Spoken Like a True Poet

Early in Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023), Joshua Bennett assures the many parties keeping vigil over poetry that the ancient art remains alive and well in the United States. “Spoken word is the best possible rejoinder to anyone claiming that poetry in this country is dead or not relevant to younger generations,” he writes. The curiously evergreen and SEO-friendly question of whether poetry matters has been posed so often this millennium that, in 2014, the Los Angeles Review of Books responded with an essay titled “How Much Does ‘Does Poetry Matter’ Matter?”

Although the late literary critic Harold Bloom disparaged slam—a competitive form of spoken word—as “the death of art” in 2000, its attitude, aesthetics, and techniques seeped into films, TV shows, music, and other art forms around the world. Bennett details this global footprint in Spoken Word, but he never treats his tour of the genre, which he defines as verse crafted to be performed for an audience, as a victory lap. For him, spoken word isn't interesting because it won the culture war against stuffy academics and their dusty canons; the value of spoken word lies in how it reared and continues to nurture its own culture. And in his view, that heritage of autonomy and aegis should shape how people understand it.

Bennett, a repeat slam champion who writes poetry and criticism, has intimate knowledge of his subject but approaches it with humility and imagination. He threads research, interviews, autobiography, and close readings of poems and related texts into a nonlinear jaunt through the spoken word archives. Perhaps in deference to prior books, such as Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s Words in Your Face (2007) and Susan B. A. Somers-Willett’s The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry (2009), he does not attempt an exhaustive account. He’s more interested in highlighting the genre’s radical and communal roots and views history as a means of rekindling that rebellious upbringing. “I hope to reclaim the political ethos and persistent dreaming of a moment that is both part of our shared past and still among us,” he writes, alluding to the legacy of activism in spoken word circles. Even readers who don’t share Bennett’s political investment in spoken word will appreciate his use of our and us, which underscores the welcoming spirit of his project. At its core, his history invites readers to appreciate spoken word's myriad contributions to the arts, community organizing, and self-expression. Its culture, as he shows, surrounds everyone.

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Bennett opens the book with an anecdote about performing at the Obama White House in 2009, when he was a junior in college. He nimbly details the sights and sounds of each leg of his journey from the University of Pennsylvania to Pennsylvania Avenue: the hip-hop and dancehall blaring in the hallways of his dorm establish his immersion in the rhythms of Black music and Black speech. His nervous recitation of his poem aboard Amtrak captures the constant practice performing well requires; the soundcheck and a cipher with other poets and performers convey the easy camaraderie of the scene. The attendees, which include Bennett’s family and luminaries such as Spike Lee, demonstrate the diversity of spoken word audiences.

By the time Bennett performs “Tamara’s Opus,” a work about his once-ableist relationship with his deaf sister, he has quietly laid out the breadth of the world of spoken word as well as the thesis of his book. “At its heart, spoken word is a social form,” he argues. “It demands engagement and requires an audience of listeners in order to function.” That social dynamic imbues spoken word with political power, but Bennett never says the form is inherently radical, noting that oral poems can be as whimsical or slick as they are militant. Though he admits the political thrust of the poets he studies, in his view, the genre is defined by the spaces it creates and connects through readings, competitions, workshops, and the simple act of congregating. The thrill of the book is how expansive his idea of space is, a mode captured in the opening anecdote’s sinuous movement from private to casual to formal settings.

Bennett organizes the book into meaty but digestible chapters on the Nuyorican poetry movement, the birth of slam, and spoken word’s new life on social media. Though he devotes ample time to marquee names such as Paul Beatty and Patricia Smith and storied institutions such as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York, the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in Chicago, and the Brave New Voices festival, he treats these as concourses rather than terminuses. Within every famous space or career, he finds bridges, footpaths, and portals that connect the art to social movements and to the world around it. The result is an account of spoken word that’s compact but wide-ranging.

The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is the first major stop. Beginning in 1973, the late poet and Rutgers professor Miguel Algarín hosted regular readings, workshops, and hangouts in his Lower East Side living room, gatherings that Bennett describes as “some combination of a rent party and a rehearsal for the future world.” The attendees—mostly poets and playwrights Algarín knew—read their work, critiqued each other, and chatted. “More than anything, there was a lot of talking going on,” poet Sandra Maria Esteves tells Bennett. She doesn’t romanticize the space, though, noting that some of the men in attendance patronized the women. “I was not silenced. I spoke my mind. That got me in a lot of trouble with a lot of people,” she says with a mix of pride and mischief.

That defiant and playful sensibility was a calling card of the group’s poetry and Nuyorican art, which was taking shape in Algarín's apartment, at other local venues such as New Rican Village and El Museo del Barrio, and in the lived experiences of second- and third-generation Puerto Ricans then coming of age in New York City. Straddling the cultures and languages of their island and city homes, the Nuyoricans turned their alterity into art, an ethos Victor Hernández-Cruz distilled in a 1975 interview: “Because of the position I am coming from, my mission is to change the English language into what I am.” By 1975, Algarín’s gatherings were so popular that he rented a pub across the street. That move allowed performers and listeners from beyond Algarín’s orbit to drift in, an accessibility that changed the salon into a public forum. After three years of packed weekly shows at the pub, Algarín used state and federal grants to buy a building in his neighborhood, thus giving the cafe a permanent home.

By this point, the cafe featured performances by established writers such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Amiri Baraka. Bennett seizes this overlap to thread the links between the Nuyoricans, Beat poetry, the Black Arts Movement, and hip-hop, which had been fomenting since Algarín first assembled people in his living room. Jumping back in time, Bennett details the short-lived Black Arts Repertory/Theater School that Baraka founded in Harlem in 1965. The school was open for only a year because of infighting among staff and a racist disinformation campaign that tanked public funding, but Bennett dwells at length on its ambitions. The BARTS curriculum combined dramatic, political, technical, and remedial instruction, a program that Bennett reads as an attempt to “prepare a generation of young people to enter the world with any and every instrument they might need to flourish in an anti-black world.”

Bennett argues that spoken word became a microcosm of that effort to make radical art with and for the public, aims Baraka made explicit in 1980 when he told The Greenfield Review, “The page doesn’t interest me that much—not as much as the actual spoken word.” Though BARTS vanished, its ideas lived on, propagated through records such as Nikki Giovanni’s Truth Is On Its Way (1971) and The Last Poets’ 1970 self-titled debut and collectives such as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and Boricua Artists Guild. To speak aloud was to summon an audience, and to be heard by that assembly, poets had to recognize the crowd’s needs and demands, a dynamic that became important as slam emerged in Chicago.

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Slam is undoubtedly the most recognized form of spoken word. In the 1990s and 2000s, films such as Love Jones (1997) and Slam (1998), television shows such as Def Poetry Jam and United States of Poetry, live events such as MTV’s Free Your Mind and Spoken Word Unplugged tours, and regular media coverage pushed slam into the national spotlight. The audience for the form grew so rapidly that spoken word record labels such as Mouth Almighty and NuYo Records launched. Much of this momentum was a product of slam’s proximity to rap, which by the 1990s was both a commercial juggernaut and a fixture of American youth culture. The art forms became so intertwined that a lengthy New Yorker feature touted the connection. “In the next couple of hours, the audience will be rowdily cheering on the performers; we could be at an evening of Martin Lawrence doing standup, or KRS-One giving a rap concert. Actually, we’re at a poetry reading,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in 1995, reporting from a slam at New York’s famous music venue S.O.B.’s. But Bennett notes that the genre also grew on its own grassroots terms, cultivating audiences in libraries, coffee shops, and bookstores.

Slam originated in Chicago in the mid-1980s. Construction worker and poet Marc Smith hosted weekly competitions at the Get Me High Lounge, a small jazz storefront in the city’s Wicker Park neighborhood that blended vaudeville, comedy, and traditional poetry readings. The events were inspired by other Chicago gigs, such as “poetry boxing” matches that took place in actual boxing rings and a traveling poetry circus, and coalesced into a form that prioritized audience reception. Random attendees judged poets through cheers, jeers, and, later, scores. Smith exported that structure to a weekly cabaret show at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in 1986.

From there, slam spread across the country, finding homes in such major urban centers as Atlanta and Los Angeles and in smaller cities, such as Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Dayton, Ohio. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which closed in 1982 but reopened in 1989 as slam was taking off, became a bulwark of the form, hosting multi-night competitions and designating slam champions. In 1990, organizers held the first National Poetry Slam in San Francisco, an annual event that was the subject of the documentary SlamNation (1998).

Slam’s raised profile and populist design drew criticism from the academy and from some written and spoken word poets. Musician, actor, and poet Saul Williams became a slam champion, but when he first encountered the genre in Brooklyn in the 1990s, he “was actually disgusted by the idea of competing with poetry,” he tells Bennett. The poet Rafael Alvarado told the Los Angeles Times in 1997, "In slams, whoever screams the most and performs best, wins. It's not the quality of the work.” That internal criticism intensified as commercial forces entered the picture. Tyehimba Jess describes SlamNation, a cult classic among slam poets that was their introduction to the form in the 1990s, as a double-edged sword. He tells Bennett that over the course of the film, competitor Taylor Mali is “formulating … how to win the slam. It became formulaic.”

By 2009, following the HBO docuseries Brave New Voices, which follows the teen competitors of the annual Brave New Voices Festival—and which Bennett stars in—even Marc Smith grew frustrated with the form. “At the beginning, this was really a grass-roots thing about people who were writing poetry for years and years and years and had no audience,” he told the New York Times. “Now there’s an audience, and people just want to write what the last guy wrote so they can get their face on TV.” Bennett’s emphasis on the political potential of spoken word stems from the same frustrations regarding how commerce affects art.

But throughout the book, he notes the ways in which slam poets raised during and after this commercial boom resisted cheapening the form, a spirit that the comparatively more-obscure documentary Poetic License (1999) captures. That film ends with the teen poets canceling the competition to “go on strike” and throw a party, a precedent that Bennett’s own Brave New Voices team followed when they resigned from the competition and performed to be heard rather than to win. “We realized that we had gotten entirely too caught up in the competitive element of the festival,” he writes. “The festival was supposed to be a way to feel a little bit less alone, to share new work and meet people you never would have otherwise.”

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In the book’s final chapter, Bennett details contemporary efforts to maintain the communalism of spoken word through recording and sharing performances online. Noting the closure of many performance venues and the dissolution of regional and independent festivals, trends that predated the Covid-19 pandemic but worsened during it, he considers the complexities of the art’s finding a new home on social media. Bennett’s own attempt at an online spoken word space, The Strivers Row, flamed out after a few years as he and his cofounders pursued other interests. But in the Minneapolis-based Button Poetry, whose founders Bennett interviews for the book, he scries the future of spoken word. In some sense, the sheer audience of the hybrid YouTube channel and publishing house demands his attention. “As it stands, the way a vast number [of] young people on Planet Earth are encountering the genre of spoken word poetry is through the Button Poetry platform,” he writes, citing the million-plus subscribers and video views.

But Bennett’s conversations with the Button team aren’t particularly fruitful. No strong or clear purpose seems to direct their dutiful chronicling of spoken word performances across the country. Sam Cook, the group’s head honcho, offers a rather transactional origin story for the company. “The desire is there, the audience is there, and I have the skills to connect the two,” he says of the epiphany that led him to build Button in 2011. There’s nothing wrong with finding a niche, but the functional motive highlights the relative silence of audiences throughout the book. As Bennett cited subscriber and viewer numbers, I wondered: who are these people seeking spoken word? Why do they choose to experience poetry together?

Bennett shows that across the genre’s history, writers have come to spoken word in search of community and their own voices and to realize their personal and political ideals. But he doesn’t dwell much on the audience members who jeer, cry, applaud, and now comment virtually from the sidelines. Won’t they shape the future of spoken word as much as the poets soliciting their eyes and ears? More important, can anyone fully understand the genre’s past without hearing their voices?

This silence is not unique to Bennett’s account nor does it sink it. Spoken word has long been historicized primarily by and through evangelical practitioners and organizers, many of whom say the form saved their lives, as rapper, actor, and slam poet Daveed Diggs told the Washington Post in 2016. But this silence stood out to me in Bennett’s book because one of the most affecting scenes in HBO’s Brave New Voices is Bennett reading his family a powerful poem about his father’s sacrifices. His dad is interviewed after and says, “Now I feel complete as a father.” It’s a striking and deeply particular response to poetry, one I can only imagine many people must share as they fill auditoriums, bars, cafés, and living rooms worldwide.