The Oral Tradition:
Spoken Word Poetry
Poetry Project #2
The Oral Tradition:
Spoken Word Poetry
This spoken word tradition has roots that go very far back in Western history. The Beat movement of the 1950s revitalized it for contemporary America, and it has since been going strong with the advent of poetry "slams" in the 1980s. Closely linked to rap and street culture, spoken word poetry tends to be relatively raw, energetic, outward-directed and reliant upon a good stage performance. That is, it may not always hold up especially well on paper, but that is not its intended medium. Spoken word must be delivered live, and the "acting" of the speaker is a big part of the work itself. Poetry slams, when done well, are delerious, energetic, and very interactive—the audience talks, hollers, judges...basically acts as part of the performance itself.
For this option, you should write a poem which is meant to be performed. You'll hand it in with your other chapbook materials, but you will also perform it for the class. Draw on our class viewing of SlamNation or our for a little background on this genre, and try, if you can, to attend a slam in town while you're working on your poem.
Click here
for an interesting article.
The Visual Tradition: Concrete Poetry
Like oral verse, visual poetry has also been around since antiquity. Early in the 20th century, Brazilian "concretists" gave the genre a big kick, and it is now flourishing in the form of electronic, new media poetry-art. The resources of digital media are of course really great for any kind of visual art, and new media poets are now experimenting with poems that include animation, audio, and interactivity with the reader.
We'll do a quick electronic survey of this sort of poetry in class, and for this option you'll create your own new media work. This means that you can produce anything from a visual poem with simple, hardcopy paper materials—to a complex work produced in Photoshop and Flash, and meant to be viewed on a computer screen. (If you decide to do the latter, be sure to get an early start, as this kind of work can be time-consuming and sometimes glitch-prone.) If your work includes a CD or DVD, you'll simply add that to your semester portfolio. (If would be good, too, to present this to the class.)
Check out some interesting resources here.
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from an early article in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, by Ron Silliman:
Gutenberg’s moveable type erased gesturality from the graphemic dimension of books. That this in turn functions to alienate the producer from his or her product is tangible even to authors who compose on the typewriter: to see one’s text in a new typeface (inevitably asserting different spatio-visual values) is almost as radical a shock as first seeing oneself on film or videotape, or initially hearing one’s voice remarkably other on a tape recorder (The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book 63).