NPS2008: A New Generation Of Poets Speak To The Madison Community

A new generation of local poets confront the ills of society, reflecting the legacy and spirit of social activism experienced in Madison during the 1960s and 70s. With a modern style of spoken word performance, these young voices take their words to poetry slam competitions and aim to be a community’s voice for change.

I’m talking hurricanes, acid rain

Summer in December man,

A pair of melting ice caps

A couple more years and it’s a rap on earth
So we gonna die with heat as the cause

Cause we couldn’t fix the flaws
Couldn’t put it on pause cause

We didn’t want to admit that it existed

Every scientist in the world was giving us warnings

But we pretended like it was a rumor,

Didn’t even humor the idea that they were right.
So instead we set our sights on other things

Like the war in Iraq,

We attack, but Katrina strikes us back.

-Danez Smith, excerpt from “Hotter Than A Bitch Outside”

On December 4, 2007, Danez Smith performed this poem on stage in front of roughly 300 students at the Union Theater on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For poets like Smith, whose performances blend song, acting and crafted verse, the spoken word is vital to their artistic expression. At the National Poetry Slam held this year in Madison, August 3-9, an array of talented poets from across the country will display their lyrical gifts.

“I don’t think there is any other art form where you can truly express yourself like poetry,” says Smith.

Over the years, Madison has had a wealth of poets contributing to a vibrant literary scene. Writers recite their craft at open mics at various venues in the city, such as the evening Avol’s Bookstore hosts each first Thursday of the month. Participants engage audiences with their latest creations, ranging in subjects from snapshots of daily life to overtly political messages.

Young poets like Smith aim to continue this legacy for the city and provide a voice for the community, directed by their concern for social and political issues reminiscent of the urgency the baby boom generation once faced in their youth. The generation of the 1960’s fought for civil rights and against a controversial war in Vietnam, and idealist poets provided words to inspire change. Today, the youth face the imminent danger of global warming and an unending war in Iraq. Despite aesthetic differences in the poetry written between the generations, it remains a constant that some poets provide a voice within the community for social change and activism.

“A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” - Salman Rushdie

Smith’s beginnings in poetry started in his hometown of St. Paul, Minn., with acting in plays that were focused on social justice. The performances called for moments of spoken word poetry, and through this introduction he fell in love with the art. Though the poetry he writes these days is often deals with personal identity, he is always conscious of social issues and lets his words reflect this awareness.

“I’ve always returned to activism. Whenever I write, there’s always some elements of activism in that,” says Smith. “I will write a poem about, and I will actively go out and protest, anything that has to do with human rights.”

Smith’s poem “Hotter Than A Bitch Outside” is a scathing critique of his perceived lack of concern for global warming amongst the nation’s politicians, who “spend more money on missiles than solutions/Who are more concerned about getting dirty money than cleaning up pollution.” His words reflect the dangerous contradiction between the need for immediate environmental reform and the country’s involvement in the Iraq war, a grave concern for today’s youth.

Kelsey VanErt of Minneapolis, 19, is a fellow slam poet at UW-Madison and sees the war in Iraq as a frightening reality for herself and her peers. For her, she says that writing poems for peace “is what I try to do to try and combat the war as much as possible.” She exhibits frustration at the lack of effort made to protest the Iraq war compared to those who lived through the era of the Vietnam War.

“I feel like there’s a lot less people fighting against the war this time, actually getting up and doing something, whereas back then there was a lot of protest,” says VanErt. “I feel like I’m just hearing a lot of people talk about the Iraq war, like ‘oh yeah, it’s sad, it sucks, it’s horrible’, but they don’t really do anything about it.”

Recently, the war touched home for VanErt, as she had an uncle deployed to Iraq.

“He’s forty years old and just started a family eight years ago, and now he is over in Iraq. He had his last baby girl a year ago, so she doesn’t even know him,” she says. “The sad thing about it is as much as I try to research about what’s going on there, I really don’t know.”

Since no one else will…

I’m Ordering a cease fire

I said since no one else will…

Its time for a neighborhood, city, state wide, national, and international Cease fire.

No more shots fired to be heard around the world.

No more shots fired on the coasts

On the equator in either hemisphere

Or anywhere in this sphere…

I’m ordering a cease fire

-Kelsey VanErt, excerpt from “Cease Fire”

Madison poet FJ Bergmann, an employee of Avol’s Bookstore in downtown Madison, grew up in the Vietnam era and sympathizes with the anti-war sentiments displayed by VanErt. She is the poetry editor for Mobius, a local publication that describes itself as the “journal for social change.”

“I don’t think that writing about social and political ills is anything new. That’s something that’s been in place since day one with poetry,” says Bergmann. “It’s hard to write something that brings the tension to poetry that in turn allows poetry to focus attention on issues. But I think poetry, because it’s shorter, more memorable and I hope more emotionally piercing, may affect people more than what they see in the papers or can hopefully infer from what Fox News does and doesn’t say.”

Scholarly readers like Bergmann are often highly critical of overtly political poetry, as she differentiates between well crafted verse and simple social agitation. When writing specifically about a political subject or social issue, she sees the poet possibly losing the artistic merit of the words, instead letting their agenda drive the creation of the poem.

“I think it’s a profound mistake as a poet to say to yourself ‘I want to write a poem against the war.’ I have done that, but it has not happened because I decided that a poem against the war ought to be written,” says Bergmann. “I really detest poetry that is transparently didactic. I think it has to be good poetry first, and then if it does something, that something is going to be affective.”

Ronald Wallace, a poet, professor and co-director of the creative writing program at the UW-Madison, echoes Bergmann’s sentiment about writing poetry strictly in a political sense. Political issues can raise one’s emotions and inspire action, though expressing such strong feelings does not necessarily equate to well written lines.

“It worries me sometimes because I’ll be writing a poem about my granddaughters, or I’ll be writing a poem about my father’s illness, or I’ll be writing a poem about someone’s death and I’ll think ‘well this is important, and it’s important to me. Yes we all are concerned with life and death and generation and things like that, but you know I should really be doing something about the environment and about the war,’” says Wallace. “The danger there is that you start trying to be political and move for social change and there are better ways than poetry to do that.”

“That said,” he adds, “there’s a website called WhyAreWeInIraq.com and I’ve got a poem there because I was moved to say something about the Iraq war.”

the only option in the face of 9/11?
The only option in the face of 9/11
an unnecessary war? Chaos? Thousands dead?
An unnecessary war. Chaos. Thousands dead.
The face of chaos, the only dead option:
thousands in an unnecessary 9/11 war.

-Ronald Wallace, excerpt from “A Paradelle For Donald Rumsfeld”

“To have great poets, there must be great audiences.” - Walt Whitman

As a competitive slam poet, Smith embraces the stage. Slam poetry is a modern hybrid of poetry and performance, with judges offering numerical scores for each participant, which are then tallied to determine winners of the competition. At the slam finals held in Union Hall, host Chinaka Hodge, herself a nationally recognized slam poet, urged the crowd to “applaud the poets, not the score.” Smith easily survived the judges tallies and earned a large audience applause with his passionate and theatrical delivery of words.

“I’m definitely more comfortable on a stage than I am on a page,” says Smith. “When I first started, everything was written for performance.”

Like Smith, VanErt also incorporates stage experience in performing her poetry, a skill that likewise served her well at in front of the judges of the slam competition.

“I’m an actress as well so when I write for slams, I always incorporate a lot of my acting in my poems because I know that performance aspect helps a lot,” says VanErt.

Smith and VanErt are two of fifteen UW-Madison students participating in the First Wave Community Learning Program, a new scholarship program that emphasizes spoken word poetry, stage performance and an identification with hip hop culture. For these two students, hip hop music has greatly affected the style of poetry they write, from rhyming patterns to the rhythm used to perform their poems.

“For those who are my age, it was impossible to grow up and not to be influenced by hip hop. Everything we do is hip hop,” says Smith. “It’s completely impossible to separate yourself from that. No matter what I do, even if I’m talking the most traditional poetry ever, in very pantun style, iambic-pentameter, it’s still going to be hip hop.”

Wallace sees a distinct difference between slam poets and those who write poetry that is in a more traditional, or mainstream, mode. He recognizes the influences of hip hop on this spoken word culture, but he does not see this affecting his students that who have come to learn the traditional styles.

“For me when I’m teaching here, with my students that rarely comes up as a topic,” says Wallace. “Almost none of the students in the program are writing in that mode.”

“There has been, not exactly a prejudice, but a lack of interest in slam poetry and spoken word poetry in the academy,” he says. “I think a lot of spoken word poets like that and don’t want to be sucked into (the academy). But as time goes along that’s starting to blur a little bit, and the academy is starting to welcome poetry of any sort and see that there are different expectations of spoken word than there are for poetry on the page.”

Tom Neale is a local poet and activist who has been in Madison since the mid-1970’s. He is a performer by nature, gigging as a musician in addition to reciting his poetry in front of audiences. He is perhaps best known as “Captain Zero”, a character on the WORT weekday morning radio program, offering listeners weekend weather reports and humor rooted in his radical politics. He also conducted two unsuccessful campaigns for mayor of Madison in 1997 and 1999.

Once a member of the Army during the Vietnam War, Neale was released from service after experiencing severe stress from his moral conflict with the war. He credits the high level of political engagement in his poetry to his relationship to the city’s activist community throughout the 1970’s. During his development as a poet in Madison, Neale attended many open mic readings, which led to his becoming a performance poet in addition to writing for the page. As an activist and poet, speaking before an audience is essential to conveying one’s message.

“I started going to (poetry readings) and started realizing that the larger part of being a poet is getting up in front of others and sharing it out loud,” he says.

The styles of poetry he has seen performed ranges greatly at open mic events.

“What I’ve come across at readings, and I’ve been going to them for about 30 years in Madison now, is that people come in with different sort of takes on it, like some people come in there and its almost like stand-up comedy,” says Neale. “Other people are very traditional poets and read a couple poems that are sestinas or sonnets right out of their notebooks.”

Neale’s subjects range from the political to the spiritual, but his style of writing is more traditional. Amongst the current generation of you poets, Neale describes “a shift in the way the language is used.”

“I think there is a divide, and I don’t mean this in the sense of a chasm or an opposition, but there is sort of a divide in the way language is dealt with by the different generations,” says Neale, “and if you are more than say about 30 years old, you tend to write the more sort of traditional forms of poetry. Then people who are 30 and younger have been deeply influenced by rap and hip hop and the word revolution that has come out of those movements.”

Embedded in that recollection

A fable out of the Whirlwind:

We all pass through parables

In that journey of finding

Ourselves through ourselves.
Each of us carries a story
Resonant with our particular life:

Cinderella or Gilgamesh,

The resurrection,

The return of the prodigal son.

It is the one voice we listen to

In the small hours of our longing

-Tom Neale, excerpt from “Hafiz Near Sleep”

“Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history” - Plato

Young poets like Smith and VanErt who perform their poetry for audiences are a part of an ancient tradition of using verse to speak to their community, whether it be introspective works or raising social issues. The style of poetry they perform may be unique to their generation, but these new voices respect the poetry and activism of the Vietnam era as a source of inspiration.

“I love their generation. You can learn a lot from them,” says Smith. “They lived through a lot more than we did. They lived through the sixties, they lived through the civil rights movement, they lived through crazy wild free love disco seventies. They lived through seeing King get shot.”

“When you hear about the things they lived through and how that personally affected them,” he adds, “it makes you want to aspire to be more active and do more.”

As Smith and VanErt look forward to the upcoming slam competition, Neale sees this new generation of poets as speaking in a similar voice as his own.

“I think that real poetry, poetry that really speaks to people’s dreams, speaks to people’s hearts and deepest feelings,” says Neale, “is always going to be nourishment for people and will always help them engage politically, because sometimes poets are capable of articulating, as specific individuals, the cry of a whole community.”