Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry
- The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 New Black Aesthetics: Post–Civil Rights African American Poetry
- 2 Traditions of Innovation in Asian American Poetry
- 3 Locations of Contemporary Latina/o Poetry
- 4 Sovereign Poetics and Possibilities in Indigenous Poetry
- 5 Changing Topographies, New Feminisms, and Women Poets
- 6 The Nearly Baroque in Contemporary Poetry
- 7 Disability Aesthetics and Poetic Practice
- 8 Queer Poetry and Bioethics
- 9 Trauma and the Avant-Garde
- 10 Blockade Chants and Cloud-Nets: Terminal Poetics of the Anthropocene
- 11 Give Me Poems and Give Me Death: On the End of Slam(?)
- 12 Anti-capitalist Poetry
- 13 Of Poetry and Permanent War in the Twenty-First-Century
- 14 Poetry in the Program Era
- 15 The Future of Poetry Studies
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
- References
11 - Give Me Poems and Give Me Death: On the End of Slam(?)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2021
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Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry
- The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 New Black Aesthetics: Post–Civil Rights African American Poetry
- 2 Traditions of Innovation in Asian American Poetry
- 3 Locations of Contemporary Latina/o Poetry
- 4 Sovereign Poetics and Possibilities in Indigenous Poetry
- 5 Changing Topographies, New Feminisms, and Women Poets
- 6 The Nearly Baroque in Contemporary Poetry
- 7 Disability Aesthetics and Poetic Practice
- 8 Queer Poetry and Bioethics
- 9 Trauma and the Avant-Garde
- 10 Blockade Chants and Cloud-Nets: Terminal Poetics of the Anthropocene
- 11 Give Me Poems and Give Me Death: On the End of Slam(?)
- 12 Anti-capitalist Poetry
- 13 Of Poetry and Permanent War in the Twenty-First-Century
- 14 Poetry in the Program Era
- 15 The Future of Poetry Studies
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
- References
Summary
This chapter traces the movement of slam and spoken-word poetry from a subjugated and lesser art form to an established and valid one in the early twenty-first century, while suggesting that these institutionalizing forces and desires can be caught up in anti-Blackness. The emergence of HBO’s Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry Jam in 2002 offered a highly produced and stylized televisual marker of contemporary spoken word and slam success, centering the young Black poetic voice in way that popularized a particular defiant Black aesthetic and had the general cultural consciousness assuming that slam was indeed a Black thing. The emergence of a new “quiet style” in locations such as the Minneapolis/St. Paul literary scene and the multimedia company Button Poetry can be seen, in contrast, as advancing the ideal of the disembodied performer who, through the rejection of theatrics, focuses on the “real” art of poetry.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry , pp. 169 - 179Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
References
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