"Spirit Guide:
Carlos Cumpian on Poetry, Chicano Culture, and the Emergency Taco"
By Benjamin Ortiz, for "Our Town" in the Chicago Reader
September 05, 1996
We're refugees, vato," Carlos Cumpian says in his trademark Spanglish. Editor of Chicago's MARCH/Abrazo Press and author of three books, the poet continues to wear his Tejano heritage on his sleeve despite having moved to Chicago in his teens. "We're economic refugees," he says, explaining his family history. "We left south Texas to follow the feria [money] waiting for us en el norte, like all our gente [people] who wind up here in Chicano, Illinois."
Cumpian's early life followed a picaresque trail from Texas, where speaking Spanish was punished in elementary school, to a south-side high school where an Anglo Spanish-language teacher once reprimanded him for not speaking good Castilian. Spanish-speaking immigrants in Chicago's barrios mocked his Chicano slang. On his visits to Mexico, locals called him a pocho, a Mexican-American who doesn't speak proper Spanish.
Cumpian was born in San Antonio, the cradle of Mexican south Texas culture, where he claims his roots reach back to 1790. With so much history tied up a thousand miles away, Cumpian's migration to Chicago is a puzzle. "We came up here for the climate," he jokes. In 1968 his father, who worked in retail, ventured to Chicago before the rest of the family and found a job at Goodwill. "A month later the job was no longer there because Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, and the following night dad's place of employment was torched." The family eventually settled in the Roseland/Pullman area.
For Cumpian, Chicago offered a radically different pace. "It's clearly a town of immigrants." The dynamics of Anglo-Mexican conflict that Cumpian grew up with in Texas were mirrored in an African-American community pushing for equal opportunity. "It made me hunger to know more about my own culture as I discovered more and more about African-Americans. After high school I went back down to Texas, lived there along the frontera, and started learning about raza all the way back to the Azteca and Maya." In Texas, Cumpian now found a burgeoning home-grown civil rights movement charged by the energy of the United Farm Workers, with the Raza Unida party taking over the government of Crystal City (his dad's hometown) and running Ramsey Muniz, a Mexican-American candidate, for governor.
Cumpian came back to Chicago in the mid-70s and entered Truman College while continuing to search after his cultural heritage. "It really wasn't until I went into Truman and got a trip down to Mexico with a crew of students that I really saw with my own eyes the complexity of Mexican society, as opposed to seeing Mexico through a few border towns where Mexican culture merges with the U.S. southwest." In Chicago Cumpian recognized an embryonic Latino arts scene of writers and painters inspired by the Chicano movement. He began experimenting with watercolors and putting his thoughts down on paper, teaming up with other artists and writers such as muralist Jose G. Gonzalez and poet and printmaker Carlos Cortez. Their group gained force and numbers and established itself as the Movimiento Artistico Chicano, or MARCH. "We're barely coming into our own as a people now, but back then nobody knew about us--we were invisible in the arts scene," Cumpian remembers. "MARCH managed to get some art shows going and the press started writing about us, even if it was mainly negative or ignorant at first."
In 1975 the group gained notoriety when members organized Mexposicion, a major exhibit from Mexico City's Mexican Fine Arts Museum that included works by Siqueiros and Orozco. MARCH followed up with an exhibit at the University of Illinois at Chicago of Agustin V. Casasola's photographs chronicling the Mexican Revolution. "We made it possible for Latinos to talk openly about working with major and minor institutions and grassroots efforts to generate public art."
MARCH mural dedications and art exhibits followed, providing an opportunity and audience for poetry to be performed. "When movement poet Rodolfo Gonzales read his epic poem 'Yo Soy Joaquin / I Am Joaquin,' it inspired young Chicanos to take poems and perform them onstage in front of the community as a way to teach ourselves and those around us who wanted to hear about the culture, about our heroes and heroines." The journal Abrazo, founded in 1976 and edited by Jose Gonzalez, published the visual and literary works of MARCH members. Cumpian recalls that Gonzalez, a graphic designer, helped polish the "ruffian ghetto edge" of the Chicano aesthetic of rasquache. The oversaturated and cluttered mix of traditional and popular cultures that defines rasquache expresses itself through both political rhetoric and literary flourish on the pages of Abrazo, with Aztec icons and images of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata adorning poems, photos, and sketches. "None of us were professional journalists," Cumpian acknowledges. "We were all just community people doing our own writing, trying to say what we needed to say. We learned a lot in the process, finding out that people wanted to write poetry, share the poems, and there was an audience for that."
A chapbook series started up, and Cumpian organized citywide poetry readings at libraries. His MARCH/ Abrazo Press emerged from the literary excursions. "We figured if people have a couple of bucks for a chapbook, maybe they have a few more dollars for a solid work of poetry. We've done about 14 books now," Cumpian explains, mentioning local MARCH/Abrazo-published poets Frank Varela, Mark Turcotte, and Raul Nino. "You can't tell from going to bookstores that we're even here sometimes, but I figure that now we are on the charts. It takes the work of people who are very single-minded and dedicated, like Chicagoans Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Achy Obejas, to establish the fact that we are here and we have a story to share." MARCH/Abrazo continues to publish midwestern poets, with a book by Milwaukee-based author Brenda Cardenas due out later this year.
While the political fervor of the 60s and 70s eventually gave way to a more subdued arts atmosphere, alternative spaces of artistic expression continued to open up from the galeria to the taqueria. "In 1981 folks started hanging out with Sandra and her brother Enrique 'Quique' Cisneros at his loft down on South Dearborn in the Printer's Row area, before it got gentrified. Once a month he opened his space as a do-it-yourself gallery called Galeria Quique, with professionally hung art pieces and spoken-word performance on opening nights. The advertising was just flyers, but after a while we got a lot of the Latino arts community into it. We'd charge one or two bucks admission and let the first 150 people in."
The opening program would usually include poetry, classical Spanish guitar, traditional Mexican music, and the folk strumming of Chicano bard Jesus "Chuy" Negrete. "But the real action started when we'd put some records on and get a dance party going until two or three in the morning. Then it was time for the emergency taco! Everybody--Sandra, Carlos Cortez, Raul Nino, my wife Cindy Gallaher--we'd pile into a car and quest for an all-night taqueria." There's an obvious parallel with the west coast's "taco shop poets," a Chicano-Mexican writing collective that regularly transforms taco stands into poetry slams. "At least a decade before those guys," Cumpian confirms, "we were stumbling into taquerias at all hours and declaring manifesto-style, 'You must prepare for a world where the taco becomes an emergency!'"
The party broke up in the mid-80s when Sandra moved to San Antonio and the rent got too high for Quique. But the works of seven taco-marauding poets were collected in 1989 as the chapbook Emergency Tacos. "We paid 75 bucks each to get that one printed, and you can't find it anywhere now 'cause it sold out in a year, but that was the testimony to all the work we did and fun we had back then."
Toward the end of the 80s, Cumpian's own work was slowly reaching critical mass. "It took me years to learn, really, how to work a poem, and it wasn't until I started getting published in little magazines here and there that I began to see myself as possibly becoming a published poet. It wouldn't be until 1990 that I would actually have my own book, Coyote Sun." Following his first book (published by MARCH/ Abrazo), Cumpian wrote Latino Rainbow (Children's Press, 1994), a book of art and poems for children that told the stories of such famous Latinos as Cesar Chavez, Joan Baez, and Tito Puente. Cumpian is currently celebrating the publication of his newest title, Armadillo Charm, by Luis Rodriguez's Tia Chucha Press.
Cumpian's influences range from the in-your-face rants of David Hernandez's "Chi-Town Brown" to the meditational working-class haikus of his main mentor Carlos Cortez. His poetry melds street smarts and native spirituality in a free-form, humorous, and densely metaphorical narrative style, and his new book gives that style its most powerful voice to date. Using recurrent images and issues, Cumpian taps into the mythos of spirit guides, part native and part syncretic symbols of the Americas. The armadillo calls up both Tejano culture and Mother earth, each in danger of being "knickknacked" to death (as it's put in the title poem).
"Some people hear the word 'armadillo' and say 'How disgusting!' or hear the word 'coyote' and say 'Not in my backyard.' Or maybe some people think 'It's just so damn cute I can't wait to stuff one and stick it on my front lawn.' My real feeling is that these are animals of the margin, they're animals of the borderlands--they're symbols of survival, of endurance, sometimes possessed of myth and magic, who have managed to survive all this time, no thanks to us."
The spirit guides also take the form of colorful characters. They range from the phantasmic Mexico City-based masked urban activist Superbarrio to the icons Che and Subcomandante Marcos to the working-class humorists Loco Chuy and Tony Atole. Through these personalities, Cumpian touches on issues of social justice, environment, anti-immigration hysteria, and the enduring spirit of Chicano culture, always with passion and urgency: "I dread tomorrow knowing / que mis hijos y otros inditos y chicanitos [that my children and other little young Indians and Chicanos] / will be robbed by a world that designs / its resorts and golf greens by gambling / with rare water under uranium friction" ("The Eighth Commandment & Uranium 235").
The passion of Cumpian's words comes forcefully alive in performance, which for Cumpian is an experience of religious significance that recalls the Aztec rites of xochitl y cuicatl (or flor y canto, or flower and song). "It's in our culture--you can just look at our ballads, our corridos." Cumpian refers to the 19th-century ballad form that developed along the Texas-Mexico border. The corrido brought together the then-rural Mexican community around a guitarist-balladeer who sang about important dates, personalities, and events of the day. "The corrido has served us well as a way of documenting our lives, like poetry did in the Chicano movement and still does."
Cumpian's cadenced delivery transforms words into weapons of satire when he talks about "Atrocity in the Assassin/nation" and how "We Don't Wanna Peso Much." Reciting a syncopated, alliterative catalog of the sacred and profane, Cumpian forges a world caught between native respect for the earth and self-annihilation; he snakes his way through laughter and lament as easily as he moves between Spanish and English. "We are very dependent on live performance to get people to see what we're doing and how we're doing it, to experience the dynamics of code-switching, brincando [jumping] between Ingles and Espanol. That's the way we grew up speaking, and oftentimes that's the way we end up performing our work." Cumpian looks forward to a series of readings at Chicago libraries and cultural centers in the coming months.
Aside from running a poetry workshop at Columbia College, Cumpian now teaches English at Farragut High School, where most of his students come from a Mexican background. "It's great--I get to teach all the Latino classics there, but when I show the students my own books they accuse me of making it up. 'If you have these books of poetry, why aren't you rich?' they ask. I tell them no one gets rich writing poetry, but you get the satisfaction of doing your own work and sharing it." He shows off his personal library of Chicano and Latino literature, a pantheon of both famous writers and writers unknown to the mainstream. "Look at how many of us are out there writing--I've got bookshelves of our stuff. And still we're barely recognized."
"Reading Out:
D-Knowledge pushes poetry into the light"
By Benjamin Ortiz, for the Chicago Reader Calendar Section
January 29, 1998
For Derrick I.M. Gilbert, being a poet means walking a tightrope between the spoken and the written word. "The spoken word has played an important role in black letters," he says. "It's something we've always done. When we didn't have pens or didn't know how to write, we've had preachers sermonizing, people gossiping on the corner, spirituals, all that. On the flip side, nowadays some people get trapped in the spoken-word thing and don't advance as writers."
After great success as a spoken-word performer, Gilbert found himself falling into that trap. Within a year of his first open mike, the young poet had performed at the NAACP Image Awards, released a CD (All That and a Bag of Words), and read one of his poems in John Singleton's 1995 film Higher Learning. The next year he toured with Peter Gabriel and Earth, Wind and Fire as an opening act. But stardom almost ruined his art. "It's too easy to get caught up being a performer and forget about the careful discipline of writing," he explains. "People will see me on a music stage or at the Apollo or a comedy club where you see 'regular' entertainers, and then they'll come up to me and say, 'D, I liked your flow, and this is the first poetry book I ever bought.'"
The book in question is Catch the Fire!!! A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poetry. Gilbert collected the poems to demonstrate the depth of the written word that accompanies a performance, to show not only the commercial but also the literary dimensions of a poetic heritage that crisscrosses generation, medium, and venue. "Black folks can do haikus just like they can rap, and this book is part of that continuum of poetry. It shows that this is not a renaissance, that people have been writing for a long time, and here's a showcase of all that talent."
Gilbert's first experience of the oral black literary tradition came through the jazz musicians who cooled it with his father. "When I was a kid, people would look at me funny because I used the word cat, like jazz lingo," Gilbert laughs. "I got that from my father, who does straight-ahead jazz and runs a club in Japan now, but back then we were one of few black families in the area we lived in." Raised in Long Beach, California, Gilbert attended an integrated high school, where he played sports and eventually got into rap. "I thought rap was funny," he recalls, "but I didn't see the complexity of it as a literary and political force until I got to college and heard Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy."
As an undergraduate at Berkeley, Gilbert became a serious student and an avid reader. "I was very straight-edge in college, very analytical," he says. "I debated and wrote theoretical essays, but never really put my words into poetic form." In 1993 a friend invited him to a reading in Los Angeles. Gilbert didn't know what to expect, but the word hooked him immediately. "I think what caught my attention was the music in poetry. I was getting frustrated with the lack of innovation in R & B and rap lyrics, but when I went to the reading, I saw poets doing things with words I had never seen before--but with musicality and rhythm." His friends had begun calling him "Knowledge" because of the effort he put into his studies, and an emcee at an early open mike introduced him as "D-Knowledge." The name stuck as his poetry handle and creative ego.
Even as his career was taking off, Gilbert began working on a PhD in sociology at UCLA, and a cross-generational study of poetry in the LA area reconnected him with both the written word and the African-American tradition of poetry. He assembled Catch the Fire!!! to solidify the connection. "Many of the poets in this book were introduced to poetry at readings, movies, where young people hang out," he says. "These are people who have had to refine their craft to get it published. But this book has poets both legendary and unknown, young and old, performers and academics, ranging all kinds of form, from haikus to sonnets to hip-hop flow. I wanted poets from everywhere, from as many different places as possible. Every now and then, someone will come up to me and ask, 'How come homegirl ain't in your book?' Like I said, this book is part of a literary continuum and cannot be comprehensive. But I hope readers will catch the fire of poetry like I did at my first reading."
Gilbert--appearing with local poets Rohan Preston, Angela Shannon, and M. Eliza Hamilton--will read from his work twice this week: Wednesday at 7 at 57th Street Books, 1301 W. 57th, 773-684-1300; and Thursday at 7:30 at Barbara's Bookstore, 1350 N. Wells, 773-642-5044.
The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us. We are no better than you...Did you suppose there could be only one Supreme? We affirm there can be unnumbered Supremes..."Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
The static scratch of a turntable needle plucks into a trumpeting groove of dramatic bombast, bringing Zarathustra's fire from the mountains for fight-to-the-finish phonetic fisticuffs at tonight's full-court, one-on-one, make-it-take-it poetry rumble. We find ourselves in medias res, the joust afoot, vendettas flagged and fallen, the bitter taste of beer and too much cigarette smoke fueling hearty wordsmiths to more and more feats of fearless foolishness on the microphone passing hands, the masses encircling victors and consoling the vanquished, and always the words, oh the words, representing all sides, cultures, and peoples in a microcosm of this country's formative tongues: formal verse, free verse, monologues, mano-a-mano sonnets, parables, odes, ballads, schizophrenic rambling, antichrist rants, hip-hop meditation, old-school rap, new-school lyricism, athletic assonance, dirty limericks, head-to-head haiku, twisted tales, iambic pentameter, napkin-scribbled words of wisdom, beat-box scratch-verse, abstract experimentalism, drunken-master mind-over-matter magic—all styles and subjects for the sport of the spoken word.
Welcome to the Slamdome, a literary alternate universe wherein the poets are gladiators and the spectators lust for word blood. If you're lucky, you might appear on the arena's Jumbotron to spout an impromptu heroic couplet, as the Slam Silver Dancers flex choreographed, pyrotechnic mimes to the rhythms of Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool," and the crowd does the wave at the drop of a smooth-sounding slant rhyme. It's a brave, new world of startling possibilities, and people all around the country are turning this vision into reality bit by bit through the hybrid artistic medium known as "poetry slam," the passport to contemporary pleasures of the spoken word.
Poetic Pugilism
Despite burgeoning popularity, even in Chicago, the birthplace of the poetry slam, most folks do not know their populist poetic counterparts, who weekly do battle in smoky bars and yearly trek to the Mecca of spoken-word sport: the National Poetry Slam. Witness an open invitation to this art-turned-sport through the anthology Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry. Some years ago, I lived and performed in Chicago as a spoken-word poet but had no experience whatsoever of poetry slam, despite its popularity among some bards my age. I had only murky information based on secondhand reports of vicious heckling and verse-almost-come-to-blows at the Green Mill Tavern slam venue, with no inkling of why Marc Smith, former construction worker and founder of slam, was prompted in his own time to create such a gimmick as poetry with scorecards to get audiences to listen.
When I moved to San Antonio, Texas, in the spring of 1998, the city's cultural contrast to Chicago led me to some of the reasons why Smith had been driven in the early 1980s to break from standard open-mic events and readings. As he stated in the Chicago Reader (Aug. 13, 1999): "'The scene back then was smaller, pathetic, stupid, boring, pompous, and very elite...If you weren't in the higher circles, like from the School of the Art Institute, you were incredibly snubbed.'" I found similar elitism and lack of energy in San Antonio, though I met individual poets with astounding talent unrealized and unheard by potential audiences who were, perhaps, rightly turned off by largely self-indulgent literary exercises in navel-gazing. Moreover, there was no solid community with support networks creating opportunities for no-name poets to actually thrive at their artistic profession, because big institutions and published writers seemed content with sporadic events but showed little interest in weekly forums.
And then I attended the National Poetry Slam in August of that year, held just up the road in Austin, Texas. I saw 45 teams (of four poets on each squad), bards who slammed their way out of regular local series all over the country in order to qualify to converge on Texas. I saw 1,200-plus fans pack the Paramount Theatre, with scalpers on the sidewalk outside. I saw CNN and NPR following wordsmiths from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which sends a brand-new team of rookies every year to the national finals. (They won the championship that year and propelled once-unknown bards to national stardom.)
On May 4, 1999, the doors opened at a San Antonio indie/punk-rock club to a standing-room-only crowd (150-plus), kicking off the weekly "puro SLAM!" series that I founded and hosted. That night, people drank too much beer, consumed more than 40 poems at a sprawling show that lasted until nearly three in the morning, and mobbed the poets afterward like Wheaties-box superstars, with freestyle-rap intermissions and verbal competition spilling over into spontaneous microphone melee driven by all-out oral athleticism—a state of self-possession by one's own words in which the poet's body is whipped into motion and the crowd into a frenzy over the most elemental of art forms.
The Secret Revealed
But how can a few scoring and heckling gimmicks generate interest in poetry to such an effusive degree? Gary Mex Glazner, editor of the Poetry Slam anthology, producer of the first national contest in San Francisco, Calif., in 1990, and pioneer of the form, answers this question in his introduction to the book, citing respect for the audience as key: "In 1986, Marc Smith started the Poetry Slam in Chicago with the idea of giving the audience a voice, letting the audience say if they liked a poem. By cultivating their participation, poetry slams build an audience for poetry, bringing everyday workers, bus drivers, waitresses, and cops to a poetry reading and letting them cut loose." Glazner recounts how Smith empowered the Chicago audience as valued critics, giving five randomly picked spectators scorecards to rate individual poems on a scale of 0.0 to 10.0 and encouraging on-the-spot vocal reactions from everyone else, with a tournament structure and prizes for those scoring highest. From there, the seed spread to both coasts, culminating in the first national contest and the continued diaspora of Chicago performance poetics to all parts of the country. By extension, the anthology charts the growing popularity of slam from the old days to its current status as an international phenomenon, having inspired a documentary film (1998's SlamNation: The Sport of Spoken Word, directed by Paul Devlin), coverage by major media outlets (including a 60 Minutes segment in November 1999), and the sprouting of slams all over the globe as a grassroots American cultural export.
As a sort of textual counterpart to the documentary film, Poetry Slam the book charts the development of the form, from neighborhood-bar happening to global forum. It contains a considerable compilation of poems as well as essays and e-chats on everything from poetics to strategy to the logistics of running a slam. Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of the anthology is that it captures a multitude of voices (about 100 poems and a baker's dozen of essays/chats) through the verse and commentary of what is alternately called the "slam nation" or "slam family"—the elders and the young turks of slam alike.
Among the contributors to the volume is multimedia poet Reggie Gibson. His "Eulogy of Jimi Christ" sits seemingly dormant on page 162, though I've seen this multi-vocal piece come to life on fire in noncompetitive contexts in Chicago and then again in Austin, where Gibson won the 1998 individual championship title. Through my local series I helped produce, manage, and then coach the first-ever San Antonio team to go to the Nationals in August, and in our semi-final bout, we encountered none other than Team Chicago Green Mill, with Reggie Gibson on point deploying his powerful, psychedelically flavored "Eulogy" against us as his team's opening salvo (his team also included Daniel Ferri, Tyehimba Jess, and Maria McCray, all contributors to the anthology). And so, the poem I alternately contemplated, rooted for, and then battled against carries all these contexts on the page. Similarly, since my first encounter with slam in Austin, I've been watching the aforementioned documentary film SlamNation avidly, as it comprehensively covers the 1996 national contest in Portland, Ore. That year, Team Boston included one Jack McCarthy, an elder slammer and senior systems analyst by profession, who is captured on camera reading his touching, contemplative "Careful What You Ask For" (on page 27 of the collection), which he would repeat in a prelim bout this year pitting his Team Worcester against my Team San Antonio.
The anthology captures such "multi-culti" styles while suggesting the true coup of slam: its inclusiveness. Diverse along lines of age, ethnicity, race, and economic background, the national circuit includes Vietnam veterans, roofers, and cops. My experiences in San Antonio have led me to debate aesthetics with pet groomers, waitresses, ticket-takers, convenience-store clerks, active and reserve members of the armed forces, candlestick makers, and yard laborers, among others. Interestingly, this past summer, before nationals in August, Glazner slammified the concept of the bookmobile and organized a 32-city national tour (in part to support the anthology's release and to realize a dream of touring gigs for poets "on the road"), involving more than 100 poets along the way from California to Providence, R.I., and showcasing the divergent voices of poets who sometimes compete head-to-head yet nonetheless think of themselves as "family."
But with so many people in on the game, doesn't this inclusive poetry party displace the cocktail cognoscenti who, prior to slam, had a corner on the poetic market? Doesn't this poetry of mass appeal get watered down by the mainstream? It must be the case that, if everyone is listening, no one is really listening. And there must be someone to safeguard poetic "quality," a job for which the cultural technicians will need to be brought in.
Everyone's a Critic
With the advent of slam internationally, even those who once had ivory-tower immunity from the grumblings of the groundlings have had to stop, take notice, and comment. Witness Harold Bloom in a round-table discussion published in a recent issue of the Paris Review (spring 2000):
And, of course, now it's all gone to hell. I can't bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn't even silly; it is the death of art.
Let me try to put aside my amusement at the paradox of an academic critic declaiming, with rant and nonsense, the death of everything in startled reaction to new cultural currents. (The end of history and the last man have come and gone, yet we still seem to be decrying and therefore celebrating perpetual apocalypse.) Despite the fact that slam emphasizes, in its judging criteria, both the writing and performing of a given poem as the reference points for deciding on a score, the stress on performance seems to be what makes many academic and text-based poets nervous. In the 60 Minutes piece, former poet laureate Robert Pinsky attempts a more measured criticism of slam with a definition of "classic poetry" in contrast to "slam poetry": "Not to be pompous, but anybody tries to be an artist. You're competing with Shakespeare and Dickinson...You're trying to make a work of art that does not depend on your presence." For Pinsky the emphasis on performance compromises the art of poetry conceived as concerned solely with language, independent of the author's utterance.
This reminds me of one night when I faced the drunken, stinking masses at "puro SLAM!" and asked, "What is a poem? How is a poem different from a novel or short story?" Someone shouted, "Novels are long!" to which I answered, "Have you read Beowulf lately?" Does anyone remember that poetry originated as a spoken form in preliterate societies?
Is There a Homer in the House?
In The Nation (June 14, 1999), Alice Fulton suggests a more expansive, holistic sense of "poetry": "...the everyday is where poetry is 'lived,' where it acquires the force of majority. The Zeitgeist is expressed more clearly by the obscure many than by the acclaimed few. It is within the ordinary gossip and buzz, within the thousands of unacclaimed poems, that poetry takes shape." The valences of orality, community, and ritual subsist in "texts" produced by preliterate, pre-printing-press societies. In his attempt to get back to these roots of poetry (as a genre distinct from other types of "writing"), Marc Smith probably would see Homer or Shakespeare as nothing more or less than a product of their audiences. Considering the audiences for text-based poetry versus slam poetry and the rates of poetry publishing/readership, slam represents a return to poetry rooted in its people, with and without the permission of textual gatekeepers.
Of course, with such emphasis, the form and content of a given poem might differ radically from what came before. The author(s) of Beowulf employed alliteration in part as a mnemonic tool (for practical, not just aesthetic reasons), and similar observations can be made of the slam form, in which poets try to get their messages out in the space of three minutes to avoid overtime point penalties. Beyond aesthetic considerations, slam is concerned (seemingly as a part of its artistic mission) with expanding the audience for poetry despite its cold reception in some quarters. So, for example, there have been slams in prisons (from the Pacific Northwest all the way east and across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom.), national youth slams since 1997, plus slams in schools in every region, alternate routes of textual production through self-publishing (that in some cases completely funds tours and helps poets clear small profits), and the creation of independent publishing houses.
At its best slam aims to return the word to all potential poets and their communities. Maybe that's why such cultural commissars as Bloom are so threatened by slam poetry: because it takes them out of the equation and empowers everyone to be a participant, regardless of specialized degrees or published words. Poetry is no longer the domain of specialists or "gifted" bards who can be understood only by the enlightened few. In fact, it never was.
By Benjamin Ortiz, special to Britannica.com