For the past few days I have been at the National Council of Teachers of English conference in Boston. The general session began at 8:00 in the Hynes Center Auditorium with a presentation by the First Wave Hip Hop and Urban Arts Learning Community from the University of Wisconsin. The First Wave Learning Community is the first university program in the country centered on spoken word and hip-hop culture. I have seen performances on the spoken word, but this was the first one I saw live. I was transfixed. Subtle chords of guitar music were interspersed with rhythmic machine gun fire words interspersed with heartfelt pleas and bruising accusations.
The art of spoken word poetry has existed for many centuries. The ancient Greeks included spoken word in their Olympic Games. I know that spoken word is used to inform or make an audience conscious of some human aspect pertaining to life. I felt the frank raw pain in these performers. They are reinventing the future of poetry.
