Hoffman - American poetry in performance: from Walt Whitman to hip hop

All the arts are capable of duende, but where it finds its greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present.

FEDERICO GARCA LORCA

To study performance is not to study completed forms[but to] become aware of performance itself as a contested space, where meanings and desires are generated, occluded, and of course multiply interpreted.

ELIN DIAMOND

IN 1882 IN HIS BOOK Specimen Days and Collect, Walt Whitman published a short reiterative prose piece called Ventures, on an Old Theme. In it, he makes his case again for an American poetry free of meter and rhyme, insisting, In these States, beyond all precedent, poetry will have to do with actual facts, with the concrete States, andfor we have not much more than begunwith the definitive getting into shape of the Union. He calls on a new breed of lofty poet to cement the states together, to divert the danger of crass materialism and instill the virtues of nationality and patriotism. Whitman ends by announcing his belief in the reciprocal relationship that must exist between the artist and the public in a democracy, with the epigrammatic assertion, To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.

That sentence has echoed through the ages, and served as both a foil and a rallying cry for American poets who have sought to understand and articulate the cultural dynamic of popularity. In a 1914 issue of Poetry, the editor, Harriet Monroe, and her foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound, debated the motto taken from Whitman on the cover of the magazine: To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too. Pound opened fire first, protesting, The artist is not dependent upon his audience, and judging

Other poets and poetry commentators have wielded Whitman's message to express their views on the popularization of poetry and its effects. The African American poet Sterling Brown in an essay entitled Our Literary Audience, published in Opportunity in 1930, had this to say: Without great audiences we cannot have great poets. Whitman's trenchant commentary needs stressing today, universally. But particularly do we as a racial group need it. He makes his case for the vital need of the black artist to write realistically about all of black life, including the most common elements of it, and the consequent need for the black audience to be receptive to representations of the race that are truthful even if they are not idealistic, optimistic tracts for race advertisement. Simpson's elitist sense is in line with Pound's and Eliot's, and suggests that the cultivation of a public in fact may be an impediment to producing a lasting literature.

More recently, an article in Time (December 16, 1991) on the emergent poetry slam scene ran Whitman's sentence as its epigraph, teeing up its discussion of the new generation of defiantly populist poets intent on communicating poetry to as large an audience as possible, with the idea being to effect a cultural revolution. In an article in Toronto's National Post (February 28, 2006) Whitman's formulation is once again cited, this time as preface to the announcement of the North American tour of rapper Saul Williams and the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails and the exploration of Williams's decision to expand his reach by performing for the white kids wearing all black that largely comprise the audience for Trent Reznor, founder of Nine Inch Nails. As these sitings demonstrate, Whitman's epigram increasingly is deployed in discussions about poetry in performance off the page, framing tensions between page and stagethat is, between textuality and oralitythat shape so many of the discussions around poetry performance in the modern period and debates surrounding the merits of publicness.

In The Peril of the Poetry Reading: The Page Versus the Performance published on the website of the American Academy of Poets, David Groff, who concedes that public poetry events bring people together, creating a community for the most intimidating of the verbal arts, expresses reservations about the embodiment of poetry and its public appeal: But even if the poem takes on a fresh life when it's delivered in the voice of its maker, it loses more than it gains. Only when we acknowledge that a poem performed is no substitute for a poem read in private will we truly advance the cause of the poetic word. Many assumptions about poetry and its cultural prestige are packed into that statement, and many of them are contested in this book. Groff goes on to ask the loaded question: In the effort to make poetry popular, is poetry-making itself debased? He answers his own question with lament: There's no chance for the poet or listener's eye to pause, slow down, or linger over a line. How many times have you wanted to ask a poet to decelerate or reread a poem? A recited poem vanishes faster than a vapor trail. The evanescence of performance is seen here as a failing, with no distinction madebetween a poem read well and a poem read poorly (who