Carly Laird

Professor Matthew Roth

Contemporary American Poetry ENGL 340B 01
May 11, 2015
Writing for the Modern Audience
Upon hearing the word poetry, most people immediately think of it in a traditional
sense; poets like Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, or Shakespeare come to mind. People
imagine emotional or intellectual expression in lines and stanzas, distinct rhyme schemes, or
rhythms. They think poetry should be written down or read in melodramatic tones by a cultured
highbrow for a crowd of equally cultured sophisticates.
In recent years, what is considered poetry has shifted and become difficult to define.
Now, poetry can include everything from whole books written in poetic verse to a few words
underlined within a newspaper column. New genressuch as prose poetry, elliptical poetry, and
language poetryhave developed and done away with definable forms, themes, and subjects.
Despite these somewhat unconventional changes, those outside the close circle of poets and
poetry critics rarely consider glancing at a poem. The everyday American shrinks away from
small books of poetry, instead reaching for the gripping, boldly titled novels that sit on the BestSellers shelfand contemporary poets are considered lucky if their work is read within one or
two college classrooms. The public's growing disinterest for poetry is not the fault of the poet or
the reader. Rather, it is a product of a change in the mindset and language of the listeners, and it
can only be remedied if poets learn how identify and speak to this new audience.
Poetry began to disappear from the public in the nineteenth century, when the increasing
difficulty of poetry started to confound and frustrate everyday readers, causing them to turn their

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backs and leave it for the academics to decipher. It was around this time, in August of 1988, that
critic Joseph Epstein published an article titled Who Killed Poetry? in Commentary Magazine,
in which he describes the trend of poetry being pushed away by the general public and becoming
trapped in an audience that was mostly limited to poets and critics. Poetry lost its ability to create
wonder and no longer had what Epstein stated was once a religious following. This following
began dwindling during the 1950s, when poets such as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert
Frost, William Carlos Williams, and E. E. Cummings, though still writing, had their best work
behind them (Epstein 13).
What made these poets different from the rising poets of the 1950s and on was their
accessibility. Their work was not overly complicated and, in general, the common reader could
very well understand and relate to it. They could find the truth in Roberts Frosts The Road Not
Taken, smile at the dark humor in T. S. Eliots Portrait of a Lady, and appreciate the
intriguing simplicity of William Carlos Williams Poem (As the cat). None of these poets,
though they came from different occupations and wrote in a variety of styles, would have been
considered academic to their contemporary audiences (Epstein 13). In contrast, modern poets
created work that was increasingly difficult for those outside of the academia to grasp and
[m]odern poetry, with the advance of modernism, had become an art for the happy few, and the
happy few, it must be said, are rarely happier than when they are even fewer (Epstein 13).
Contemporary writers attitude has caused poetry to exist in what Epstein calls a kind of
vacuum (14), in which poetry is mostly read publicly to other poets and privately by other
poets.
In response to Epsteins article, poet-critic Dana Gioia published Can Poetry Matter? in
1991. In this article, he expanded on the idea of poetry moving away from the eyes of the public

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and into the closed circle of academic poets. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has
lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture (Gioia Can Poetry Matter?). In
recent years, this diminishment in confidence caused poetry to lose its ability to speak to a broad
audience. Gioia describes how poets begin to doubt that their work matters to contemporary
society and, consequently, most contemporary poets, knowing they are virtually invisible in the
larger culture, focus on the more intimate forms of lyric and meditative verse (Gioia Can
Poetry Matter?). Today, poetry moves more and more inward, shutting out the large audience of
the general public. In order to put a halt to this trend and once again gain the favor and attention
of the everyday man, poets must first understand the audience with which they are dealing.
In America, this audience is a diverse collection of students and adults, both young and
old, who come from a range of ethnic backgrounds and social classes, and who are rarely
interested in the practice of studying verse. As Latino spoken word artist Denice Frohman said in
her poem Weapons, they think poetry is what old white people do (see Appendix).
Contemporary poetry must respond to an audience that has a false view of poetryone that sees
it as a pretentious and overly complicated art form that thinks itself too good for them, a view
often brought on from their memories of analyzing it in their high school English classes; here,
they were taught that poetry must be read as a series of embellished sentences spliced into lines
and stanzas written in specific rhythms and rhyme schemes that somehow meant something to
the author. Students read the classic works of Tennyson, Blake, Wordsworth, and Byron and are
forced to tease and beat out the deeper meanings through prosody and close reads. Eventually,
this treatment causes them to abhor poetry; they no longer find meaning in it. Mark A. Neville, in
his 1958 essay titled Who Killed Poetry?, (possibly an inspiration for Epsteins article)
describes the monotony that the teaching of poetry had become even then:

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An authors style was copied; grammatical construction of sentences was
analyzed; allusions were traced with single-minded intensity; biographies of
authors were investigated (to the everlasting harm of the author and the increasing
apathy of the student); words, phrases, and sentences were studied as exercises in
understanding the meaning of style. (135)
While necessary to an extent and interesting to an audience of literary scholars or poets, this sort
of analysis does not aid in instilling an appreciation of poetry to the younger generation. Looking
at poetry in only this way inhibits young readers from seeing the poet as the living creator of the
poemsomeone who had a plan and purpose for their workand often prevents the audience
from relating to the work on a more personal level. How can they be expected to be interested in
modern poetry with this sort of mentality thrust upon them?
Another characteristic of the modern audience is their unique language and style of
communication. Language constantly evolves, and this evolution has become faster and more
drastic with the rising popularity of social media and text language. In both written and spoken
conversation, words are shorter; slang and mispronunciations are becoming more prevalent. It is
rare to hear someone use scholarly, formal words or sentence structures in everyday speech.
Many writers and literature fanatics lament what they believe is the deterioration of language due
to what they see as laziness and apathy among youth. Journalist and author Edwin Newman
wrote in 1974 that America would be the death of English stating, due to a rise in slang and
informality, [most] conversation these days is as pleasing to the ear as a Flash-Frozen Wonder
Dinner is to the palate (3-4). However, shifts in speech and language are not new, nor are
they negative.

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Language has been changing and evolving ever since the first words were spoken, and
poets have been trying to respond to these changes for centuries. As time goes on, speech
patterns change. Words become outdated and new ones take their place. However, language
never loses connection with its genesis; words, phrases and genres are linked to their past,
current, and future uses, and their meanings can be understood only through acknowledging
these links (Akkaya 289). Even though everyday speech and colloquialisms may change, they
still contain echoes of the past. But a writer must recognize these changes in their audience and
respond to them if they hope to maintain communication with them. This is exactly what
Wordsworth was doing when he asked, What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And
what language is to be expected from him? (Wordsworth 71). Poets must constantly ask
questions about their audience and actively reach out to them through their language. On the
most fundamental level, a poet is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more
lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human
nature, and a more comprehensive sole, than are supposed to be common among mankind
(Wordsworth 71)1. This knowledge must be used to recapture the attention of the modern
audience.
There have been several movements in the past that broke away from formal poetry and
tried to do just that. The first of these movements began in the late 1950s and early 1960s with
a group of poets that included [r]ebels in San Francisco, in New York City, and in North
Carolina [who] translated poetry from French and Spanish, wrote tiny songlike poems or
enormous ambitious ones rather than midsize controlled formal work, and published in obscure
magazines they ran themselves rather than in well-established ones tied to academia (Burt).

1 Of course "woman" and "women" can be substituted into this definition as well.

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This movement also marked the beginning of a generation of poets called the Beats. Among
these poets were Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Frank OHara, whose work was first made
public in Donald Allens The New American Poetry in 1960 (Burt). Their poetry held themes of
personal and spiritual liberation written in disjointed, rambling lines that were often absent of
form (Watson 5). This style can be seen in Allen Ginsbergs poem Howl, which begins:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynmo in the machinery of night. (Ginsberg 126)
The Beats utilized poetry to explore their lives and both the internal forcessuch as their
spirituality, beliefs, and sexualityand the external forcessuch as their society, experiences,
and personal interactionsthat influenced them. They tried to develop a poetics of voicethe
literal presence of the poet in his words (Foster 193). The countercultural movement of the
1960s gained much of its agency and influence through the words and works of these poets.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the Beat generation was beginning to fade as a new group of
poets attacked their idea of the poetics of voice, turning instead to the poetics of language and
linguistics. This second movement was led by the language poetswho took their name from
the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which ran from 1978 to 1981 (Burt)and who were
heavily influenced by the works of William Carlos Williams and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as
their contemporary, John Ashbery. They were a fairly small group of writerssome of whom
included Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Berstein, and Barrett Wattenwho followed

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Ashberys idea of making poetry difficult once again. These poets focused on the sound and
function of language and everyday speech; their poetry often held no sort of narrative or theme,
as they believed narrativity limited the experience of the reader (Shetley 140). They explored
specific words and phrases, juxtaposing them in ways that forced their readers to think of how
they related as individual units, rather than whether they made sense together. Barrett Wattens
poem Natura Morta presents a more extreme example of this:
winter
window
*
l express
*
specimen
specie
specific
spectacular
*
spectacular

ornate (Watten 13).

The poem contains little sense, but the words play off of one another, interacting through their
sounds and meanings. While some language poetry contains a bit more meaning than Watten's
poem, this sort of nonsensical wordplay is common.

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Though both the Beats and the language poets did see some success and actively broke
away from the strict, formal style of earlier poetry, they did not solve the problem of poetrys
diminishing audience. Many of them won prizes and were admired by poets and poetry critics,
but everyday American readers did not buy their books and, as the 1980s came, these readers
were still buying less and less poetry (Burt). There were several movements that tried to remedy
this, such as the New Formalistswho tried to again make poetry easier to understandand the
Elliptical Poetswho made poetry more conversational while still challenging their readers
but their poetry was nevertheless trapped within the circle of other poets, where todays modern
poetry has, for the most part, stayed. However, a new movement, which began in the late 1980s,
is beginning to change this.
It was around this time that poet Marc Smith brought poetry to a new venue that moved it
directly into the face of its disinterested modern audience. Smith and several other local artists
began an experiment where they read poetry and participated in musical experimentation and
performance art at local, blue-collar bars in Chicago rather than in the normal, academic venues
of colleges or recital halls that consisted of poets reading to other poets (Somers-Willett 3). In
these bars, where the audience mainly made up of working-class citizens trying to watch the
game on the bars television, Smith and his fellow poets performed poetry that spoke to them.
These poets would parade around the stage, pointing and yelling at the audience. They would
walk into the crowd and use its members as characters in whatever story or message their poems
conveyed. Smith demonstrates this in the performance of his poem Money, in which he forces
a man in the audience to stand and then characterizes him as Richard Cory, a rich man named in
Edwin Arlington Robinsons poem Richard Cory, which Smith quotes in his performance (see
Appendix). These readings created a scene that performance artist Jean Howard described as

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barely controlled chaos in an audience of Joe six-packs (Somers-Willett 3). Eventually, in
1986, Smith turned the readings into a competition held at The Green Mill Bar in Chicago, where
the audience would listen to performers and give them a numerical score. This occurred every
Sunday night and became known as the Uptown Poetry Slam, which marked the beginning of the
slam poetry movement and "appeared to be a tailor-made solution to Epstein's and Gioia's
trouble with contemporary poetry" (Somers-Willett 6).
Eventually, slam poetry grabbed the attention of poets outside of Smiths troupe at the
small Chicago bars. Other slam venues opened in cities around America and the first National
Poet Slam was held in 1990 and featured poets from New York and San Francisco. Over the
years, the audience and participants of slam readings continued to grow as [s]lam poets
frustration over the academic monopoly on poetry readings and the attending highbrow airs of
these events helped fuel a rowdy, countercultural atmosphere at slams, one that persists at many
venues today (Somers-Willett 4). While slam poetry continues to gain in popularity, other forms
of modern poetry shrink further away from the modern audience. What is slam poetry doing that
modern poetry is not? It is speaking to the everyday people.
Slam poetry was established on the tenets that the audience is not obligated to listen to
the poet, that the poet should compel the audience to listen to him or her, that anyone may judge
a competition, and that the competition should be open to all people and all forms of poetry
(Somers-Willett 5). While many poetry reading are one-sided, slam poetry interacts with the
audience and directly involves them in performances. It does not try to outsmart its listeners and
instead focuses on relating to them through universal themes that are as diverse as their audience.
Slam demonstrates an openness to all people and types of poetry [which] suggests a specific
political inquiry in its practice, one that slam poets make explicit in their work about identity: a

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challenge to the relative lack of diversity they feel is represented in the academy, the canon, and
the dominant culture (Somers-Willett 6-7). The diversity that slam poets incorporate in their
work celebrates finding identity and power in minority groups. While there are many modern
poetssuch as Alice Notley, Richard Siken, and Alice Walkerwhose work also speaks to
minority groups, their work is not presented in a way that captures the everyday man or woman.
It remains hidden between the covers of their books and rarely read aloud to those outside the
academia. In contrast, slam poetry is presented to the public in a loud, flamboyant form that
cannot be ignored. To their audience, slam poets become activists speaking on behalf of all
marginalized racial, sexual, and gender groups. Their poems effectively slam societal prejudices
such as sexism, racism, and homophobia as well as oppressive institutions such as the
government, the educational system, and society as a whole in a form more powerful than words
on a page.
When a slam poet performs, they are the embodiment of their poem. They control its
emphasis, pronunciation, and tone, an advantage that poets whose work is only written do not
have. Belissa Escobedo, Rhiannon McGavin, and Zariya Allen, three young girls who competed
in the Brave New Voices slam competitionwhich consists solely of teenagersdemonstrate
this ability in their poem Somewhere in America (see Appendix). Their poem highlights nearly
every prejudice that exists in American society. The three girls alternate between speaking the
lines individually and as a group in order to create emphasis and authority:
Nw smewhee n mrc thee s chld hldng cp f Ctchr n th
Re nd thre s chld hldng gn. Bt nl ne f thse thngs hve ben
bnned b thir stte gvrnmnt nd t's nt th ne tht cn rp throgh flsh.

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t's th ne tht sys "F' Yu" n mre pgs thn ne. ("Somewhere in
America")2
The girl's utilize the repetition of the line "now somewhere in America," which echoes the
language of patriotic odes to the country's beauty and perfection, such as can be seen in
"America the Beautiful" and "God Bless America." However, rather than praising their country,
they reveal all of its flaws, those that exist both due to the government's policies and due to
society's attitude. Throughout their performance, Escobedo, McGavin, and Allen tear down the
positive view many people hold of America, where progress is "n th bnes f th Hspnics,
n th bnes f th slves, n th bnes f th Ntve mrcns, n th bnes f thse wh
fught jst t spak" ("Somewhere in America"), an idea that reflects the disenchantment many
Americansparticular those from diverse backgroundsfeel toward their country. The poem's
informal language combined with its controversial subject matter and the manner in which it is
performed exemplify why slam is so success in engaging its audience.
When examining this success, the question becomes, can it be shared with modern poets?
Currently, there is a rift between slam poets and academic poets. The academic poets see slam as
a lesser form of poetry (some do not even consider it to be poetry at all) while the slam poets
view academic poetry in a way similar to that of the modern audience: it seems pretentious and
unnecessarily difficult. What is needed in order to save the future of poetry is fluidity between
these two groups. This is not to say that academic poets must become slam poets, completely
abandoning their forms and poetry books for theatrical readings in bars. However, stepping
outside of the academia for a moment and practicing their work in a more unconventional setting

2 For all excerpts from this poem, treat accents as inflection marks. Bolded words indicate
phrases all three poets spoke in unison. As slam poetry is meant to be heard and not read, refer to
link in Appendix for the actual performance, a far more accurate portrayal of these lines.

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could give them the insight into their audience that they need. Some poets have utilized this sort
of practice to gain success both within written work and stage performances. Called "crossovers
poets," these artists "trouble the existing lines between poetry's elite and popular audiences, text
and performance, form and free verse" (Somers-Willett 135). In doing so, they are speaking to
their full audiencenot simply for the part of it that exists in either the academic or slam
worldand bringing poetry back into a position where it can once again be admired and create
inspiration. If all poets practice this, they will not need to worry about the death of poetry.
Poetry can matter to today's society. But poets must have confidence in this possibility
and work toward it by remembering how to write for the modern audience. As the language and
attitude of the audience changes, so too should the language and attitude of the poet. Poets,
though they sometimes like to separate themselves from the masses, must remember that they
too are part of the people and have the power to speak to and influence them. They only have to
reach out to their audience and let it into their circle once again.

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Appendix

1.

Denice Frohman, Weapons, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy8DknlWRk8

2.

Marc Smith, Money, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOcdwIxXg6I&list=PL4J8a-

po4p4qlnJbJ2_HXsMUu0mv7KmeH&index=20
3.

Belissa Escobedo, Rhiannon McGavin, and Zariya Allen, Somewhere in America,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OadZpUJv8Eg

For more examples of slam poetry performances, search Button Poetry on

http://www.youtube.com

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Works Cited

Akkaya, Aslihan. Language, Discrouce, and New Medoa: A Linguistic Anthropological

Perspective. Language and Linguistics Compass 8.7 (2014): 285-300. Web. 27 April
2015.
Epstein, Joseph. Who Killed Poetry? Commentary. Commentary Mag., 1 Aug. 1988. Web. 25
April 2015.
Escobedo, Belissa, Rhiannon McGavin, and Zariya Allen. "BNV14 Finals - Los Angeles
'Somewhere in America.'" Youtube. Youtube, 25 Jul. 2014. Web.
Foster, Edward. Understanding the Beats. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992.
Print.
Frohman, Denice. "Denice Frohman - 'Weapons' (WoWPS 2013)." Online video clip. Youtube.
Youtube, 23, Mar. 2013. Web.
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl. Collected Poems 1947-1980. New York: Harper & Row Publishers,
1984. 126-133. Print.
Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter? The Atlantic Monthly. The Atlantic Monthly Mag., May
1991. Web. 20 April 2015.
Neville, Mark. Who Killed Poetry? The English Journal 47.3 (1958): 133-138. Web. 20 April
2015.
Newman, Edwin. Strictly Speaking: Will America be the Death of English? Indianapolis: The
Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1974. Print.

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Shetley, Vernon. After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Print
Smith, Marc. "'Money' by poetry slam founder Marc Smith (w/John Condron)." Online video
clip. Youtube. Youtube, 21, Aug. 2009. Web.
Somers-Willett, Susan. The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the
Performance of Popular Verse in America. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 2009. Print.
Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1995. Print.
Watten, Barrett. Natura Morta. L Magazine. Ed. Curtis Faville. 1972: 13. Web.
http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/L1/html/pictures/image0002.html
Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Lyrical Ballads. Ed. Michael Mason. New
York: Longman Publishing, 1992. 55-87. Print.