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Spoken Word: A Cultural History - Hardcover

Bennett, Joshua

 
9780525657019: Spoken Word: A Cultural History
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525657010 ISBN 13: 9780525657019
Verlag: Knopf, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A “rich hybrid of memoir and history” (The New Yorker) of the literary art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by one of its influential practitioners, an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion

“Bennett…transport[s] us back to the city blocks, bars, cafes and stages these artists traversed and inhabited…an instructive text for young poets, artists or creative entrepreneurs trying to find a way to carve out a space for themselves…Shines with a refreshing dynamism.” —The New York Times

In 2009, when he was twenty years old, Joshua Bennett was invited to perform a spoken word poem for Barack and Michelle Obama, at the same White House "Poetry Jam" where Lin-Manuel Miranda declaimed the opening bars of a work-in-progress that would soon revolutionize American theater. That meeting is but one among many in the trajectory of Bennett's young life, as he rode the cresting wave of spoken word through the 2010s. In this book, he goes back to its roots, considering the Black Arts movement and the prominence of poetry and song in Black education; the origins of the famed Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side living room of the visionary Miguel Algarín, who hosted verse gatherings with legendary figures like Ntozake Shange and Miguel Piñero; the rapid growth of the "slam" format that was pioneered at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago; the perfect storm of spoken word's rise during the explosion of social media; and Bennett's own journey alongside his older sister, whose work to promote the form helped shape spaces online and elsewhere dedicated to literature and the pursuit of human freedom.    

A celebration of voices outside the dominant cultural narrative, who boldly embraced an array of styles and forms and redefined what—and whom—the mainstream would include, Bennett's book illuminates the profound influence spoken word has had everywhere melodious words are heard, from Broadway to academia, from the podiums of political protest to cafés, schools, and rooms full of strangers all across the world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOSHUA BENNETT is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is also the author of Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020), The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022). He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is a Professor of English at Dartmouth College.

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Book 1:

The Nuyoricans

I came from a family where culture prevailed. My folks gave me a love of culture. So there is nothing surprising about Shakespeare being in my life. It would be surprising if he weren’t. I work for him and he works for me. He wanted to have a place to tell the story of England; so I wanted to have a place in which to tell the story of the Lower East Side.

—Miguel Algarín

Well, I guess I started stealing when I was eight. Stealing bread for my baby sister and brother. And other times you walk into the supermarket and just eat the food right out of the aisles, and not even pay. We’d walk right outside, you know? Now when you think about Latin writers, you probably think about Señor Márquez, Neruda, Cortázar—the magic realism. Not here, not this. There are no floating butterflies around my head when I walk down Avenue B, you know. This is street reality. This is where we shout it out. Shout it out.

—Miguel Piñero

On a Friday night in November of 2006, my senior year in high school, I put on a royal-blue T-shirt emblazoned with Bob Marley’s face, and a pair of red-and-white Nikes I’d purchased with my Foot Locker employee discount. I boarded the 1 train from 242nd Street after taking the BX9 bus from my childhood home, heading south for Manhattan, to a placed called the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Earlier that fall, I qualified for my first city-wide youth poetry slam, which was to be held at the famous East Village bar and global center for spoken word: the most famous poetry slam venue in the world. The only other time I had been to the East Village was to purchase my first album, Juelz Santana’s From Me to U, from a record shop not too far from the Cafe. I would keep the record as contraband that year—no hip-hop allowed in the house—letting its sharp cadences and outlandish tales of uptown bravado color the raps I recited to myself in the still moments between studying for English class and writing for the stage, which by November had already become my second job, alongside the gig at Foot Locker. The walk from the D train to the Cafe was an education. All the elements of my surroundings were turned up to ten: each radiant color and irrepressible sound. Bass blasting from the windows of cars, Dollar pizza shops packed from wall to wall, rows of sunglasses stacked higher than any passerby. When you got to the part of Avenue C where the Cafe lives, you knew it immediately by the line that stretches all the way down the block (whether we’re talking Wednesday or Friday, it made no difference, I would soon learn), the large black awning and booth that leads to the door, and the mural on the wall depicting the famed Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri. Pietri was sketched in blue and black and surrounded by red bricks on all sides. The mural also featured five faceless figures in hats and trench coats, as if a collective composed entirely of detectives who also happened to be ghosts.

It took about twenty minutes to get to the front of the line, at which point I paid the entrance fee and stepped inside the venue. The first thing I saw was the blast of Technicolor: red and blue and bright yellow where the stage lights hit the back of the room. All the chairs in the venue were aimed toward the back of the space, where there was a bright vermilion rug onstage, and a wireless microphone in a metal stand on top of that. There were paintings all over the walls, and a DJ in the back spinning records in and out of one another at warp speed. The room was bristling, alive.

On the night of that first slam, my big sister, Latoya, had just returned home from her senior year of college. She came all the way down from Yonkers to the Lower East Side to see me perform. The host that night was a poet and emcee named Jive Poetic, and the place was packed. As is custom, the DJ played Bell Biv DeVoe’s timeless hit “Poison” right after the judges were chosen and right before the sacrificial poet touched the stage. Thankfully, I didn’t draw the first slot during this particular slam. Generally speaking, no one wants to go first. When that happens, you have to set the tone for the night, and have no idea what kind of work your competitors will bring to the table. Whether you opt for a funny poem or something a bit more politically charged becomes a gut decision, instead of a strategic choice based on audience reaction and the poet who performs right before you. It’s a tough spot to be in.

Ten teenagers signed up for that night’s competition and discerning an early favorite would have been difficult amid such a large field. I did my best to stand out. As a friend’s former mentor used to say, “Your poem starts before you touch the stage”—by which she meant that the process of communicating who you are, what you are about, begins the moment the audience first sees you, before you have even opened your mouth. It may have been my first time performing at the Nuyorican, but I was familiar with the lore. I knew that when the poetry resonated, it got wild in there: people yelling, banging on tables, laughing so loudly that you could barely hear the poet. Likewise, you could just as easily tell when the crowd wasn’t into it, and that was my worst fear—not rejection so much as indifference. The point of slam is not simply to be heard. You want to be engaged, encountered, unforgettable.

The poem I performed that night was the first one I had ever written for the stage: “The Talented Tenth.” As its title suggests, it was a meditation on W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of racial uplift. The ideas that would eventually become “Talented Tenth” were shaped during the two-hour commute from my parents’ house to my private high school in Rye, and then back again each day. For all four years of high school, I would wake up at five a.m. and speed down the block with my laptop and books in my backpack while just about everyone else in the neighborhood, my family included, was still asleep. On those walks, I would think at length about what it meant to have been selected for this opportunity. I knew that my friends, family, and classmates from childhood all would have benefited greatly from the sort of educational resources I now had access to. Until I discovered slam, I was never able to put that feeling into words, and wrestle with what it meant to me, and for how I should live my life. Though I was exposed to poetry at home—Toya kept a copy of Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” taped to her bedroom door—the spoken word poets who entered my life my senior year, once I started going to slams, had an energy to their work that felt altogether new. For one thing, the vast majority of the poets I met around that time were my age. They used profanity unabashedly (to my mother’s chagrin), they talked about teenage angst, structural inequality, and global revolution in evocative ways, often addressing all these subjects in the span of a single poem. I knew from the very beginning that I had found my people—and my calling.

Jive Poetic called out my name, and I walked up to the microphone to mild applause and the discernible voice of my sister yelling “Let’s go, Josh!” from the front row. I took a moment to survey the crowd, closed my eyes, and tried to reimagine the scenes that brought me to this moment. The venue was packed to the brim that night. The stage lights shone so brightly I could barely see beyond the front row. The poem began:

I am a member of the Talented Tenth

W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory in the flesh

The cream of the crop

the best of the best

or at least that’s what I’m told

by my standardized...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525657010
ISBN 13 
9780525657019
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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