Abstract
Spoken word poetry has a rich genealogy that Imani Perry (2004) calls the “poetics of Hip-Hop.” My aim in this chapter is to, first, offer a genealogy of the spoken word culture; second, show how, within a twentieth-century context, spoken word poets are prophetic in their language; and third, argue that spoken word poets are our new cultural theorists. Taking Tupac Shakur as an example of a radical youthfulness, my ultimate goal is to show Hip-Hoppers not just as poets but as strong poets, people who take the known language and frame it in unknown ways, where language becomes both a product of and a producer of this strong poetry. Tupac’s lyrical production during his teenage years, I will conclude, offered a radical cultural theory.
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Notes
- 1.
Somers-Willett makes an unconvincing distinction between spoken word poetry and poetry slam. She sees the latter as not commercial and more about poetry for its own sake, and the former as more trapped into commercialism. However, she also writes, “Since today a poem’s life as ‘spoken word poetry’ is highly dependent on context, slam poetry can easily slide between the slam and spoken word camps, and many performers bill themselves as slam poets in the competitive arena and spoken word poets in commercial arenas” (99). Precisely because of these arguments where the distinction is not only not helpful but unnecessary, I use the terms “spoken word poetry” and “slam poetry” interchangeably.
- 2.
Spoken word poetry has a rich genealogy that Imani Perry (2004) calls the “poetics of Hip-Hop.”
- 3.
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Ibrahim, A. (2020). Tupac Shakur: Spoken Word Poets as Cultural Theorists. In: Conrad, R., Kennedy, L.B. (eds) Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_15
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