...don't sweat it I ain't mistaken this stage for a pulpit/ this is just the altar where I offer my ink and my words for the return of your memory--"Remember," Mayda del Valle
In late 2002, I had the chance to see a performance of Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam On Broadway. The show fascinated me and provoked months of thinking about how one defines poetry, the relation between poetry and music, the nature of the poetic word, and, more than anything else, what we broadly term as "identity politics." Since then, I've been looking for ways to discuss the works I encountered on and since that day, but writing about slam poetry/spoken word without being able to convey the oral and visual aspects of its performance seemed pointless. Simply put, to "quote" a slam or spoken word performance requires sounds and images. This why it was tremendously odd for me to discover that a published collection of the Def Poetry Jam On Broadway poets did not include, at the very least, a CD. At the time, most of the poets that participated in the Def Poetry Jam On Broadway show had very rudimentary websites, if they had a website at all. Fortunately, this has changed in the past few years and part of the credit goes to sites like MySpace and YouTube that make it easier and affordable to share multi-media content.
Three Def Jam poets currently on MySpace are Mayda del Valle, Ishle Park and Georgia Me. Their respective pages take advantage of available content-sharing technologies to varying degrees. On her MySpace page, Mayda embedded a video of her performance of "In the Cocina" (see below), which she also performed on Broadway. She considers it the poem for which she is best known. It's a well-crafted poem and she performs it with wonderful energy but, personally, I dislike it immensely. I acknowledge that this is due to very personal reasons but ones that touch directly on the issues I have with the way "identity" is advanced in many slam/spoken performances. Someday I'll respond to Mayda's poem with my own version called "Mamá's in the kitchen huddled over CPA practice exams, a week's worth of frozen tuco in the fridge." On a more positive note, I think her poem "Tongue Tactics" is brilliant and after months of searching high and low for a recording, I found one. Ishle has no videos up on MySpace but her track "Work is Love" is gorgeous. She has a crisp voice that moves from word to word with a touch of restraint, gripping a word just slightly before she lets it go. Georgia Me's MySpace page includes both YouTube videos and audio tracks, including a more musical version of her best known poem "Niggods." Unlike Mayda and Ishle, there's not much action on her MySpace blog. Staceyann Chin sporadically uses her MySpace blog to post events and updates but for poems and audios of her performances you'll need to visit her official website. MySpace is a good start but it can't handle a lot of media. The vertical content layout quickly results in a cluttered, sluggish page. On the other hand, the active communities that emerge around a MySpace page encourage more, and more frequently updated, content. Staceyann's personal website, in contrast, is notably silent though it is better equipped to support and organize a lot of media content. But still, there are a few things she could do to make her MySpace page look less like an afterthought (for instance, why not post events using the MySpace calendar?). As people continue to embrace new media technologies on the web, I anticipate more dynamic poet websites. Sites better equipped to house the heterogeneous, multiple and fractured identities to which these poets give voice. And, on my end, these new technologies are making it possible to write about these works, so keep your eyes out for a more extensive critique of slam/performance poetry on SK.
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