I think I'm going to end up echoing a couple of things
that me and Loren said.
I want to start off with a quote from someone
who I think is more articulate on this subject than me.
Bob Holman, the poet, plays the Bowery Poetry Club in New York,
and is a great poet and poet impresario.
And Holman says, "In the United States, in this century,
the idea that poetry could exist in or as performance
was so heretical that a whole genre--
the performance art movement of the 1980s--
occurred with no acknowledgment of the poets who had begun it."
It seems that there might be three areas that
seem to be dominant or prominent today in poetry.
One is the fascination with spoken word in our country.
I think it's a relationship with music.
And it's not a new trend, either,
as Holman was pointing out.
When we look at music and poetry-- he has a list here--
the Last Poets, one of the members
of which is from our hometown back in Ohio, Gil Scott-Heron
and the Watts Prophets were all years ago,
in the '60s, doing the same thing a lot of groups
are doing today.
Really doing what hip-hop is doing today,
they were doing with spoken word and music at the time.
And then we're having subsets of music and poetry.
In jazz, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Sekou Sundiata,
and Quincy Troupe.
Some poets out of DC are Kenneth Carroll, DJ Renegade,
Peter Harris, who's from DC but actually lives in California
now.
And then he sort of goes into talking about different poets--
quasi-poets-- that are using rock--
Captain Beefheart, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, David Thomas,
Tom Waits, John Trudell, Maggie Estep.
And he puts Regie Gibson, the former National Poetry Slam
champion, in this category.
I don't think Regie would go with that, though, under rock.
And then he also puts Carl Hancock Rux
under gospel, which I'm sure he wouldn't go for that, either.
But there are these poets who are
able to infuse the music and spoken word, and sort
of bring a marriage to that.
And I think that's been quite attractive
to the American public, and especially
with the advent of hip-hop and its popularity in America
right now.
The other area I would point to would
be the diversity of voices that are showing up
in print nowadays.
I don't think 20 years ago you had
as many African-American, Asian, Latino, Native American, gay,
lesbian poets out there on the bookshelves.
The only problem with that sometimes
is if you go to one of the larger bookstores,
like Borders or Barnes and Noble,
they sort of have this way of ghettoizing
these different genres in the bookstore.
So if you're looking for a specific poet,
what you end up--
you might be looking for me one day--
and I end up in African-American studies or something
next to a book by Shaquille O'Neal or something.
[LAUGHTER]
You know.
And that's just what usually happens.
I've actually seen that happen before.
So that's the one thing that's been the bizarre sort of nature
of the rise of these new voices coming
into the American contemporary poetic scene.
And another thing would be that there's a lot more poetry being
published now.
Poets and Writers about--
I guess it was a few months ago, they
had an article about the number of poetry prizes
that are popping up now.
They said that there are over 1,340 books
published through contests last year.
That's just the ones through contests.
And the bottom line is, as much as I love poetry,
I know that there's not that much good poetry out there
being published.
And so there's probably too much poetry
being published right now, which is
something that, getting into this, I never thought I'd say.
But in the scheme of things, I think that it sort of dilutes
the public appeal or the importance of poetry that's
actually out there that's sort of extending these traditions,
interpreting poetry from other eras.
Getting back to the point one, talking about spoken word--
spoken word is about as new as Homer and Dante.
That was spoken word poetry.
And the idea of meter and rhyme, the musicality of the poem,
was strictly a mnemonic device.
And we're sort of looking at it now
as being something that's new and hip.
Because I guess we've gone through phases where we've gone
away from that with reverse.
And now that we're coming back to it,
it seems like it's something new,
but it's really a very traditional approach to poetry.
And in looking at the musicality of it,
I think it also deals with, in this day and age,
the commercialism of it--
the ability for it to become commercialized in a way that--
in some ways, it could be good.
In other ways, I think it's not so good.
I mean, I think that the public gets a whiff of what poetry is,
and sometimes it's a bad example.
And for them, that's what they're-- this is what poetry
is.
And then if someone who is a real poet comes along-- poets,
yeah, real poet, I'll say that--
comes along, then they'll be considered-- they don't get it.
They're not hip enough for me.
And so when we look at transferring that
from the spoken word down to the page--
we look at somebody like your man,
Kenneth Koch he's been writing forever.
And he's been doing a lot of innovative things
on the page for years.
But if someone came along writing poems
that look like Ken Koch's poems on the page,
and those poems would be considered new.
It'd be like a new trend setting to occur.
And I think there's a lot of that that's going around--
just people who haven't read Mina Loy or Sterling Brown,
or certain people who came decades before, who
were writing innovative work.
They haven't read that, and they come across someone that has--
I love Doris' book about that-- but it's not
necessarily something we haven't seen before.
But it's a fresh approach to it.
I think that's the thing-- we haven't necessarily honored
the extension of traditions.
And I think when we see these works, a lot of them
are extending traditions that have come before.
And I just think those traditions need to be honored.