By Susan B. A. Somers-Willett
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Additional resources for The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America
Example text
That said, even as slam poetry moves within and between different media, the context of live performance shines a particularly bright light into its inner workings, especially as those workings involve performances of identity. In this context, all slam poems become about the author’s performance of identity on some level because of the author’s mandated presence onstage. His or her speech, dress, gestures, voice, body, and so on all re›ect in some way on the poem at hand, and these various aspects of embodiment convey nuances of cultural difference that the page cannot.
S. popular culture enacted through the performance of popular verse. Poetry and the People / 43 Performance, Poetry, and Blackface Minstrelsy The tradition of blackface performance—with its use of song, dance, the lyric, and rhyme—has much to offer in the way of understanding performance poetry’s appeal to popular audiences. ”5 It was also one of the ‹rst theatrical genres to cause a break between highbrow and lowbrow audiences. 6 In truth, minstrelsy enacted an idea of blackness, one shaped by the relationships with and exchanges between African American folk and the whites portraying them onstage.
Rather than engaging in the relatively passive dynamics of reading print or listening to a poetry reading, slam poetry, facilitated by performance, commands that the poet, poem, and audience have an immediate and active critical relationship with one another. Furthermore, it seals the author’s intimate and inseparable role as the embodiment of poem’s commonly ‹rst-person voice in performance. Slam poetry declares that its authors are alive and well, leaving little question in an audience’s mind as to who is speaking.