Poet and author Susan Somers-Willett talks about the branding of poetry slams, details why slam poetry is moving mainstream, and outlines the problems that commercialism poses to politically-minded poets.

BOOK: The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America by Susan B.A. Somers-Willett (University of Michigan Press, May 2009).

Interview By RONAMBER DELONEY & JASMINE MAHMOUD
Published: Issue 1, Summer 2009

JASMINE: Did you catch the White House Poetry Jam featuring, among others, spoken word by Mayda del Valle, Jamaica Osorio and Joshua Bennett? The mass reception has been mixed. Some applaud the White House for featuring “cutting-edge” artists; others are blasting this event because of its difference from what the mainstream associates with art. What are your thoughts?

I think this event underscores what many critics forget to mention about slam and spoken word poetry: that its audience is there not only to hear poetry but to engage in political exchange. One of the main appeals of a poetry slam, or poetry “jam” in this case, is that the engagement is both literary and extra-literary. These events celebrate the performance of poetry but they also celebrate the performance of marginalized identities and calls for social change.

The opening remarks of President and Mrs. Obama make this political imperative of slam and spoken word poetry clear. Michelle Obama introduced the event as “another way for us to open up the White House and once again make it the People’s House—to invite people from all different backgrounds to come and share their stories and speak their minds” and to “be open to hearing other people’s voices.” By other people’s voices, she means the voices of the disenfranchised: people of color, the urban poor, women, and youth. Her continual reference to the White House’s new “openness” indicates that they are interested in poetry and authors that challenge the social and aesthetic boundaries of high art. This is not Laura Bush’s idea of an evening of poetry, in other words.

As for this work being “cutting edge”—I’m not so sure about that. Although del Valle, Osorio, and Bennett are fine artists in their own rights, they perform work that is pretty expected from an audience familiar with spoken word poetry: personal narratives from people of color that proclaim the validity of their social positions. The real challenge for a spoken word poet is how to make that proclamation new, to perform it in a fresh way. When one succeeds, or when one has a brand new audience that hasn’t heard much of that before, the poetry can be read as cutting edge. But for a slam veteran like me, performance poems about marginalized identity need to do more than just be proclamations. They need to also be formally innovative and provoke deeper questions about how identity operates to garner the “cutting edge” title.

I also worry about the branding of this event as a “poetry jam”—I realize there was some confusion in the press about whether or not this was going to be a “slam” (a formal competition with a strict set of rules) or something else. I get what the Obamas were going for with this term—they wanted to convey that the work being performed was non-competitive spoken word poetry and which for the most part wasn’t academic—but the term “poetry jam” puts Russell Simmons’ fingerprints all over this evening and represents his branding of spoken word poetry for his own commercial purposes (further represented by his Def Jam record label and franchises like Def Comedy Jam and Def Poetry Jam). The fact that del Valle, Osorio, and Bennett have all appeared on Russell Simmons-branded HBO programs—del Valle on Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and Osorio and Bennett on Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices—should not be lost on us. For me, the term “jam” signals that this new literary “openness” is also what is commercially viable, perhaps even sanctioned.  That’s highly ironic for poetry that we expect to be grassroots, politically subversive, and largely non-commercial.

RONAMBER: I think slam rules limit the experience that the artist and audience could have, were props and time limits non-existent. However, without these rules, I know contemporary slam poetry as a genre wouldn’t exist because how could it then be distinguished from theatre?Do you think the marginality of slam poetry as a non-lucrative career path is because of its own politics of performance, or do you think the social interest in slam poetry is being hindered by the dominance of other normative, pop entertainment?

That’s a pretty complicated question that requires taking in a lot of “what if?” scenarios. Let me define the terms first. I think of slam poetry as what is being performed competitively in local and national competitions. Spoken word poetry is a much broader category, but it doesn’t entail poets competing against each other for scores. Instead, in popular American use, the term connotes poetry performed in the commercial sphere and is often aligned with hip-hop culture and African-American, urban, and/or underclass expressions. Both slam poetry and spoken word poetry entail politicized performances of marginalized identities, and both can disseminate politically subversive messages. The difference between them is that spoken word poetry is performed in the commercial sphere where slam is not.

That’s the theoretical distinction I like to make. In practice, however, the boundary between these worlds is very slippery, since many of the same poets skate between slam and spoken word venues performing the very same poems. That makes it hard to say that one venue is hindering the other or that one venue is more open to political expression. I think poets are more interested in what the carrot is at the end of the stick: if they are more inclined to being lauded by a live audience, they choose slam, if they want to make a viable career that will help pay some bills, they choose spoken word. Some poets move from slam to spoken word and never look back; some poets shift between the competitive and commercial contexts pretty seamlessly. Both entail crafting an argument to an audience—usually a political one—even as they are contextually different. The compelling question for me, the one that lies at the center of my book, is how and why American audiences receive politicized performances of identity the way that they do.

RONAMBER: Do you think a bridge to the mainstream can be achieved without sacrificing thematically the political voice of slam poetry? I know Def Poetry Jam on Broadway made it to mainstream theatre but that audience is small compared to other audiences.

On the contrary, I think the political voices we hear at slams are proving appealing to mainstream audiences and are at the heart of the success of projects like Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry on HBO, Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, and his new series Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices. These programs hinge on marginalized poets’ expressions of personal and political strife, and so just tuning in can feel like a political act for white, middle-class audience members. Their consumption of a performed poem becomes a way to support the voices of the disenfranchised.

The problem is, of course, that those programs are designed to promote certain expressions of politics and identity in order to be commercially viable. So in the Def Poetry series, for example, we see a predominance of black, male, urban, and underclass voices performed in the hip-hop idiom. At the same time, we see artists and hosts wearing clothing from Russell Simmons’s Phat Farm line on the show, Mos Def rapping to introduce episodes, recording artists like DMX, Kanye West, and Common sprinkled in among the featured artists. It’s pretty clear that Russell Simmons is doing his best to connect spoken word poetry with the commercial viability of hip-hop in the popular imagination. In fact, he makes no apologies about his commercial aspirations; in the film Slam Planet Simmons says of poets appearing in his Def Poetry projects, “These niggas are honest as the day is long. They are commercial as the day is long. They are commercial niggas like me, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Of course, becoming a “commercial nigga” poses a real dilemma for the politically-minded poet. On one hand, participating in a commercial venture like this offers an opportunity to get politically subversive messages out to a much wider audience. On the other hand, one has to participate in and maybe even reflect commercial interests in her poetry—I’m thinking particularly of poets who have performed poems as advertisements for major companies. Furthermore, the desire of white, middle-class audiences to consume and reward what they see as ethnically or socially “other” can perform an act of “liberal violence” (to borrow Gareth Griffiths’s term), fetishizing the poet and further marginalizing those who are already marginalized.

Given all this, I think slam poetry’s introduction to mainstream audiences is incredibly complicated, involving both sacrifice and possibility. Staceyann Chin summed up this dilemma really well in a piece she wrote for Black Issues Book Review. She says of her participation in Def Poetry projects: “The dance of survival in this new world of art and money is the dance of the middle ground—one has to straddle the commercial/mainstream and the not-for-profit/underground…I am walking a tightrope between poetic prostitution and art—and that, my dear, is the only way not to die as an artist.”

RONAMBER: I see the conversations about identity happening in the U.S. at poetry slams through the performance of the body authentic, as you write about. Yet, when I remember the time I spent in Germany, I must admit, I never saw this conversation happen on stage at a poetry slam unless it was a black poet from the U.S. on stage. Do you think the only transferable elements of U.S. slam poetry are its politics of performance regarding slam rules? If each local appropriation of the poetry slam around the world creates its own discursive trajectory, how can slam poetry be a more transportable bridge toward establishing a global network of poets with a common activist goal?

This is a great question, RonAmber. You’re right that each poetry slam around the world has a different flavor and discursive trajectory, just as different local slams in the U.S. differ from each other depending on their regular venues, locales, and audiences. The difference in the global context has to do with the fact that cultural politics in the U.S. are very different than other places around the globe. Here the politics of ethnicity and race seem paramount, whereas in some places in Europe, class is the foremost issue. This is a real success of slam, I think, for it has encouraged poets to speak to their local audiences in relevant and entertaining ways, as I think creator of the slam Marc Smith had always hoped. One of his main ideas in founding the slam was that the poet should be in the service of the audience, and so it should make sense that poets are responding to local issues that need to be addressed, even as those issues may differ globally.

I do think there is a common element among slams internationally, and that is its spirit—a sense of willing play, of entertainment, and of democracy. Sometimes that gets translated into an anti-establishment vibe, particularly as it pertains to the academy or canonical literature.  But mostly it just means that whether one is going to see a slam in Germany or the U.S., audiences are there to have fun and experience poetry in a new way. I went to an event billed as a poetry slam in Paris several years ago, and it looked nothing like a slam in the U.S. except for the ebullience of the performers. One poet performed his entire poem while speaking through a bullhorn! And you know what, I thought it was great! Fun is something we often forget about when marrying politics and arts, but it is incredibly necessary. This spirit of the slam is ultimately what can help build a sense of community between slam poets globally—and in turn how the slam can become a sphere for social and political exchange.

RONAMBER: Can the title, “best slam poet,” achieved through events such as the National Poetry Slam, truly be achieved? Assuming the title can be reached, how can the title preserve an open platform for activating political voice amongst writers and not just “slam poets?”

As for the title of the best slam poet being deserved…well, I’ve been to slams where I thought the most electrifying performance was passed over and others where the poet who blew my socks off won. It’s a crapshoot, and on any given night poets are at the mercy of a certain randomly-selected pool of five judges who may or may not do a good job in my personal estimation. In this regard a slam title, although a sign of incredible prestige, is ultimately unimportant. What remains important to me is that slams are crucibles where poets speak out to audiences, audience members speak back to poets, everybody speaks back to judges…it’s a veritable melee of talk! In this setting, the poem is not just a set of words that exist on the page that then are imparted aloud. At a slam, the poem becomes an experience; it exists in the exchange between poet and audience in that particular space and time. TAP

For more on Susan B.A. Somers-Willet, visit her website.