Sibling rivalries: literary poetry versus spoken word: why does the divide exist and what does it mean?

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2004 by Quraysh Ali Lansana

Today's black poets find themselves in an interesting (though not necessarily unique) place in the history of contemporary American letters. They are at the heart of what many critics have termed a "new renaissance" in African American literature. Black poets are in vogue--from graduate degree programs in creative writing to the Broadway stage, from the pages of The New Yorker to CDs and TVs. Still, not everyone, especially black poets them; on aesthetic approaches.

Again, this is nothing new. Some critics used to call the work of Langston Hughes "lowbrow" and "folksy." The term "Angry Black Poet" was created to define the Black Arts Movement poets set their verses apart as anything but art. Many of these critics are and were African American.

However, who back in 1947 would have envisioned experiencing a Jamaican-Chinese, lesbian wordsmith fire spitting love songs from a Broadway stage, joined by a multicultural crew of word slingers in a United Nations summit of syllables? But that's certainly one way to describe Russell Simmons's 20112 Tony Award-winning Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. (See page 22, POETIC LICENSE, by Stacyann Chin.) What open-minded professor in 1965 would have envisioned an African American Poet Laureate of the United States of America like Rita Dove, who served from 1993 to 1995?

So some things have changed. Today's poets are heirs to the whole of the African American literary tradition, which includes both Phillis Wheatley and Chuck D, (who counts Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets among his influences). What hasn't changed is the debate regarding who possesses the artistic high ground: literary, poets or spoken-word/performance poets. Or why the distinction exists at all.

On a personal note, I have often been called a "performance poet," though I loathe the term. I spent much of my early career working with musicians and presenting traditional and contemporary poetry as theater for school-aged children. (KRS-One coined this "edutainment.") I also spent much of my early life studying the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Langston Hughes and the poets of the Black Arts Movement. The term "performance poet," however, has never appeared on my biography, I believe poetry must work as well on the page as it does the stage. Now I have earned an MFA and produced three published books of poetry, but I was sill tagged a performance poet tag at a recent reading. So who is responsible for that label? Is there a way out from under it, particularly given that it's a title I've never claimed?

Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd, poet, professor and author of Wrestling With the Muse: Dudley Randall and Broadside Press (Columbia University Press, February 2004), understands the conundrum. "The irony is that poets are supposed to be people that defy boundaries with language; however, once any poet, whether academic or otherwise, aspires toe popularity or when a poet reaches recognition, critics classify and analyze them in an attempt to dissect creativity. It's their job. But me, I write what I want to write, in my variegated voices, for whoever wants to listen to me, aloud or in print."

History tells us how the publishing industry shifted in response to the independent punishing success of Nikki Giovanni, Haki R. Madhubuti, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez and others during the Black Arts Movement period. Kalamuya Salaam, noted Black Arts Movement poet/scholar and author of the "The Magic of Juju: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement (Third World Press), suggests a double standard is employed when weighing literary work from the period.

"It is not unusual for critics to attempt to dismiss a complete body of work because of a personal flaw or failure on the part of a particular artist or on the basis of the content of a few specific poems, but this is not sound criticism ... If the Fascism of Ezra Pound or the anti-Semitism of T.S. Eliot have not kept them from the pantheon of great poets, wily should 'Black Power; 'anti-white,' or 'violent rhetoric' be cause to universally dismiss Black Arts Movement poets in general and Giovanni, Madhubuti, Baraka and Sanchez, specifically," Salaam writes. "... the importance and innovation of Black Arts Movement music-based literary forms are the key element of Black Arts which has been ignored and sometimes even denied, as though poetry could only be 'literary' in the Eurocentric sense of literary tradition."

The phrase "music-based literary form" helps define what today is called spoken word/performance poetry. If Nikki Giovanni or white Beat poet Allen Ginsberg were young poets right now, would the academy or the publishing industry embrace their work?

"Neither Dante, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Walt Whitman was considered 'literature' by the critics of his day," says DJ Renegade, a poet and educator in Washington, D.C. "And there are many contemporary spoken-word artists who also publish, like Patricia Smith, Jeffrey McDaniel and Regie Gibson. It wasn't that long ago when Ginsberg was a total outlaw. Now he's taught in all the universities.