Gritty, grunged and boasting as many girls as guys, poetry has made a comeback-in a bohemian rhapsody of rap swagger and fiercely urban poems that has done more to revive interest in verse than anything since the Beat Generation was filling coffeehouses from the East Village to the Mission district. In the last year, poetry clubs with such arch-sounding names as the Fez, the Elbo Room and the Nuyorican have become a hot alternative to dance clubs in cities from New York to Nashville, from Boston to L.A. It doesn’t stop there. The Gap, that arbiter to post-baby-boomer tastes, celebrated the form last year in a TV commercial that featured poet Max Blagg reciting a paean to his old jeans. For the last month, MTV has been showing what it calls “image spots”-seven New York poets offering up 30-second bites of their work. In John Singleton’s coming film “Poetic Justice,” Janet Jackson stars as a hairstylist who slings verse. Even Bill Clinton captured the wave when he invited poet Maya Angelou to read at his Inauguration.
The new bohemia borrows both form and fashion from the Beats, who penned their smokey, jazzy poems under mushroom-cloud fears of atomic annihilation. It also taps the topical energy and beat of rap. But unlike the Beats, this is not just a bunch of white boys riffing on the meaning of life. There are “womanist” poets, rapper poets, gay poets, lesbian poets, neo-Beatnik poets, deaf poets who use sign language, Afro-Caribbean immigrant poets, Latino poets, Asian-American poets, cowboy poets and cyberpunk poets. They are intentionally rough around the edges: one poet might incorporate a slice of video into his performance, another might throw in a little hip-hop; there’s a bit of improv here, a dash of performance art there, and maybe even a tossed chair or two.
Consider: “You lesbian bitch! You gay bastard! I want the both of you!” Just a line from a work offered by Radamus, a young Latino whose recent appearance at the Nuyorican included a sermon on race, war and peace and, in turn, an “opera break,” a “soul break” and a “hip-hop hooray break.” Or consider: “ssssssoundcheck / onetwo onetwo / my boy elroy / suicidal drumtech in full effect / son of jane / and george jetson. . .” It’s the opening of “Doggin the Rockman,” written by Paul Beatty, who’s touted as one of the premier bards of hip-hop.
“It’s a kind of healthy anti-intellectualism,” says Neeli Cherkovski, a San Francisco-based poet and literary historian. “These people are responding to the real deep pulse of a rapidly changing society.”
This may be just the beginning. Soon enough, predicts Chicago construction worker-poet Marc Smith, the raucus poetry reading contests known as slams will be spreading out to suburban poetry clubs. But Beatty worries that the move into mainstream venues will dull the critical edge that poetry should have. “The real hook of poetry is that it turns things inside out, and I’m not sure all this trendiness meshes with that.”
Trendy or not, the current crop of clubhoppers can’t seem to get enough of it. Long after the last of the slam contests at the Nuyorican had ended, a score of versifiers took to the open mike and declaimed until the wee hours of the morning. That’s a lot of words-and, inevitably, a lot of bad poetry. But as some guy named Ginsberg once showed us, poetry’s a howl.
