Politics of poetry. (Culture).

"I wonder what all the conservative or right-wing poets are doing these days?" asks Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles poet and author of the award-winning Bath water Wine and Mercurochrome, who has been writing and performing for 30 years.

Whether poets perform and publish or choose to do one of the two, those who align themselves with the struggles of their communities are continually tested in a capitalist system that commodities what all artists and writers create. A poet who talks generally about conservation may get significantly more attention from larger, whiter audiences than a poet who examines environmental racism and tells stories about the lack of universal health care for victims of intentionally polluted communities. Deciding what stories to tell is a political choice.

"I think what has happened, especially with things such as the recent Def Poetry Jam, is an emphasis on what works commercially by producers who have the connections and the money to mount television programs, films, and Broadway type productions," says Kalamu ya Salaam, writer/publisher of Runagate Press.

McDonald's and Chrysler have already used poets as copywriters and voiceovers for their products. It is an interesting comparison that black poets were asked to write jingles rather than be interviewed on Nightline about poetry like white Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.

"As dictated by those who control the music business, the only time relevant messages get through is when it is felt that they can be exploited for financial gain, or in the effort to capitalize off a fluke or subcultural phenomenon, something that's fad-driven and, like hip-hop, emerges without anyone's control," Coleman said.

Salaam also made note of how black films such as Love Jones and Poetic Justice have utilized poetry. "The point is that those who have done the most to popularize performance poetry are not poets in the main," he says. "As the popularity increases, we will see more and mote non-poets performing poetry, more and more experienced actors for whom performance is their profession."

This professionalization also raises serious questions for the content of the work.

"The more the artists of spoken word receive endorsement deals from designers and beverage manufacturers and car companies, the less likely they will be to ask questions like, 'Were these clothes made with non-sweatshop labor? What are the investment practices of this beverage company? How does this multinational conglomerate affect the way people live around the world?"' says Tyehimba Jess, a longtime Chicago educator and activist against police brutality.

Jess, also a member of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill-Chicago slam reams, is influenced by the persona poems of multiple-slam champ Patricia Smith, but slam poetry's present focus differs from the style favored by Smith and Jess.

"Although performance poets like Pat Smith were successful in slam in their day, it is questionable whether they would win slams today, due to the differing expectations in style and delivery from a younger audience that is steeped in hip-hop," Jess says. "This audience is used to a faster delivery, fewer pauses, and expects more rhyme these days than before."

The mainstreaming of spoken word plays out much like in hip-hop, says poet Walidah Imarisha, a co-editor of the anthology Another World is Possible. "Lots of brown folks getting publicity, but behind the scenes it's still white folks setting the rules," she says. "In hip-hop, you don't see a lot of women. You see more in spoken word because poetry is historically considered a 'woman thang,' but I think since the popular type of spoken word now is so closely tied to hip-hop, it's much more alienating to womens voices.

Despite the pressures of commercialization, many writers still find ways to merge their politics and poetry while documenting the stories of their communities. Luis Rodriguez writes, lectures, and runs Tia Chucha Cafe as an outlet for community artwork in Los Angeles. Walidah Imarisha is working in Philly with the Blackout Arts Collective, where they are planning the Lyrics on Lockdown tour, in which the collective performs in prisons and coordinates political organizing and artistic efforts with other organizations.

"Writing political poems is no substitute for being an active part of a political movement," says Kalamu ya Salaam. "Creating revolutionary art is only part of our struggle."

RELATED ARTICLE

Blues Sestina

by Tyehimba Jess

I hear the blood of muled men
Sing sweetback in my veins,
Through ghettoed doors that swing funk
Into shine of gold toothed laughing
Blues stomping piano into boogie;
Seeking to kneel us, shaken, under its blast.

But how to kneel royalty down
From blood musically muscled as
This unending blues? All the guts of it
Sing a ballad stuffed with ghetto stink
That glows a sweated summer shine
Sneakin out of lust's rusty back door.

Doors dented and dogged, dingy as Dolemite's
Rusted knees that never knew the word kneel,
As unbroken as Shine's final "Fuck You,"
His blood spraypainting bulletholed concrete
Leaving all his women to sing themselves sick
In beer, barbiturates, and barrelhouse blues--

Not the Louis Jordan Swing but gutbucket blues,
The kind with dark black Cadillac hearse suicide
doors
That sings the metal/rubber/flashing light dirge
When the sun kneels low enough to kiss
A horizon of all the bloods gathered 'round
gravesite,
Last glint of dusk's shine splintering off
golden casket handle.

When I hear this crushed up love shine
Through the punch drunk siren of blues,
My blood rises and seeks the scintillated voice
Of that lover I left behind closed door,
The one that taught my back and tongue to kneel
So I could hear her sing my name at midnight.

And now, empty palmed, I sing of loss,
How it shines on the ghost of all she left behind,
How the church couldn't fix it, so now I kneel
In this bar, the guitar's sweet violence bluing me
down
To a whimper of a man locked in the doors of his past
past
Waiting for his blood to settle and slow.

This is the blood that calls me to sing
Of abandoned back door dreams, their faded shine
That wans into blues, kneels a hard man down to
love.
Cross-fire

by Staceyann Chin

Am I a feminist or a womanist
the student wants to know
definitions and affiliations are important to
her

She loathes the new age revolutionary
    unable to claim a cause
she listens
uncomfortable
asks again
am I a top or a bottom
do I do men occasionally
primarily am I a lesbian
and if so how is it exactly that I DO women

Tongue tied up to my cheek
I attempt to respond with honesty-
      This business of dykery
      I tell her
is often messy
you never quite know what you're getting
--girls who are only straight at night
--hardcore butches who sport dresses
between nine and six
during the day
maybe she is really a he
trapped by the limitations of our
imagination

Primarily
I am concerned about young women
who are raped on college campuses
in cars
after poetry readings in bars

In New York City
a girl is beaten every 12 seconds by her
lover
bruised lip and broken heart
you will forgive her if she does not come
forward with the truth immediately

when she does she will stand trial as
damaged goods

Everyone will say she asked for it
dressed as she was she must have wanted it
short skirt could only mean that she wanted
it

The words will knock about in her head
horny bitch
slut
harlot
tease
loose woman
some people cannot handle a women on
the loose
noose around her body
they look for inscriptions on her collar
     wonder why she's wearing cargo pants
     and pearls
     wonder how big that dick is under her
     skirt

Not strapped with that kind of courage
I leave my electric pink dildo in my room
when I come out I'll invite you to bring
yours when you come over
risk the drama of collaboration
a little bit of everything makes my world an
interesting place
--and while we're on the subject of
diversity
ASIA IS NOT ONE BIG RACE!
--and there is no country called "the
islands"
--and no I am not from there

There are a hundred ways
to slip between the cracks of your
assumptions
and other peoples interpretations of race
and religion
most people are surprised my father is
Chinese
like there's a preconditioned look for the
half-Chinese
lesbian poet who is also Jamaican but lives
in Far Rockaway Queens
let's keep it real, says the boy in the double
X hooded sweatshirt
that blond haired blue eyed Jesus in the
Vatican ain't right
that mother fucker was Jewish, not white

Christ was a Middle Eastern Rastaman
He ate grapes in the company of prostitutes
and drank wine more than he drank water
born of the spirit the disciples loved him in
the flesh
but the discourse is not on people who
identify as gay
or lesbian or straight

The State needs us to be left or right
those in the middle get caught in the cross-
fire away at the other sid

If you are not for us you must be against us

People get scared enough they pick a team
everything is about declarations
nothing of independence
in America you could get capped for
speaking out against a policy
designed to remove the legs from small
Afghanistan children

Quick!
America under attack
do your part and shop

The directive is on every channel
the president has spoken and now we must
all act with
patriotic conscience

I say God is that place between belief and
what you name it
I believe holy is what you do when there is
nothing between your actions
and the truth

The truth is I am afraid to draw black lines
around me
I am not always pale in the middle
I come in too many flavors for one single
spoon

I am never one thing or the other
at night I am everything I fear
tears and sorrow
black windows and bad dreams
in the morning
I am nothing I cannot handle
rain and laughter and footprints
my mothers pain is borderless
without breath or definition
I claim the dawn
for yesterday is simply what I was
and tomorrow today will be gone

Tara Betts teaches performance poetry and has published her work in Poetry Slam, That Takes Ovaries!, and These Hands I Know.