The Spoken Word Revolution Redux (A Poetry Speaks Experience) - Hardcover

Eleveld, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1402208693 ISBN 13: 9781402208690

Publisher: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2007

Synopsis

From its earliest days to today, poetry has always been a spoken art. On the page and out loud, poetry is the home for the brilliant, the rebellious, the artists and performers who are changing the world. Today's spoken word revolution is the literary equivalent to grabbing a culture by the collar and shaking it...hard.

In the tradition of The Spoken Word Revolution, Redux brings more of the gripping, moving, innovative, often hilarious poetry in the oral tradition. This redefining collection gathers multiple forms of "spoken word" under the same motley tent-slam, hip-hop, musical interpretations, and youth movements among them. The resulting brew is both satisfying and world-expanding. One audio CD features some of the best poems and poets, immediately live in their own electrifying words and voices.

The Spoken Word Revolution Redux includes:
--Singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley
--Slam Poetry founder Marc Smith
--Ethan Hawke reading Beat Poet Gregory Corso
--Jazz pianist Patricia Barber adapting ee cummings
--Former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Bill Collins and Mark Strand
--Four-time national poetry slam champion Patricia Smith
--Jeff Tweedy of Wilco
--Hip-Hop founder Gil Scott-Heron
--Indy National Poetry Slam Champions, including Mayda da Ville
--Viggo Mortensen and Hank Mortensen
--Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins

About this title

About the Author

Mark Eleveld is editor of The Spoken Word Revolution, the top-selling book on the spoken word poetry movement. He is copublisher at EM Press and a board member of the Midland Authors Society in Chicago. He lives in Joliet, Illinois.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part 2
Café, celebrated in song, story, and The United States of Poetry, which has been both a TV program and a book.
Here, excerpted from the book, is co-editor Bob Holman's characterization of the Slam scene:

Yes, the Poetry Slam, whose very name sends terror to the civilized. The Poetry Slam, those mock Olympics with judges selected randomly from the audience, judges who dare to score the poem between zero ("a poem that should never have been written") and ten ("a poem causing simultaneous orgasm throughout the audience"). But please use the Dewey Decimal System of Slam Scorification-if there's a tie, we must resort to the Dreaded Sudden-Death Spontaneous Haiku Overtime Round! With tongue in cheek (usually), and competition itself competing with irony and hype, the Slams have brought Whitman's "muscular art" [power] upon the ear of the populace. The Slam is now the most potent grass-roots arts movement in the country, existing in over thirty cities, with an annual National Slam that attracts hundreds of poets...More than anything else, at a time when "poetry readings" connoted a beard chained to a podium, a muffled voice, and an airless ear, Slams allowed a generation to attend a poetry reading without saying they were going to a poetry reading.2

Edition details

• Publisher: Sourcebooks MediaFusion
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1402208693
• ISBN 13: 9781402208690
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256