Hip hop has become an umbrella term in the new millennium that has usurped jazz-fusion, pop, and R&B; music for contemporary fans of these genres, bringing about a blurring of histories, cultural contexts, and generic identities in the process. The hip-hop pandemic has had a similar effect on spoken word performances since the 1990s. Susan B.A. Somers-Willett’s second publication is an in-depth examination of the cultural phenomenon known as slam poetry, and she is the first to produce a critical, book-length text on the competitive art of performance poetry. Somers-Willett is not a folklorist but rather a published poet, author of Quiver (University of Georgia Press), and she is a scholar who holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. Her pioneering work on a genre in popular culture reflects themes and concerns that are of great importance to folklorists and in the study of folk poetics and, to a degree, for those studying marginalized communities.
Admittedly, the introductory chapter is not particularly enticing, but the chapters that follow are fully captivating as the author delves into a cultural history of popular verse performances, the socio-cultural political economy of slam poetry, and an exposition and critique of race and ethnicity as well as issues of origination, privilege, and commercialization. Each chapter reads as a collection of independent essays that are married to slam poetry in separate-but-equal polygamous relationships. In chapter 2, the author sketches the ways that Blackface minstrelsy, the Black Arts Movement, and the debate between popular verse versus elite verse are reborn in discussions regarding slam poets and their art today, and frames the following two chapters. Chapter 3 presents slam poetry performances as reflections of identity, resistance, and authenticity, while the commodification, commercialization, and marketability of this underground art scene are illustrated in chapter 4. She concludes with an epilogue that predicts slam poetry studies and provides the reader with documents from the National Poetry Slam Competition.
In the introductory paragraph, Somers-Willett explains that her work intentionally strays away from situating slam in oral culture or orienting performances in a celebration or romanticization of the old traditional way of life. Rather, the author wants to shift our attention to the ways poetry is embodied. This is a fascinating and refreshing perspective, given the somatically sonic nature of live poetic performances; however, an analysis of these performances as having oral, aural, and kinetic dimensions all at once never comes to fruition. The potential arises in chapter 3, especially in the description of an African American poet delivering the words of a hypermasculine white supremacist, but the focus remains largely on the transcription of the texts and the overtly different gender and racial identities, and not on the body, per se, in performance. This is somewhat guided by the performance studies of Judith Butler that is heralded as opposed to the works of Richard Bauman and/or Richard Schechner, which in fact could have enriched Somers-Willett’s work and approach to slam performances and embodiment.
Because slam poetry is, as Somers-Willett acknowledges, a multisensory experience, coaxed and massaged by it audience, and given this reader’s understanding of embodiment as calling for a discussion of bodies-in-performance, it is really the only item in an otherwise smart work on slam poetry and performance that did not meet my expectations. The work is relevant to folklorists, as it is important to recognize the role of interdisciplinarity that takes into account the complex traditions of the ethnographic methods and performance studies, folklore and anthropology, and the textual analysis of literary criticism. Somers-Willett gives students the basic tools to pursue further research into the performing body of slam poets and an opportunity to examine the broader ethnographic study of a participatory culture in practice at performance events.
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[Review length: 625 words • Review posted on January 26, 2011]