The Center Cannot Hold:
Slam, Academia & the Battle for America's Bourgeoisie
NO FUTURE?
Bloom is pompous and aristocratic, but he’s dead on with regard to one thing: the nature of poetic thought is generational. In his youth, Bloom lamented that the Modernists were barely taught at all… the tenor of the poetic sensibility reaching back to Whitman. Of course, the Modernists returned, and today hover over the academic sensibility. Mere years ago, the Beats were absent from college curriculums, but it’s difficult to find a contemporary poetry program these days that doesn’t examine Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. Of course, these poets’ political underpinnings are frequently underplayed, as Bloom himself underplayed the political overtones in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s writings. But nonetheless, they now exist in the pantheon, in many places superceding the preceding Modernists. Change is happening before us, and one imagines that this process will again repeat itself, ad infinitum, for as long as poetry is tolerated in society.
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both care deeply. . . |
The Academy exists. The Slam exists. Likely, they will wax and wane in influence over the contemporary voice of American poetry. Perhaps one or the other will fade into history, but that is neither certain nor even likely.
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. . . for the art form they share |
Both, however, have more in common with each other than their leaderships would ever dare express: the memberships of both care deeply for the art form they share, and moreover, both will find the financial successes of their members tied closely to the fortunes of the middle class. Which recollects Bloom’s thesis, that politics as a subject somehow corrodes the integrity of the art. In fairness, perhaps he has a point, but he forgets two things: The first is that the very act of writing a poem is a political expression, the simplest pastoral verse a probing at the boundaries of freedom of speech. The second is that great art cannot be made without the risk of great, even horrific, failure.
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the very act. . . |
By denying the political in the poetic canon -- even more than playing to the sensibilities of a tenured and privileged class that might, indeed, not want to be coddled -- the art form runs the great risk of stagnation. Of course that political expression needs to manifest itself as more than mere rhetoric -- and does, with surprising frequency.
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of writing a poem. . . |
As it stands, the poets within the Slam hold the greatest well of untapped potential in recent memory -- perhaps the greatest in the history of American poetry. Indeed, if there is a potential of stagnation there at all, it comes from strict adherence to the forms and limitations of the competition itself. For example, there are staggering differences between the breathtaking originality of a Saul Williams, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez or Jerry Quickley and the slew of rhetoric-spouting rappers reiterating that the revolution will not be televised. But again, that's an irrelevancy -- the Slam itself has always been judged by its worst elements, not its best.
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. . . is a political expression |
It remains that, in the years to come, it seems likely that America will be fascinated by its outlaw poets, heaping increasing amounts of success and praise on them, until the national mind focuses elsewhere for a while. What then? One hopes that the poets would remain the same, screaming at darkness whether anyone listens or not, but one can also see more than a few of the once maverick poets settled down in old homes in the country, pondering them until the next class begins.
Victor Infante is our Orange County Museletter correspondent. His collection of poems, Learning To Speak, was released by FarStarFire Press in 1999. His previous feature articles for About Poetry are:
Are Poetic Times?,” a commentary on the furor following LA Weekly's fall 1999 review of local poetry.
