Chicago’s performance poetry scene has been dominated by poetry slams for the past 20 years. Founded in 1985 at Chicago’s famous jazz venue, the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, poetry slams are lively, often theatrical competitions between performance poets vying for the title of “Slam Champion” and, in Green Mill’s case, a batch of brownies. HBO picked up on the poetry trend and aired Def Poetry Jam in 2001, showcasing many top performance poets from all backgrounds. While poetry slams for children and teenagers have grown in popularity in Great Britain, they remain mostly an event for adults in the United States. Nearly all slams are held in bars or jazz clubs, excluding poets under 21 from even being able to attend.
But now, in response to the popularity of poetry slams, performance poetry is increasingly reaching a younger audience.
“Poetry started out as performance,” says X.J. Kennedy, winner of the prestigious 2004 Poets’ Prize. “Before there were books, The Odyssey and The Iliad were recited, and Beowulf may have been chanted in drinking halls. So really, performance poets go back to an ancient tradition.”
Kennedy, who refers to adults as “big people,” has been writing books of poetry since 1961, and the first of his 20 children’s poetry books was published in 1975. On Dec. 11, Kennedy will perform his poems for children at “Poetry Speaks for Children,” alongside Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez at the Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St. Giovanni and Sanchez are both renowned poets esteemed for their animated performances. Giovanni, winner of numerous prestigious poetry awards, has written six illustrated books for children. Sanchez is a poet and playwright who often writes about black culture. She was also featured on Jazz Poetry Kafe, a spoken-word album.
“Removing Hierarchy”
“You ham up your performances for kids,” Kennedy says. “Kids are not drama critics.” No theatrical experience is required – as long as the performer is willing to pull out all the stops. He admits he enjoys reading poetry to children more than he does to adults. “They are a great audience,” he says. “They’ll show you their boredom if they’re bored and their pleasure if they’re pleased.”
He says he believes it’s essential to excite children about poetry. “Little kids usually have no prejudice against poetry,” he says. “I think it’s very good to expose them to the stuff and to get them to realize that it’s enjoyable before they get older and begin to doubt they want anything to do with it.”
Daniel Custodio, program director for Mindrap, agrees it’s important to hook kids early. “Poetry has a stigma – we talk about sonnets and Shakespeare – that’s hard to sell,” he says. “But if you show the connection between poetry and hip-hop, kids will understand it better.”
Mindrap is an after-school program for enthusiastic high school students in Chicago. It trains students in the aspects of songwriting – poetry, storytelling, rhythm and performance. Based at the University of Illinois-Chicago, the program teaches how to create hip-hop while emphasizing cultural heritage. Then the students use what they’ve learned to write hip-hop songs and create multimedia projects to help teach third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students about math and science. “It’s intergenerational learning,” Custodio says. “It’s about removing hierarchy from the classroom.” The students record their songs with professional recording equipment, producing rap albums about prime numbers, as well as Venn diagrams and graphs imbued with facts about African history and encouragement to work hard in school. Custodio says the program recently received a $350,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to be disbursed over five years.
Melanie West, Mindrap’s production director, says the program enhances students’ writing skills while teaching about culturally relevant history. “Rap is poetry,” she says. “(Mindrap) gives students pride in their ancestors and self-esteem.”
Literary Learning
Learning to write and perform can also boost a student’s confidence. Mindrap prods its participants to share their work with others. Custodio says standing in front of an audience “is very liberating. A lot of (people) are shy and nervous when they get up there, but it’s a really good feeling if you say something personal and then you see people relating to you. Especially at that age, where you feel awkward and isolated.”
Communication junior Naliaka Wakhisi is Mindrap’s storytelling instructor. She says the program is rewarding for the students in many ways. “Our job is to inspire (the students) to make a story about math,” she says. “Because it’s so challenging, it forces them to pay a lot of attention to what they’re doing, which by default makes them learn.”
Wakhisi says she has been writing and performing poetry since high school, and she has been teaching since she was 15 years old through Breakthrough Collaborative, a national program where motivated young adults become teachers for younger minority students. Wakhisi says the point of the program is to have students teaching students in nontraditional ways, because the standard way of instructing doesn’t motivate students to learn. “I’ve always used performance, movement and poetry in teaching,” she says. “I can’t imagine teaching without some sort of performance aspect because it’s so hands on. When students say things out loud, it helps them learn.”
Mindrap’s organizers hope to establish a chapter in New York City. Custodio says the program also has an eventual goal of “creating an online collaborative community where kids can go and download different beats to create music.” It will be an educational resource with recordings of students’ work that teachers can use in their classrooms.
Like Mindrap, Poetry Alive! battles the stereotype of poetry as antiquated, inaccessible verse. “Our overall goal is to popularize poetry,” says Bob Falls, owner of Poetry Alive! “We want to take it off the museum shelf and connect it with people.”
Poetry Alive!, based in Asheville, NC., was founded in 1984. Its five two-member teams travel the country, giving approximately 2,500 performances a year of several different shows that target the specific age range of the audience. They perform at schools, libraries and conventions for about 600,000 students a year – reaching a wider audience than any other outlet for poetry, Falls says.
He says taking a theatrical approach to poetry makes it more accessible to the public, especially children. It allows people to actually see the thoughts and emotions embedded in the poetry.
“The show becomes a model for approach in the classroom,” he says. When Poetry Alive! visits a school, it offers workshops for teachers, giving advice on how to stage a poem. Falls says staging poetry helps make analysis of the work become more tangible to students.
Poetry Alive!’s shows are interactive and require audience participation. “When teachers call asking what they need to provide for a performance, we tell them, ‘All we need are two chairs and kids,'” Falls says.
Performance poetry is entertainment for children – they delight in the humor, changes of emotion and outlandish gesticulations. But at the same time, they also are learning.
“Poetry makes children more conscious of words and the weight of language,” says Kennedy, who often visits elementary schools. But he explains that there’s often a difference between the quality of poetry written to be published and that written to be performed. “Some wonderful things are coming out of (the performance poetry movement),” he says. “Yet if you read a written slam poem, some of the poetry evaporates on the page because the words aren’t good enough. It’s plenty good enough for an audience.” He says it’s important that poets finely craft their words so their poems are successful when both spoken and written, especially when exposing children to them.
Young Chicago Authors is a 14-year-ol
d organization offering creative writing opportunities to young people. YCA works with 2,500 teens a year through its student publications, workshops and performance programs. Every Tuesday evening from 6 to 9 p.m., it sponsors an all-ages poetry or songwriting workshop and open mike night at Blackwater Cafe, 1741 N. Western Ave. Every spring, YCA presents “Louder Than a Bomb,” a festival including a poetry slam for about 350 13- to 19-year-olds. Slammers compete in teams of four to six people and can only perform poetry they have written. Each poet’s performance cannot exceed three minutes, and no profanity or explicit content is allowed.
Many advocates of performance poetry are cautious of the idea of poetry slams for young adults because of the overt competitiveness that can overshadow the poetry itself. Poetry slams use audience members as judges, who hold up scorecards for each poet, grading them on a 10-point scale. Having one’s work compared and judged against others’ can be intimidating. Yet with young people’s growing interest in slamming, it seems that many kids are willing to risk being vulnerable to participate in this verbal sport.
“I’ve seen attempts (at exposing kids to performance poetry) be extremely successful,” Kennedy says. “I think it can do nothing but good.”4
Music junior Heather Gross is a PLAY assistant editor. She can be reached at [email protected].
