimentation of Hugo Ball or Kurt Schwitters or linguistic explorations of the sources mentioned above. In challenging the "canon," Ishmael Reed poses the question "why can't Tupac Shakur be studied alongside T.S. Eliot?" [ii] I would ask why we don't study Tupac alongside Kurt Schwitters. Given the tendency and desire of early literary avant gardes such as Dada and Surrealism to borrow from (what they perceived as) African Art and rhythms, an art practice that works more directly those traditions would have much to offer contemporary practice, tied in as it often is with hip hop. And with criticisms these avant gardes as "appropriating" from other cultures, it would seem natural for those coming from a diasporic aesthetic to revisit those techniques and ideas and reclaim them for themselves.
The outsider stance of the poetry slam aesthetic also has much in common with a movement such as Dada, which was very critical of and reacting against the literary and artistic "establishment."
"The Dadaists' disenchantment with the cultural and political status quo was so fundamental and deep-seated that they felt they could no longer express it within the boundaries of existing artistic and communicative conventions." [iii]
One of the hallmark activities of the Dadas was the performance cabaret, most famously, Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The cabarets were designed to push the endurance and tolerance of the audience and challenge their ideas toward art. They would include sound poems composed of "nonsense" verse and syllables, declaim their many incendiary manifestos from the stage, perform skits, and in one instance, created a riot by creating and then erasing an artwork by Francis Picabia on a blackboard. [iv] Confrontiation was the hallmark of their work, and confrontation is necessarily a face-to-face, live endeavor. And so while they published their own journals and pioneered visual poetry as well, Dada poets were meant to be heard!
At the same time that Dada was meant to be performed and performative, one of the methods to the madness was to challenge norms by challenging normal thinking, which meant challenging the modes of language in which thought is possible.
"The avant-garde, by means of several devices, tried to create a realm based on three forms of novelty: 1. new forms of perception from the point of view of the subject/author; 2. new forms of communication by placing words and objects in a different order for reception; 3. new forms of reception and perception, from the point of view of the recipient." [v]
Dada shared with Formalism its disdain for "subjectivity" "understood as a solipsistic individuality in art and social life." [vi] Like the Formalists, they too sought a denaturalized language, deconstructing representation in language the way it was being deconstructed by the visual artists in their midst. The Dadaists' goals was to "try to trigger and stimulate change within the individual, hoping that they could get the audience . . or readers . . . to rethink their positions, to make them confront habitual thinking structures, to question their attitudes toward literature, convention, and perhaps even social order." [vii] So deep was their "disenchantment with the cultural and political status quo . . . that they felt they could no longer express it within the boundaries of existing artistic and communicative conventions." [viii]
As I talk with people about Dada writing and performance and its application to contemporary practice, it's fairly common to hear things like "Well, Dada was great, but it's over now," or "Dada was out of its own time . . ." Interestingly, this discussion most recently came up with Bob Holman, director of the Bowery Poetry Club, who was at the same time, scheduled to read Dada poetry at MoMA the day after I met with him, as part of their Dada exhibit. Holman has also been quick to invoke the spirit of Dada, for example in his manifesto-like introduction to Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets'Café:
"Hear this book with your eyes! When the Mouth marries the Eye, the Ear officiates (see Tristan Tzara's "The Gas Heart." Better yet, perform that tiny masterpiece!)" [ix]
There is, in fact, unfinished work to the literary avant gardes. Language has not been fully deconstructed the way the image has. In fact, poet Bryon Gysin is famously noted for declaring that "writing is 50 years behind painting." With the stranglehold on language that we see in phenomena like myth, spectacle and simulacra, we cannot declare the experimentation of Dada, 'zaum, Formalism, Surrealism irrelevant until they have fully borne fruit. There is still, as Michael Moroni calls it, "an unfulfilled project,"
" . . . the possibility of art participating in social-cultural processes, understood in the widest sense (social emancipation and the transformation of language and of perceptive modalities of reality) . . ." [x]
Charles Olson's calls for post-modern poetry to go back to its origins and come forward again down a different path, "beyond Melville and Romaticism . . . To go back is not to seize the origin, to recuperate some paradisal space, but to begin the 'deed and misdeed' signified by writing. Olson's new beginning rejects (figuratively) everything that lay between Homer's writing and Melville's . . ." [xi] In our time, perhaps we need not to reject everything that came between Homer and Melville, or even between Tzara and Bernstein, but it is certainly a call to revisit the possibilities of the past, to look for unfinished revolutions and business left undone, and see where those threads can be incorporated into our own work.
[i] van den Berg 33
[ii] Ishmael Reed, 3.
[iii] Schaffner, 118
[iv] For particularly good descriptions of Dada events and cabarets, see Annabelle Melzer's Latest Rage: The Big Drum and Dada and Surrealist Performance as well as RoseLee Goldberg's history Performance Art: Futurism to the Present.
[v] Moroni, 9
[vi] Moroni, 4
[vii] Schaffner, 125
[viii] Schaffner, 118
[ix] Algarin and Holman, 1
[x] Moroni, 21
[xi] Riddell, 162
One of the most potentially fruitful avant garde movements for spoken word practice is Dada. A collection of artists throughout Europe during and between the two world wars, Dada's literary and performance aspects were deeply intertwined and are difficult to speak of as separate entities, much like current practices of spoken word and performance poetry.
e.g. bailey, writer, performer and one of the founders of the Minnesota Spoken Word Association (MnSWA) once said to me that all spoken word comes from the African diaspora. Obviously any blanket statement like that requires skepticism, and the traditions of performed poetry in Ancient Greece and in Japan, as well as Native American storytelling refute his blanket assertion. But within contemporary practices, built on jazz and bebop in America, and the European avant garde's affinity for African art, there is an idea worth considering here.
"Dadaists recited so-called 'negro songs' . . . Mostly sacral texts from indigenous African and Oceanic cultures meticulously collected from anthropological literature in an attempt to guarantee the highest grade of authenticity" and also "from the slums of the North-American metropolis: Afro-American rag-time, cake walk and jazz." [i]
While poetry slam and hip hop borrow from African (American) rhythms, including bebop and jazz, as well as dealing with issues of ethnicity and racial heritage, we rarely see in contemporary practice the kind of language experimentation of Hugo Ball or Kurt Schwitters or linguistic explorations of the sources mentioned above. In challenging the "canon," Ishmael Reed poses the question "why can't Tupac Shakur be studied alongside T.S. Eliot?" [ii] I would ask why we don't study Tupac alongside Kurt Schwitters. Given the tendency and desire of early literary avant gardes such as Dada and Surrealism to borrow from (what they perceived as) African Art and rhythms, an art practice that works more directly those traditions would have much to offer contemporary practice, tied in as it often is with hip hop. And with criticisms these avant gardes as "appropriating" from other cultures, it would seem natural for those coming from a diasporic aesthetic to revisit those techniques and ideas and reclaim them for themselves.
The outsider stance of the poetry slam aesthetic also has much in common with a movement such as Dada, which was very critical of and reacting against the literary and artistic "establishment."
"The Dadaists' disenchantment with the cultural and political status quo was so fundamental and deep-seated that they felt they could no longer express it within the boundaries of existing artistic and communicative conventions." [iii]
One of the hallmark activities of the Dadas was the performance cabaret, most famously, Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The cabarets were designed to push the endurance and tolerance of the audience and challenge their ideas toward art. They would include sound poems composed of "nonsense" verse and syllables, declaim their many incendiary manifestos from the stage, perform skits, and in one instance, created a riot by creating and then erasing an artwork by Francis Picabia on a blackboard. [iv] Confrontiation was the hallmark of their work, and confrontation is necessarily a face-to-face, live endeavor. And so while they published their own journals and pioneered visual poetry as well, Dada poets were meant to be heard!
At the same time that Dada was meant to be performed and performative, one of the methods to the madness was to challenge norms by challenging normal thinking, which meant challenging the modes of language in which thought is possible.
"The avant-garde, by means of several devices, tried to create a realm based on three forms of novelty: 1. new forms of perception from the point of view of the subject/author; 2. new forms of communication by placing words and objects in a different order for reception; 3. new forms of reception and perception, from the point of view of the recipient." [v]
Dada shared with Formalism its disdain for "subjectivity" "understood as a solipsistic individuality in art and social life." [vi] Like the Formalists, they too sought a denaturalized language, deconstructing representation in language the way it was being deconstructed by the visual artists in their midst. The Dadaists' goals was to "try to trigger and stimulate change within the individual, hoping that they could get the audience . . or readers . . . to rethink their positions, to make them confront habitual thinking structures, to question their attitudes toward literature, convention, and perhaps even social order." [vii] So deep was their "disenchantment with the cultural and political status quo . . . that they felt they could no longer express it within the boundaries of existing artistic and communicative conventions." [viii]
As I talk with people about Dada writing and performance and its application to contemporary practice, it's fairly common to hear things like "Well, Dada was great, but it's over now," or "Dada was out of its own time . . ." Interestingly, this discussion most recently came up with Bob Holman, director of the Bowery Poetry Club, who was at the same time, scheduled to read Dada poetry at MoMA the day after I met with him, as part of their Dada exhibit. Holman has also been quick to invoke the spirit of Dada, for example in his manifesto-like introduction to Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets'Café:
"Hear this book with your eyes! When the Mouth marries the Eye, the Ear officiates (see Tristan Tzara's "The Gas Heart." Better yet, perform that tiny masterpiece!)" [ix]
There is, in fact, unfinished work to the literary avant gardes. Language has not been fully deconstructed the way the image has. In fact, poet Bryon Gysin is famously noted for declaring that "writing is 50 years behind painting." With the stranglehold on language that we see in phenomena like myth, spectacle and simulacra, we cannot declare the experimentation of Dada, 'zaum, Formalism, Surrealism irrelevant until they have fully borne fruit. There is still, as Michael Moroni calls it, "an unfulfilled project,"
" . . . the possibility of art participating in social-cultural processes, understood in the widest sense (social emancipation and the transformation of language and of perceptive modalities of reality) . . ." [x]
Charles Olson's calls for post-modern poetry to go back to its origins and come forward again down a different path, "beyond Melville and Romaticism . . . To go back is not to seize the origin, to recuperate some paradisal space, but to begin the 'deed and misdeed' signified by writing. Olson's new beginning rejects (figuratively) everything that lay between Homer's writing and Melville's . . ." [xi] In our time, perhaps we need not to reject everything that came between Homer and Melville, or even between Tzara and Bernstein, but it is certainly a call to revisit the possibilities of the past, to look for unfinished revolutions and business left undone, and see where those threads can be incorporated into our own work.
[i] van den Berg 33
[ii] Ishmael Reed, 3.
[iii] Schaffner, 118
[iv] For particularly good descriptions of Dada events and cabarets, see Annabelle Melzer's Latest Rage: The Big Drum and Dada and Surrealist Performance as well as RoseLee Goldberg's history Performance Art: Futurism to the Present.
[v] Moroni, 9
[vi] Moroni, 4
[vii] Schaffner, 125
[viii] Schaffner, 118
[ix] Algarin and Holman, 1
[x] Moroni, 21
[xi] Riddell, 162
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