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Stand and Deliver: The Power of Performance Poetry
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by Barbara McBride
Carmel High School
Carmel, California
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| | A hush sweeps across the audience as Chelsea takes her stance in the spotlight. Though she holds her typed pages in her right hand, she need not look at them. Glancing up at the darkened crowd, she asserts, with the inflections and pauses we have practiced all week, "Tonight, I am going to be the most electrically profound poet in the room. I am going to blow you out of the water and paint a shade of a color that you have never seen..."
And she does. In her three minutes on stage at tonight's inter- high school poetry slam, Chelsea charges the crowd from mild to wild with her electrical profundity. Just as she hopes, she "freeze[s] the steam that is rising above [our] hot coffee cups," and helps us "to forget about time" as our "hearts beat in rhythm with [her] rhyme."
As she completes her performance, the audience's applause can barely be heard beneath the barrage of whistles and shouts of approval. When the roar finally recedes, we await her scores -- a 9.0, 8.7, 9.7, 8.9, and 9.2. Dropping the high and low score, the scorekeeper announces her total of 27.1 (of a possible 30). As the next poet is called to the stage, I see in Chelsea's expression that she is pleased.
Poetry is thriving among American youth. In cafés, on street corners, during passing periods, on the lawn at lunchtime, students are not only writing but are also voicing their verse. Without external reason or role models, they are gathering in gaggles and creating a community upon the pillar of poetry, and it is time that we English teachers join in.
The public vehicle for these students to espouse their verse is the poetry slam, which, as described above, is an oral poetry competition. Often held locally at coffeehouses, the poets sign up in advance to read and come prepared with two to three pieces polished for performance. Each poet is given three minutes to read, and while they are allowed to run over the time limit, they lose a half point from their score for every ten seconds over three minutes and ten seconds. Five judges are selected randomly from the audience, and they rate each poet on a scale of 1 to 5 in two categories: content and performance. Thus, a poet can receive a possible ten points from each judge. After the poet has read, each judge each reveals her or his composite score, and then a scorekeeper tallies the scores, dropping the highest and lowest score for a maximum total of 30 points. The highest-scoring poets proceed to the second (or sometimes even the third) round, when a winner is declared. Often there is a monetary prize for first place, but the real reward is the thrill of winning the audience with words composed straight from the soul.
What is so engaging about slam poetry for students is its raw and flexible nature. Poets are able to deliver rhymed or free verse; they can infuse their poems with poetic technique or simply let it drip from their mouths; they can unleash romantic passion, rant about the government, or even rant about how slam poets rant about everything! What my students love is that they are developing a sense of identity and community through poetry. They feel empowered, and their voices are being heard.
While I am fortunate to teach a semester-long course in poetry, it was my students who taught me about slamming. My class has always included "Coffeehouse," a biweekly class period of standing up and sharing original verse. When students enroll in my classes, often their first question is whether or not this is a Coffeehouse class, for this casual class period, in which students are given the opportunity to share the contents of their creativity and hear the poetry that their classmates have produced, is tremendously popular. Certainly the bean bags in my classroom and the abundance of edible treats and warm beverages contribute to Coffeehouse's appeal, but students really love it because it provides them a venue in which to express themselves freely, with no grade at stake.
At one point, Coffeehouse could no longer be contained within the classroom, so we began to hold the event in the theater once a month on a Friday night. Coffeehouse attracts dozens of creative students, often those who are not engaged by the traditional school activities of sporting events and dances. Students read original verse, published poetry, or short stories. They deliver monologues and poetic duets, they play original music, they do stand-up comedy, and they even do improv. Parents, middle school students, district administrators, and students from other high schools have all dropped by to watch, and even participate.
This year, inspired by having attended the national slam competition in nearby Big Sur, a few of my former poetry students approached me about starting a poetry slam team. As a result, a handful of poets meet weekly in my classroom to share their new verse and to give and receive constructive feedback to prepare their poetry for performance. We have expanded Coffeehouse so that the first two hours are open mike and the final hour is reserved for competition. The movement has simultaneously arisen at other high schools, and as a result, we now have quarterly interschool competitions that draw audiences of nearly 200.
Performance poetry possesses a pulse that the written page cannot replicate. You won't hear many sonnets or singsong lyrics, but you will hear honest expression and genuine delight in the use of language. The effectiveness of performance poetry exists in delivery, so elocution, inflection, and dynamics are essential to the poem's success, as is the skillful use of sound devices such as alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, and internal rhyme. Often, these poems fall flat on the page but stun audiences when performed. Some slam poetry has been accused of lapsing into language play that lacks content, but a skilled poet will ground slick rhymes in solid images and strong sentiments.
To foster this skill, I spend the first unit of my poetry class helping students to develop imagery through precise diction and adroit use of figurative language. My goal is to liberate their language of extraneous or flat words. We practice economizing words with short forms, such as haiku or tanka, or we play with other restrictions. For instance, I will provide the students with a sheet of words, and with a partner they create a poem of 44 words (or any preselected number) using only the words printed on the page. For models of compression and vivid imagery, I use Japanese poets such as Matsuo Bashō and Yosa Buson, or imagist poets such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Perhaps the most brilliant imagery, though, can be found in the luscious lines of Pablo Neruda. His "Ode to Tomatoes" and "Ode to My Socks" are among my students' favorites. I even give an emulation assignment in which students are to write an ode to a food item or ordinary object that incites such Nerudian passion.
Another way to develop students' imagery and style is through a "poem a day" exercise. Each period, students are welcomed by a new poem projected via LCD onto the screen at the front of my room. For the first ten minutes of class, the students write. I call the activity "Interpret, Imitate, or Inspire," and students have the option of responding to the poem in prose; writing a poem that imitates its form, content, or style; or writing verse simply inspired by a word, line, or theme from the poem. When the 10 minutes are up, I call on student volunteers to share first their inspirations, then their imitations, and finally their interpretations. We use the latter to initiate the day's poetry discussion. Most of the time I select poems that demonstrate particularly strong examples of the technique I am teaching, be it synesthesia, symbolism, or a form such as the sestina. In a pinch I use the Web sites Poetry Daily or Poetry 180, a site designed by Billy Collins that features a daily poem geared toward high school students. This exercise offers students an opportunity to write poetry every day, if they wish, and it exposes them to poems from various cultures, eras, and styles. The interpretation option offers a nice reprieve for those students not feeling particularly poetic, keeping them engaged by allowing them to become part of the discussion. The imitation choice allows students to experiment with form, style, and technique, and the inspiration option pushes students to find their own voice.
Once students have a firm foundation in their diction and imagery, we move into the study of sound. Starting with Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," I introduce them to the sound devices of alliteration, assonance, consonance, and internal rhyme, all of which abound in the poem. We spend several class periods discussing the effects of various sounds on our emotions, and students learn that they can produce a desired effect on the reader through the use of certain vowels or consonants. To soothe, they might use long o's and u's as well as the letters l, s, and w -- any letter that can lengthen the line and leave room for lingering. A line like "Slowly the lonely woman wades waist deep in the cold ocean" demands that we slow our speech and wade along with her. On the other hand, to rush their readers, students can make use of harsher letters such as t, k, and p, along with the vowels a, e, and i. They can shorten their line lengths and utilize sounds that trip off the tongue. The famous tongue twister "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" demonstrates such a technique.
By revealing the secrets of manipulating language, we give students a sense of power, and they begin to see poetry not just as the outpouring of teenage angst or unrequited love but as a true vehicle for expression. It gives them control, something many students feel they lack. Emboldened with linguistic consciousness, even reticent students are now willing to risk not only writing but also reading poetry aloud before their peers. At this point, we begin to play with rhythm as we study Poe and Hughes. This is when I introduce them to jazz and have them create poetry from Coltrane's music. I give them Whitman, and Ginsberg, and Eliot, and Jordan, and Bellow, and I watch as their minds and their poems unfold.
Confident and skilled, my students can now tackle what many of us consider to be classics. When I have tried to require students to write a sonnet or even metered and rhymed stanzas too early, I have met with strong resistance. They feel bored and confined, and all I have succeeded at is confirming why they never liked poetry to begin with. But armed with an arsenal of poetic techniques and an understanding of how and when to use them, my students become excited about playing with form. It is as if, having found their voice, they are willing to suspend it in order to try on new identities. They will write a Shakespearean sonnet because they sense an interesting challenge. They will read Dante's Inferno because they are enthralled by its intricate, interlocking structure of terza rima. They will stand up and deliver their verses with pride because they are no longer wading through the muddy and mysterious bog of poetry; they have learned to swim through its sea of language. A Coffeehouse once dominated by a few brave or attention-seeking souls will become a lively competition to reach the podium. Meanwhile, I will have covered the English content standards by exposing them to a plethora of literature and by showing them, firsthand, not simply to recognize literary devices but to use the power of language to express what is most imperative to them: their truth.
Barbara McBride teaches poetry, Shakespeare, and both AP English courses at Carmel High School in Carmel, California.
"Stand and Deliver" by Barbara McBride first appeared in California English, the quarterly journal of the California Association of Teachers of English, in its April 2004 issue.
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