by Julia H. Jackson
“Do not forget what’s left, because this is all we have, and you won’t found your roots online. We have no dances or chants if we have no history. Just rants—no roots, just tears. This is all I have of my family history that’s real. And now it’s yours.”
–from Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio’s “Kumulipo,” performed at the White House on May 12, 2009
Last spring, President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama hosted an evening of poetry, music, and spoken word for students from Howard, American, Galluadet, and Georgetown Universities. Readers included Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, a Hawaiian poet who later represented her state on HBO’s Brave New Voices, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the Broadway musical “In the Heights.” There was something different about the way these readers shared their original poems; these were not recitations, nor were they readings in any traditional sense. These performers brought passion and theatricality to their words; theirs was a form of slam poetry. Today we examine The Roots of Slam Poetry.
Of all the words in the English language, “slam” and “poetry” don’t seem to naturally connect. And yet, the slam poetry movement has been growing strong ever since its birth in late 1980s Chicago, when construction-worker-turned-poet Marc Smith coined the term while performing at his favorite jazz club. In its essence, poetry is usually defined by its poet, but the slam poetry movement arose out of a desire to raise the stakes with local, regional, and eventually national competition.
In the introduction to his book, The Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip Hop, and the Poetry of a New Generation, Smith states that in the 1990s, “poetry reared its motley head” all across America. Cafes and bars such as the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City, the Green Mill Jazz Club in Chicago, and Boston’s Cantab Lounge started hosting regular competitions in which poets were judged on their content, style, performance, and emotion.
Slam poets such as Saul Williams, Taylor Mali , Mayda del Valle helped publicize the burgeoning movement in the 1990s with their performances, both in their own communities, as well as televised competitions. Williams played the main character in the 1998 film Slam, which followed a young inmate who discovers his passion for poetry in a writing class in jail. Slam poetry teams and nonp
rofit organizations sprung up across the country, including the NYC-Urbana Slam Team, the Austin Slam Team, the nationwide program Youth Speaks , and Poetry Slam, Inc., the heart of the movement.
The slam movement picked up its pace in 2002, when television hip hop entrepenuer Russell Simmons began hosting Def Poetry Jam on HBO. The show followed a national competition every year until 2007. In 2008, the Def Poetry producers created Brave New Voices, a new poetry competition that spotlights teenage voices.
Why is slam poetry important? Well, think of it this way: slam poetry is a way to expose talented young writers by challenging them to recreate their inspirations on stage. Poets are judged not only by their command of language, but by the ferocity or subtlety with which they speak. Many slam competitions have paved the way for writers who might not normally be nationally recognized, perhaps because of the communities they represent, perhaps because of the content of their work. Either way, slam competitions act as a platform for writers of all backgrounds and ideologies to voice their opinions, aspirations, fears, and desires.
“However it begins, it’s gotta be loud
and then it’s gotta get a little bit louder.
Because this is how you write a political poem
and how you deliver it with power.
Mix current events with platitudes of empowerment.
Wrap up in rhyme or rhyme it up in rap until it sounds true.
Glare until it sinks in.”
–from Taylor Mali’s “How to Write a Political Poem”
By Adam Krause
We know, we know: you hate poetry. Whether you are a poetic newbie laboring to compose a sonnet for a school assignment, or a tormented William Blake figure with a drawer full of tear-stained rhyming manifestos, poetry always asks a lot of you as a reader and as a writer. It can look like an antiquated art form, a roundabout or overly confusing way of expressing something, but in fact a good poem should cut directly to the heart of the matter in a way that expository writing can’t, and a good poet should be able to adapt the medium of poetry to any vernacular or subject. In this, the second installment of a series on ways to get your writing going, Eduify presents five ways to start writing poems that are different than anything you’ve ever written before.
1) Lost in the zoo of love 
For people who only infrequently write poetry, the love poem is often the first poem they are inspired to write. It crystallizes a passionate impulse into a few lines of expression, which is one of the things poetry is good for. The master of the stormy, turgid love poem is undoubtedly Pablo Neruda:
“Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.”
(from “I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You”)
However, the stock images of roses and sunlight, burning desire and a beating heart might, if not expanded in creative directions, provide the writer of love poetry with a relatively limited assortment of metaphors and ideas to choose from. Try this exercise to stretch your love poetry:
Make a list of ten animals, the first ten that come to mind. Then get another sheet of paper and, next to this list, write a ten-line love poem that compares the loved object, or the relationship, to a different animal in each line. You will find yourself with an undoubtedly creative poem in front of you if you have to find the way in which the girl of your dreams is like a narwhal or a cicada, and it may help you figure out new aspects of your beloved that remind you why you are writing a poem to them in the first place.
2) Unapologetic apology
One of the most famous modern poems is William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say”:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.
Williams is apologizing to his wife, but the third stanza makes it apparent that if the poet sincerely regretted what he had done, he would not be luxuriating in the sensuous description of what it was like to eat the plums. One doesn’t say, “I’m sorry I borrowed your bike and lost it, but if it makes you feel any better, it was really wonderful to feel the wind whipping through my hair as I rode.” The poem, then, is only taking the apology form as pretext to go somewhere stranger.
Write your own poem in the form of an apology or secret confession. It can be sincere or sarcastic, revealing or surreal. For additional inspiration, look at PostSecret.com, where contributors write down their deepest darkest secrets on postcards.
3) Pick a form, any form.
Ever since poets like Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot started composing poems that weren’t bound by meter or rhyme, free verse has become the form of choice for thousands of aspiring poets. But free verse, and the A-B-A-B rhyme scheme of Hallmark cards, are not the only forms out there.
You could, for instance, try a ghazal: a Middle Eastern form of love poetry in which each couplet ends with a repeated word preceded by a repeated rhyme. Or a sestina, in which each word from a list of six appears in a different order in each of six six-line stanzas, and again in a tercet at the end. (Definitely be familiar with poetic terms before you tackle these more complicated forms. A stanza is any unit of one or more lines in a poem, a couplet is a stanza of two lines and a tercet is a stanza of three lines.) There is always the classic haiku, with three lines of five, seven, five syllables. Writing haikus can be addictive, but writing good ones is harder than it appears.
Sometimes the constraints that a specific form puts on your poem is just what you need to start thinking in a new direction, even if it seems awkward or forced at first. Think of form as the rules of the poetic game, and as Robert Frost said, “Free verse is like playing tennis without a net.”
4) Take the poem off the page. 
With all the new forms of communication sprouting like mushrooms in our culture, many of them short enough to lend themselves well to poetry, why do poems have to be limited to scribbled lines in a notebook or Moleskine journal? Try a poem that looks like something else: Facebook status updates, a government questionnaire, a personality quiz, a fast-food menu, an instruction manual. Bringing the associative leaps and emotional content of poetry to these often superficial or impersonal types of writing can surprise the reader into really paying attention to your poem.
If you are truly bold, you could put your poem in a place where one generally doesn’t expect to find writing at all. Write it with a Sharpie on an old volleyball, making use of the spherical surface to find new possibilities in the words. Chalk it on the sidewalk or scratch it with a stick into the snow. One of my favorite poems is John Ashbery’s untitled poem commissioned for a bridge in Minneapolis. You can read it starting from either side of the bridge, going in different directions, and while it is not only about a bridge (that would be boring, since we can already see the bridge for ourselves) it carries some of the essence of the unusual surface it is on.
The entire poem (in photographs) is available here.
5) Blind translation
This is an experiment in how a poem can make sense without necessarily making sense at all. Go to the library and find a few poems that have been written in another language and are still published in that language, whether Czech, Italian or Brazilian Portuguese. (Poems in a language that uses a different system of characters altogether probably will not work for this purpose, and don’t pick a poem in a language that you already speak, such as Spanish.) Even if the English translation of the poem is available on the opposite page, don’t read it yet!
Now, type out the poem with the same punctuation and line lengths, but instead of using the original words, replace them with your own words in English (or whatever language you write poetry in.) This is not a real translation, so do not worry about whether the words you come up with have the same meaning as the original. You should be writing a new poem of your own based purely on the visual look of the first poem.
Did you feel any connection to the rhythm of the original poem, even if the meaning turned out completely different? We are used to writing to convey straightforward information and reading to absorb information in the same way, but poetry is often more like music: the sound and meter of the words may sometimes be more important than the meaning of the lyrics. The information you went on while doing your “blind translation” – the length of the lines, a mysterious exclamation point here and question mark there, a repeated unfamiliar word – may have been enough to start you off on a new poetic tangent of your own.
The Raven, from http://xkcd.com/
By Julia H. Jackson
Imagine that your significant other has recently fallen ill. You are an orphaned adult. Everyone who is close to you is slowly dying of tuberculosis, or as you call it, consumption. You can’t sleep. You fidget. You wait by your writing table and contemplate the slow descent of humanity. And suddenly, there is a knock at your door.
I should mention that you are a sometimes-successful editor of literary magazines. It is 1845.
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.’”
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John Keats
I’m glad of the arrival of the new movie Bright Star, based on the life of poet John Keats. Really, it’s high time Hollywood produced a movie based on the romantic and absolutely fascinating life of this famous poet. Bright Star focuses on Keats’ relationship with his neighbor Fanny Brawne, and the subsequent influence Brawne has had on the subject and nature of his work. Hopefully, the film will spark a fresh wave of interest in Keats, someone whose life hasn’t provided the kind of mainstream biographical interest as his contemporaries, Byron and Shelley.
Bright Star also got me thinking about the many if-not-great then at least ’solid’ biopics that have recently been produced on the lives of poets. Of course, we don’t prescribe to a biographical reading of any author’s work (we are strictly Barthesian in believing that the author is dead), but we whole-heartedly enjoy the singular sensation of watching the real-life, actual persona of a poet — a creator of poetic fictions — become the subject of a fictional portrayal itself. No one can possibly argue that a Hollywood biopic has any relevance in the discipline of academic biography, so the pleasures we experience in watching them are intently and completely based on fictional — i.e., entertainment — value. These poetic biopics are wholly ‘meta’, unapologetically middle-brow, and greatly entertaining, with small trivia takeaways that become of value later in board games and dinner conversation. We love them! And, without further ado, here are our five favorites.
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