Taylor Monfort-Eaton

Phone Number: 585-278-4359

Email Address: monfort-eatonjt15@mail.vmi.edu

Date: 9/18/14

Possible Title: Pass Me the Mic! A History of Beat Poetry

Thesis: Slam Poetry is a legitimate art form that should be as widely studied as normal poetry.

Faculty Mentor:

COL Ball

ballgv@mail.vmi.edu

Signature

Reasoning:

I was a rat when I saw my first episode of the now famous Def Poetry Jam, a show that took up and coming young rappers and poets from the streets and put them in front of a live studio audience in New York City. The raw emotion of the poems shocked me. Long gone were the days of poets that talked of summer days and songs of themselves. These poets were telling the truth about their upbringing, bearing their souls on a stage in front of millions of people across the US.

Needless to say, I was hooked. From the moment I saw that first episode, I’ve watched as many as I could find, whenever free time allows me to. I’m in love with the passion, with the drive and intensity of it all. So I want to go back to the beginning. I want to know why this whole thing started. What made someone want to hop up on a stage and scream at hundreds of people? Certainly at the first poetry slam, nothing but personal pride was on the line. I also think that this project is challenging, seeing as I have never taken a formal poetry course, but have been interested in the subject for a few years. Also, I think that this project and it’s end result can be attained because my plan is to include a performance section in which I prove that poetry must be read aloud in order to be understood well.

Overview:

            Poetry has entranced men since long before Shakespearian times. From Beowulf and The Bhagavad Gita to Shel Silverstein and Charles Wright, poetry has remained one of the top ways of artists expressing themselves. For years, basic poetry went the same way: written down into anthologies to be read by countless English students years later in a class they only took for credit. However, in the 1950’s, everything changed. Instead of poets sitting hushed in a coffee house, they were now out on stage, battling each other for lyrical supremacy in front of a jury of their peers. The name given to these rather informal meetings were poetry slams, and they grew in popularity until the mid 1990’s, when a rapper and producer named Russell Simmons invited urban poets from all over the world to perform together in front of a live audience in New York City and millions of people watching across the US on their televisions. The show was an immediate smash success and brought the ability of these poets to the forefront of American pop-culture.

My goal with this project is to look at the ‘why’ of slam poetry. I plan to read up on the history of slam poetry, interview faculty both at VMI and at WNL, and analyze several of the most famous slam poems, and figure out why poets are so drawn to the idea of a poetry slam. I also believe that a poem must be read aloud and heard in order to be fully understood because, in reading a poem, the reader may miss out on many of the intricacies of emotion that the author intended.

Overall, I hope the end game of this project is a 25-minute presentation, that will include a PowerPoint element, handouts, audience participation, and several live readings that I will do. The PowerPoint portion will help me cover the history of slam poetry, as well as give the audience a visual aid while I perform several poems. The handouts will also include the poems, in case the audience would like to play closer attention to the poem’s wording and meaning. Finally, no poetry slam is complete without a little help from the audience, so I plan to use the audience in some of the poems that I do to help set the tone and make it an enjoyable experience for everyone.

I think this project is important because, as I stated earlier, poetry is an integral part of any English curriculum. With all the popularity of poetry, a shockingly low number of schools provide even one class on poetry slams. As the world changes around the subject of poetry, I find it surprising that there are not more studies on the subject of slam poetry. By doing this project, I hope to bring light to this art-form while producing a fun, engaging, and well-researched project. I also think this is important because it incorporates nearly all facets of the English department curriculum. From analyzing works, to research, to a public speaking element, I feel as if my project is a complete review of everything that I have learned while an English major.

Bibliography:

Bauridi, Brigit. “Contemporary “Black?” Performance Poetry.” American Studies 55.4: 715-24. Print.

Gregory, Helen. “Youth Take the Lead: Digital Poetry and the next Generation.” English in Education 47.2 (2013): 118-33. Print

Ingalls, Rebecca. ““Stealing the Air”: The Poet-Citizens of Youth Spoken-Word.” The Journal of Popular Culture 45.1 (2012): 99-117. Print

Weaver, Rebecca. “The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America Somers-Willett Susan B. A. University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor.” Journal of American Ethnic History: 152-54. Print.

Wheeler, Lesley. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008. Print.

Individual Poems:

Flashy Words by Shihan

We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

Knock Knock by Daniel Beatty

Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too by Shel Silverstein

My Southern Heritage by Jason Carney