spoken word isn't real poetry
Oh, how typical of me to write about this. But it seems the question of what is and isn't real art has been coming up lately (you already know how I feel about real hip-hop). Anyway, here's a comment I just responded to from a fan who asked what I felt about his college professor saying that spoken word isn't real poetry. Maybe I'll expand on this one day, when I stop feeling like dryheaving every time I think about professors like that:
Much love Swan! Sorry for the late comment! Anyway, on to the whole "spoken word isn't poetry" thing: The thing about what people consider "real" poetry is that, in the literary world it has become quite elite. Poetry books don't usually sell very well, and oftentimes the only people who buy/read poetry books are other poets. As a result, the only people who are available to critique these books and poems are people who study and write poetry themselves. When this happens, the demographic of the audience is filtered to English majors and MFA's that they think they know what REAL poetry is, and feel entitled to being able to judge it because they've spent years and years studying all the little facets and rules of what "good" poetry is. Then comes spoken word, a medium that takes similar basics but generally focuses more on conveying the message in way that an audience can get instantly and on the spot, and less on the "rules" and formatting. And most of these poets haven't received the "proper" education that "real" poets get. Even youth are doing it...and they're getting larger audiences, selling more books, and receiving broader acclaim than "real" poets. Meanwhile, most "real" poets can't pursue poetry full time because their books aren't selling, so they keep on studying poetry until they can become poetry professors in order to teach people what "real" poetry is, while using the money they make to write another poetry book that only their students and colleagues will buy. I'm not explaining it this way to invalidate academic poetry. I read and appreciate plenty of it. But when it comes to art in general, I feel like the essential thing to remember is that if there's anything to justify its "realness," it's the genuineness of the expression from which it comes. If someone writes a sestina that follows the rules of format perfectly and is perfect under all the academic standards, the dude who wrote it doesn't mean it, I feel like that definitely makes it less "real" than the 9th grader who poured her heart out all over her first freewrite. Yadigg?
-Adriel
After posting this I felt like an asshole for posting a comment that took up half his profile:(
posted by adriel at
10:27 AM
1 Comments:
JEBUS, SUN. I love your thinking/writing/art. College Professors have the tendency to make me sick a lot of the time. Funny that i am working to become one myself... =P
I feel you 9000% in that a child who speaks from their heart and has some misspellings and "bad" grammar is something I'd rather read 12,000,000X more than some academic snob who follows some "poetry canon formula."
You GOES boy.
Keep going,
C+
12:45 PM
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