Rant: Why I hate “Spoken Word” poetry

Call it whatever you want – spoken word, performance poetry, slam poetry – but you know what I’m talking about. Someone is spouting a string of tired clichés and bargain basement poeticisms into a microphone. His speech isn’t just exaggerated, it’s over-exaggerated; the metre is a contrived hodgepodge of forced iambics and something that is trying desperately to resemble hip-hop, but isn’t. The idea, I suppose, is that the flailing, stylized vocals will be interesting enough on their own that no one will notice how bad the actual writing is.

If the performer is a serious practitioner of this ‘art form,’ he has to constantly move his hands about, mostly to count the syllables of his speech. Essentially, this gives the impression that the syllables, with their forced rhythm, have been arranged this way on purpose, and that he must carefully ‘conduct’ the words coming out of his mouth, perhaps as Leonard Bernstein would conduct the New York Philharmonic. Occasionally, his hand movements change from syllable counting into a kind of illustrative mime, some clever action to help demonstrate a particular word’s significance to the audience. Usually the important word that requires this kind of illustration is a first-person singular pronoun, and the clever performer mimes this by pointing to himself, or perhaps by thumping his chest, or (my personal favourite) by tugging on his shirt like he’s ready to rumble, yo.

Now, when I say, “tired clichés and bargain basement poeticisms,” I mean the writing is unoriginal, old-hat, and boring, something that generally indicates that the author of the work in question hasn't read very much poetry (the work of his friends doesn't count), and this causes the author to mistake hackneyed truisms and platitudes for insight and cleverness. So banal, so bromidic, is this doggerel that the “performer” must jazz it up with all kinds of forced rhythms and hand signals to make it “entertaining” enough for an audience. In my experience, the audience members (at least the enthusiastic ones) are largely the performer’s friends, and the shittier his "poem" is, the louder they will clap. And the more familiar the clichés are, the louder they clap still. They like the familiar, and they are in luck. This genre is quickly developing it's own cheap short-cuts and recycled conventions. Before long, I suspect all spoken word artists will be performing the same composition, likely the very same way, and no one in their audience will bother to notice.

Now, when I say the meters and rhythms are forced and contrived, I mean that if you could see the words written out on a page, and if you applied the most basic principles of English scansion to the composition (I’m loathe to call it a poem), you would find that almost all of the stresses in the delivery of the composition are not naturally there in the writing. In short, the rhythm of the piece as performed is quite different to the rhythm of the piece as written, thus, the rhythms, while over-exaggerated, are also forced and contrived, probably because the author lacks the skills required to get the meter of his own writing the way he wants it.

Sadly, many of the compositions in this genre carry with them a message of social or civic outrage. This is kind of noble, I know, but the delivery is usually intended to scold the audience for their implied complacency in, or culpability for, some on-going social injustice. When the message isn’t born of social consciousness, it’s generally born of self-aggrandizement and cocky posturing. Either way, it’s fucking horrible to watch, even worse to listen to, and does it a disservice to actual poetry by calling itself “poetry”.

My message to any aspiring MCs out there is this: if you actually have a talent for rap and for hip-hop music, then I wish you luck in the music business. To the rest of you wannabes, if you have no real talent for rap or for music, or for poetry for that matter, why are you stinking up legitimate poetry readings with your musical failure?

My message to any aspiring poets out there is this: if you want to read your poem to an audience, read your poem the way it is written. If it is well written, it will sound just fine, and if it has something to say, it will be said. And if it isn't well written, then I recommend you keep working on your writing. "Performing" a shitty poem, no matter how well you "perform" it, isn't going to make the poem less shitty.

10 Questions with Catherine Graham

As we get ready for the Insomniac Press poetry launch next week, Open Book Toronto offers us ten questions with poet Catherine Graham. You can check it out here.

Join Catherine Graham, Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross for the Insomniac Press / Punchy Writers Launch at Dora Keogh Traditional Irish Pub in Toronto on Wednesday, May 21. Visit Open Book Toronto's events page for details.

Also check out Jason Camlot's blog here.

And even alsoer, check out Stuart Ross's's blog here.

I hope to see you, yes you, at the launch!

The skull in poet Schiller's tomb is not Schiller's

From Deutsch Welle:

DNA tests prove that a skull venerated by many literature lovers as the "brainbox" of 18th-century German dramatist Friedrich Schiller actually sat atop the shoulder's of a very different man, a German official said.

Genetic material was taken in 2006 from the skull, kept in a tomb in Weimar, central Germany, where Schiller and fellow author Johann Wolfgang Goethe lived, and compared to material from the graves of Schiller relatives.

Schiller (1759-1805), who wrote influential plays critical of inequality, has no direct descendants still alive.

The skull was recovered from a royal courtiers' mass grave in Weimar 21 years after his death as a cult developed around him, and it was treated for 180 years as Schiller's, based on many points of resemblance to his appearance.

"The DNA analysis shows without a shadow of a doubt that this is not the author's skull," Julia Glesner, a spokeswoman for the Weimar Foundation which preserves the German Classicist heritage, said on Saturday, May 3.

Adding to the mystery is a controversy over a second skull found in 1911 in the same mass grave, regarded by some as Schiller's. But the DNA tests found it too belonged to someone else.

Read the whole story here.

And The Local here.

Homeless poet robbed, poems stolen

Is nothing inviolable? Here's a sad story from yesterday's Ottawa Citizen:

"Homeless poet, sorry no poems, everything stolen while I went to eat. Nice city we live in, eh."

So read 'Crazzy' Dave Dessler's sign after he returned from dinner Friday to find his possessions had vanished.

For two years, Mr. Dessler has been a poem-writing fixture at George Street and Sussex Drive. In the winter, he shovels his stretch of pavement. Recently, he hauled garbage bags full of litter from the shrubs growing opposite his post.

Yesterday, he sat on a blue milk crate next to a few of the poems he'd managed to remember, written on cardboard in marker.

He's had his stuff stolen before, but never his poems. He had hundreds of them on pieces of cardboard and in notebooks.

"It's the poetry, it's my art -- that's what hurts," he said.

Fortunately, Mr. Dessler's friend, Guy Bérubé, director of La Petite Mort gallery on Cumberland Street, kept a few dozen poems. Mr. Bérubé sells Mr. Dessler's work; buyers can pay what they like. They fetch anywhere from $2 to $40, but they're off the market until Mr. Dessler can copy them.

Read the rest of the story here.

Dani Couture, a.rawlings, and me.

Dani Coutute, a.rawlings, and myself have been profiled by Lisa Young in the local arts online magazine Gadzooks!

Check it out here.

Two nominations for Insomniac Poets!

As poetry editor for Insomniac Press, I'm very pleased at how the year is shaping up so far. Two of our poets have recently been nominated for two very wonderful awards. First came the news that Olive Senior is a finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for her collection Shell. The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the League's Annual General Meeting in May or June, with the shortlist announced in April. Congratulations to Olive. Click here for the official announcement.


And just this morning it was announced that David McFadden has been selected to the shortlist for this year's Griffin Poetry Prize for his book Why Are You So Sad? Selected Poems of David McFadden. The winners, who each receive C$50,000, will be announced on Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at the eighth annual Griffin Poetry Prize Awards Evening. I was lucky to work with David on this book, and also with Stuart Ross, who did the bulk of actual selecting and editing and who also wrote the introduction. Congratulations to David, and to Stuart, too. They both worked hard to make this book a success. Click here for the official announcement.

Hugo Claus, the greatest poet of Flanders, is dead at 78

The writer Hugo Claus has died at the age of 78. He had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for some time and had asked to undergo euthanasia.

Claus was a universal artist: he wrote poetry and novels, painted and made films.

The character of his work is particularly diverse. He combined the banal and the burlesque with tragedy.

Often classical themes return: love for the mother, hatred of the father, Roman Catholicism and Flanders during and after the war.

His most famous work is Het Verdriet van België (The Sorrow of Belgium, 1983), an epic tale of Flanders under Nazi occupation.

Read the rest on deredactie.be

An excellent selections of his poems in English, Greetings, was published in 2005. It is a book that return to again and again, and I recommend it.

Here is a profile of Hugo Claus that contains some poems you can read online.

MORE COVERAGE FOR HUGO CLAUS:
The Associated Press
RadioNetherlands
news.com.au
Euronews
Google

Jeff Latosik wins P.K. Page Award

This is awesome. Jeff Latosik is a very talented young poet, and I'm happy to see that he's already garnering the praise of his elders, not to mention prizes. Here's some background on the award:

The P. K. Page Founders’ Award for Poetry recognizes the excellence of The Malahat Review’s contributors by awarding a prize of $1,000 to the author of the best poem or sequence of poems to have appeared in the magazine’s quarterly issues during the previous calendar year. The winner, to be chosen by an outside judge who is recognized for his or her accomplishment as a poet, is announced annually just prior to the publication of The Malahat Review’s Spring issue.

Read the rest of the press release here.

Read Latosik's winning poem here.

Campbell McGrath talks about his new book

I really like Campbell McGrath's poetry. His book Pax Atomica is one of those books that rarely seems to get put back on my bookshelf. I like to leave it out, so I can pick it up and thumb through it when I should be busy with other things. So naturally it is exciting to learn that McGrath has recently published a new collection called Seven Notebooks. Here he is talking about it with the Wall Street Journal:

WSJ: At the end of your poem "June 28" you quote Walt Whitman from "Specimen Days." In it, Whitman suggests that too much knowledge ruins one's enjoyment of nature. You agree?

Mr. McGrath: I think he's being tongue in cheek. He's offering a defense for being slightly casual in one's knowledge. I was eager to take advantage of that defense to cover up the fact that my own knowledge is full of holes. Whitman was a pretty good naturalist; if somebody else said that you might think he was allowing everyone to be an idiot. But Whitman was a cataloguer, especially about Long Island. He knew you had to know things. I take his quote as liberty to recognize that there's a kind of precision that can lead poetry astray.

WSJ: What inspired "Ode to a Can of Schaefer Beer," a brew you at one point describe as "tasting of metal and crisp water?"

Mr. McGrath: It was inspired by coming across a six pack of that beer. This beer was an icon in my childhood, and the TV commercials and jingles popped back in my head. It made me wonder: How is it that certain icons live and die, and what does it mean? That's what the poem riffs on. Their ridiculous slogan -- the one beer to have when you are having more than one - - is totally inappropriate now, so it makes you think of the good old days. The culture stays alive, but certain parts of it die or fail, and that's very interesting to me.

Click here for the rest of the interview.

Globe and Mail books section today: Newlove, Skelton and Sutherland

My review of A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove, In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton, and Manual for Emigrants by Fraser Sutherland is in the Globe and Mail books section today. Here is a sample:

A good volume of selected poems should be more than a gathering of popular favourites. It should be a discerning encapsulation of a poet's career to date, a book that considers all the poet's aims, aesthetics and advancements. When such a selection is made posthumously, the importance of choosing and arranging the poems is amplified. It is a kind of monument-building, and it can be a harrowing experience for the editor charged with the task.

John Newlove was a major poet whose life's work has long deserved such careful attention, and thanks to editor Robert McTavish, it has finally received it. A Long Continual Argument, the first comprehensive edition of Newlove's poems to be published since his death in 2003, is a fitting monument to the poet's consummate craftsmanship, and a cause for national celebration.

In its time, not long ago, Newlove's poetry was among the most commanding work being written in Canada. It is stark, brutally honest and deceptively complex. As such, it is a lot like the man who created it. In his introduction, McTavish describes his first impression of that man: "I found him self-deprecating and sly, his low tone punctuated with cigarette pauses." The same could be said for a great many of Newlove's poems, like the fretful Blue Cow Phrases: "If I'm disgusted with my life I'm disgusted with yours too./ All we do is invent blue cow phrases dripping thin vapid milk."

Newlove never attempted to hide his disappointment with the world, at least not in his poetry. He often expressed an antipathy that many people feel but lack the nerve to express themselves. He was the pinch-hitter for our secret bitterness, the darker and more forthright part of our conscience. His raw material was the ugly truth; from it he forged poems that demonstrate the intrinsic beauty of all human emotions, not just the comfortable ones, and he understood, as Aristotle and Shakespeare did, that the grandest of them all, the most poetic, is our melancholy. Few have given voice to human sadness as eloquently as Newlove did, as he demonstrates in his poem She:

She starts to grow tears, chemical beast
shut in a dark room with the walls closing
behind her eyelids, all touches hateful,
the white sweep of clean snow death to her,
the grey naked trees death to her.

You can read the whole review here, but this link will only work temporarily, as the Globe and Mail archives its material on a paid subscription basis.