Bring in da Poetry [Publisher Weekly]

Rap has taken over popular culture; why has poetry been put on the shelf?

by Michael Scharf -- 4/11/2005

In an age of rap—musically, fashionwise, sportswise—the rhymsta rules. Across the country, kids gather on street corners and chant out rhymes; young men and women on the subways recite their own couplets to themselves. It's not called "groovin' " anymore, but the culture is moving to a hip hop beat, and word and rhythm are at the heart of it. Rap rules, and rap is words, words in syncopation. "The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty," as Edgar Allan Poe put it: poetry. So why hasn't poetry's customary medium—books—benefited?

It's not like rap and hip-hop sneaked up on anyone, publishers included. Nearly three decades ago, Grandmaster Flash and Sugarhill Gang were mixing vinyl tracks with a aggressively rhymed verbal braggadocio, and earning raves from the musical literati. In New York, Miguel Algarin started the Nuyorican Poets Café to provide a forum for spoken-word performance.

"In 1978, I knew that hip-hop was poetry," says poet Bob Holman, today a commentator for New York's NPR flagship, WNYC, and proprietor of the East Village's Bowery Poetry Club. "I saw how it moved from one little section in a local record store to the huge industry it is now; I watched as little magazines became big magazines." When the Nuyorican made a broad and successful effort to host poetry slams, Holman got very involved, and worked to push this new poetry to hip-hop levels of popularity. "I tried to find parallels," he says. "And you know what?" Holman asks rhetorically with a wry smile, "there ain't no parallel." Even with Def Poetry Jam—the Broadway show and HBO spinoff—the poetry part never took off. "Hip-hop has crossed over a lot more easily as music than spoken word has as literature."

In terms of publishing, the advent of spoken word has generated a lot of confusion, some mixed messages and a few halting attempts at innovation. Still, performance poets who want to be published in book form face a set of publishing structures built for conventional verse, with no tried-and-true formula for presenting performance-based work. There's no clear format—book? CD? DVD? all three?—and no reliable set of publishers and distributors has yet emerged. Lack of demand and lack of publishing vision present a kind of chicken-egg problem. While Def Poetry Jam made headway, it was not the solution.

Market Remains Def

It was precisely a hip-hop–type crossover that Danny Simmons hoped to engineer with the HBO series and Broadway show drawing on the reputation of one of hip-hop's major impresarios. Simmons kept at his brother Russell for years until the latter relented, and allowed the use of the "Def Jam" brand for Danny's vision of poets as mainstream performers. The results were impressive, but for all of the show's many accomplishments, selling Def Poetry Jam books and discs wasn't one of them.

Def Poetry Jam DVDs have sold "moderately," according to Simmons. And the book, which does not include an audio CD, has done less than that. Says Simmons about the book and DVDs, "I don't think it was a breakout thing because I don't think the marketing was right. I don't think there's been a buzz created." And although he doesn't use the word "afterthought," for Simmons, "the book is largely to commemorate how important it was to spoken word that this happened. There was a Broadway show. It won a Tony Award. It had a good run and a good tour." The book has largely been confined to "poet-heads."

Simmons is still puzzling over what combination of format and style could make a crossover happen. In the meantime, "the book" still matters very much to performance poets, who desperately want to get published, even if only on the scale of conventional poets. "Definitely," says Willie Perdomo, a major performance poet and two-book veteran. "What I first thought of when starting out was getting a book. I remember being six years old, waiting for the new Scholastic books to come in at the library. I wanted to have a book of my own, something that people could hold in their hands. I still feel that way."

Book publication by a major house remains elusive for many performance poets. The assistant editor at a major poetry journal summed up the prevailing attitude: the work "doesn't always hold up" on the page. Holman is more candid: "That's often because, like with most conventional verse, the poem is bad"—and not because the work can't make it in text.

One means of splitting the difference between page and stage has been tipping-in an audio CD. Perdomo's 1995 book from Norton, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, was innovative at the time for its inclusion of a CD, and remains one of the few single-author performance works published by a major house. There have been other tries (Saul Williams, for one), but no breakthroughs.

This Year's Model
Simmons and Holman agree that the old model, tipping in a CD to a "regular" book, has not worked in general. There are exceptions. Sourcebooks Poetry Speaks, featuring recording by canonical poets (all of whom are dead—Tennyson, anyone?) has sold approximately 200,000 units over the last four years. Publisher Dominique Raccah points to the book's information-overload factor as its push factor:"We're doing more than just representing the audio. You can listen to the poet read the poems [on three CDs], read the poems in the book, you can read short biographies of the poets and see their manuscripts. And we have 42 world-famous livings poets writing about these, their predecessors. It's a sense of discovering poetry."

Raccah has tried to duplicate that sense with The Spoken Word Revolution, which sold 30,000 units in hardcover and has just shipped in paper. Its one CD of performances is emceed by slam elder statesman Mark Smith, and the book includes pictures and other performance ephemera. "Creating a vision of the book that includes more than one author and is therefore interesting as a set of voices is integral to this concept. I'm not sure that one voice, unless it's Billy Collins's or Robert Pinsky's, is going to carry you." She points to Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project package (from Norton), which included DVDs of ordinary citizens from across the country reading their favorite poems, as another success story.

It's a formula that so far seems hard to duplicate. For most poetry publishers, the book-CD combination remains little tried, and has met with even less success. "We've done it a couple times, and it doesn't seem to make much difference," says Copper Canyon's Michael Wiegers, but neither does the house publish much performance work. Yet Manic D Press in San Francisco, which publishes mostly slam poets, doesn't do CDs either, alone or with books. "Bookstores don't want to handle CDs, and book distributors don't really handle CDs. So the trade doesn't know what to do with them. And if you package them as part of the book, it's kind of like the bonus that nobody wants," says publisher Jennifer Joseph.

CDs alone do worse. The Academy of American Poets has an acclaimed series of readings available on disc. According to associate director Charles Flowers, the most popular, a reading by Robert Lowell and John Berryman, sells only 75–100 copies a year through AAP's site, which gets "millions" of hits annually.

Holman tried the CD-only approach himself, forming a spoken-word, audio-only label, Mouth Almighty, in the mid-'90s, with the backing of Mercury Records' Danny Goldberg. It didn't last long. Like Simmons, Holman points to serious "marketing problems" in creating demand.

Fly Staples

For conventional poetry, demand and marketing aren't as much of a problem. The traditional publishing route for young, page-based poets is clear: MFA program, close relationship with famous adviser, scattered magazine publications during training, polished full manuscript. Then, on graduating, hopefuls submit contest entries with cover letters from said adviser—or perhaps said adviser is even judging. Poetry programs and presses are often subsidized by universities. Not everyone gets a book, or a job (far from it), but at least the rules are clear.

In the performance world, the main publishing model looks much more like the mix tapes of the hip-hop world, where artists self-produce and self-promote, trading tapes and handmade books through a network of relationships and venues. Most books and CDs by performance poets are bought and sold at the performances themselves—in numbers that rival or surpass those of conventional verse.

Kevin Coval, a Chicago-based slam poet who has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, has done what most performance-based poets do: self-publish. "I work with a designer, so I'm very happy with the results. Other people just bring a few pages down to Kinko's and fly-staple them, and that's their product, which is okay, too." The more tech-savvy burn their own discs and sell both, separately and together.

Perhaps the biggest success story along these lines is Henry Rollins, the former Black Flag frontman who now tours constantly as a spoken-word artist, and heads his own small press, 2.13.61 (Rollins's birth date), that has an elaborate Web site offering everything from books and CDs to T-shirts, posters and DVDs. But for noncelebrities (even underground ones), shows remain the main point of distribution. "The poetry slam in Flagstaff, a pizza place in Sante Fe, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder—we'll hawk our wares anywhere," says Manic D poet Michelle Tea.

Holman has set out to maximize community impact with his Bowery Poetry Club. When the club first opened its doors in the fall 2002, Holman, drawing on his experiences at the Nuyorican, imagined it as a poetry crossroads of the world. Sales of poets' work happens up front, at the coffee bar. But for Holman, the main event remains the poets themselves, live on stage. Publication, for him, means getting more people in the seats.

"The Poem didn't used to be in a book," Holman notes between fast sips of coffee as PW catches up with him for a few minutes at the club. "The Poem used to be talk. And with spoken word or performance poetry or whatever else you want to call this movement, it's happening again. So if you're looking for a market for it, you have to be as inventive as the work. The new model is: 'How do we stretch the medium to be the poem?' It's collaboration in a way that we've never thought of it before."

Class Conscious?

Another collaborative possibility involves beats. Holman, Simmons and others interviewed for the piece all offered versions of the same sentence: "I don't know people who listen to spoken-word CDs"—other than potboilers in the car. Indeed, spoken-word audio—professional readers reading text, whether prose or poetry—are a staple of the suburban commuter and the truck driver, not so much the inner-city denizen driving hip-hop culture. Says Simmons: "People want to hear music. It's just the nature of the thing."

Poets are responding. Some tour with bands, and Simmons points to the illegal mixes of Def Poetry Jam poets with beats that he sometimes gets in the mail ("brilliant") as a possible next step. An event called Def Poetry Plugged-In that Simmons produced at a Brooklyn opera house sold 2,000 seats, and Simmons is having meetings with people from Music Choice (the digital cable company) about doing poetry with music. The funky neo-soul duo Floetry, consisting of Marsha Ambrosius and Natalie Stewart, is putting up respectable numbers at record stores with the backing of DreamWorks. But for the music-averse who want to break in through the doors of conventional verse, another problem remains.

No one interviewed for this piece explicitly used the term "race," but many alluded to the stereotype of performance poetry as subliterate. Books themselves represent a kind of cultural divide.

"What do we think of literacy and illiteracy?" asks Holman. "You can either put your thoughts into print, which means you're civilized, or you can't or won't, which means you're a savage. The theorist Walter Ong said 'literacy breeds colonialism' and that's what we've been living through. Orality is not illiteracy."

It's an issue that the poets themselves have been tackling head-on since the movement's inception. Ripostes to charges of illiteracy run through the work of the Def Poetry Jam poets, and many others (not to mention hip hop itself). A former slam champion, Tracie Morris, who works in both written texts and in performance and has had work in the Whitney Biennial, has made "what I guess is a political choice not to have my sound work presented as text. People always say, 'how do you put that on the page,' and when I say, 'I don't,' there's this uncomfortable silence."

Part of the reason that race does not dominate discussion of the problem, though, is because class also plays a large role. Michelle Tea remains astonished that "I—with my queer, dirty, broke, drunken attitude—could perform, and get my writing published, too." While there is a tradition of the poète maudit in conventional verse, and performance poets are starting to make more campus visits, most in the slam community—without formal means of legitimation for what they do—get left out of the system of publications and hires.

Holman has designed aspects of the Bowery Poetry Club to take full advantage of the slam community's existing modes of commerce. It has full digital audio and video recording facilities, both of which are running a lot of the time, and which will eventually produce instant-reproductions of shows for audience take-home. But "in order to really have the CDs work, they must be treated with as much respect as the book itself. And if that were to start to happen, then publishing might be able to salvage some kind of a hybrid."

iPoems?

This risks seem minimal. Even if it remains the bonus nobody wants, burning a CD and placing it loose in a plastic sleeve at the back of a book costs about 60 cents per unit, according to Ram Devineni, publisher of Rattapallax Books. To have a hard plastic sleeve bound into the book, along with two-color art on the CD itself, costs Devineni $1 per unit for a run of 1,500. That includes everything from pressing the discs to getting them into the sleeves. "It's insanely cheap," says Devineni, who has put CDs in all 13 Rattapallax titles—and who funds the books himself. When asked if he breaks even, he smiles. "Not yet, but Willie's book [Perdomo's second, Smoking Lovely] sold out." Perdomo will have his own imprint, Cypher, at Rattapallax.

Other things have been tried. Several people interviewed for this piece mentioned Gary Hustwit, former head of Incommunicado Press, who, at the height of the tech boom, sold his poetry MP3 archive, mp3lit.com, to Salon.com for $1 million in stock. (The stock is now worth far less, but that doesn't stop poets from grumbling that Hustwit never had the rights in the first place.) One can still imagine, as Brian Fielding at Audible.com does, a kind of iPoems, where myriad poet MP3s would be for sale at 99 cents a shot. It's still in the planning stages, but there are several free MP3 sites, including Ubuweb, Duration and Slought.

For the time being, the old formats persist. Kevin Coval, now negotiating to get his first book published, is insisting on a CD. He imagines "some kid on the train popping in my disc, and pulling the book out of his back pocket to follow along. For me, the two things are inseparable."