The Room Is on Fire

Susan Weinstein

Description

The Room Is on Fire offers an overview of youth spoken word poetry's history, its practitioners, participants, and practices. Susan Weinstein explores its grounding in earlier literary/performance/educational traditions and discusses its particular challenges. In order to analyze these issues, the story of how youth spoken word poetry developed as a field is told through the voices of those involved. Interviewees include the people who organized the first youth poetry slam festivals, the founders of central youth spoken word organizations, and a selection of young people who have participated in their local programs and in regional and national events over the last two decades. Narratives about individual and communal efforts and experiences are supported by analyses of full-text poems by youth poets and by reference to contemporary scholarship in performance studies, critical youth studies, and new literacy studies. Blending history and theory with practical descriptions of how spoken word poetry is taught and how to produce spoken word events, the book will appeal to researchers, teacher educators, and K–12 teachers.
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Who’s Who

2. Pedagogy and Practices

3. A Brief History of The Field

4. What Is Spoken Word Poetry And Where Did It Come From?

5. The Role of Slam

6. Youth Spoken Word Poetry Enters Its Third Decade

In Memory of Those We Have Lost

Appendix A
Brave New Voices Festivals by Year

Appendix B
Youth Spoken Word Poetry Organizations by State and Country

Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• Secondary school
• Education
• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438470245
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE
ROOM IS
ON FIRE
THE
ROOM IS
ON FIRE
THE HISTORY, PEDAGOGY, AND PRACTICE OF YOUTH SPOKEN WORD POETRY
SUSAN WEINSTEIN
Cover photograph: “Baton Rouge All City Finals,” courtesy of photographer Christopher Diaz
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Weinstein, Susan, 1965– author.
Title: The room is on fire : the history, pedagogy, and practice of youth spoken word poetry / By Susan Weinstein.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017033588| ISBN 9781438470238 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438470245 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Spoken word poetry. | Performance poetry.
Classification: LCC PN4151 .W42 2018 | DDC 808.5/450835—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033588
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my mother, Alice
CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
ONE
Who’s Who
TWO
Pedagogy and Practices
THREE
A Brief History of the Field
FOUR
What Is Spoken Word Poetry and Where Did It Come From?
FIVE
The Role of Slam
SIX
Youth Spoken Word Poetry Enters Its Third Decade
IN MEMORY OF THOSE WE HAVE LOST
APPENDIX A
Brave New Voices Festivals by Year
APPENDIX B
Youth Spoken Word Poetry Organizations by State and Country
NOTES
REFERENCES
INDEX
TABLES
TABLE 1
Youth spoken word poetry organizational staff structures
TABLE 2
Teaching artist demographics by age, race, and gender
TABLE 3
Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival by year, location, and number of participants
TABLE 4
Directory of US youth spoken word poetry organizations by state
TABLE 5
Directory of youth spoken word poetry organizations by country (not including the United States)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for the generosity of those who have shared their time and reflections with me over more than a decade. My aim has been to represent their voices as respectfully and accurately as possible, given the inevitable filters of my own perceptions, positionality, and experiences. Overwhelmingly, participants have opted to use their real names rather than pseudonyms (youth poets for whom research ethics required pseudonyms at the time of their interviews have “come of age,” and some have now asked for use of their real names here). As the participants appear throughout the book, I will not list them all here, but will simply note that they are the people who have made this book possible.
Two colleagues at Louisiana State University (LSU) have served as steadying forces for me as I have navigated the book-writing process and the larger academic culture. One is Brannon Costello, a talented teacher and scholar of southern literature and comic book studies. Our shared cultural studies orientation has allowed us to critique and enrich one another’s work despite the many differences in our fields. I can’t thank Brannon enough for his consistent patience and good humor, and for the respect and thoughtfulness with which he has long read my work. Jackie Bach, a curriculum theorist and English education scholar, has been my primary other half in English education at LSU, and our collaborative teaching, writing, and service have been an unmitigated pleasure. Other colleagues whose collegiality and friendship have helped me maintain some amount of balance and sanity throughout the course of this work include Chris Barrett, Kathryn Barton, Jennifer Davis, Fahima Ife, Greg Johnson, Elsie Michie, Rick Moreland, Irina Shport, and Sunny Yang. Professor Elisabeth “Lisi” Oliver was a strong supporter of this project as she was of all my work at LSU. Lisi was my faculty mentor and friend for a decade, and her death in 2015 remains a deep shock and loss for me, for our department and university, and for her students, whom she adored.
Within the international field of youth spoken word poetry, Tama Brisbane, Alex Charalambides, Michael Cirelli, Ron Horne, Helen (Gibson) Johnson, Peter Kahn, Willie Ney, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Lyz Soto, and Amanda Torres have been core collaborators over the past decade. I must also acknowledge the staff and participants of the sites I visited in person over the years, including AS220 in Providence, MassLEAP, Oak Park and River Forest High School, One Word Connecticut Youth Poetry, Roundhouse Poets in London, Santa Fe Indian School, Taos High School, Urban Word NYC, Worcester Poetry Slam, Young Chicago Authors, and Youth Speaks. More recently, Nate Marshall, Nicole Narcise, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, and Jonathan Tucker offered critical information as I worked to revise and clarify the contents of the manuscript in the face of looming deadlines.
The Baton Rouge poetry community gave this project an early home and deep roots. Thank you to current and former members of the Baton Rouge Poetry Alliance for their ongoing commitment to this critical local space, and especially to people like LaTasha Weatherspoon and Jocelyn Young, who are not featured in the book but were integral to establishing the close connections between adult and youth poets in Baton Rouge that continue today.
Baton Rouge’s Humanities Amped program at McKinley High School, and the Forward Arts community writing organization, are my professional partners and my local family. I am proud to stand with Destiny Cooper, Desireé Dallagiacomo, Donney Rose, Chancelier Skidmore, Alejandra Torres, and Anna West in the challenging and affirming work of arts education, teacher professional development, critical pedagogy, and resource liberation. And while I’m naming important local folks, I must include a warm embrace for my friend Taylor Scott, who decided early in her high school career at EBR Laboratory Academy that I would be her mentor. Happily for me, Taylor has still not reconsidered that decision.
Ongoing thanks to my family: my sisters Leslie and Marci; my dad, Bernie; and my mother, Alice. My mother died in 2013, the night before I was to embark upon a busy summer of youth spoken word–related travel, first to the annual meeting of the National Association for the Teaching of English in Stratford-upon-Avon and then to Madison, Wisconsin for the annual Hip-Hop in the Heartland conference. I will always be grateful that there was time for me to get to Philadelphia to say goodbye in the week prior to her death, and that there were good people around me during the travels that followed to offer both empathy and space for my grief.
The cover photo is courtesy of Christopher Diaz ( www.christopherdiazphotography.com ). The photo features Tyeone Barner (facing the viewer) and Vincent Honey (back to the viewer) performing on the finals stage of Baton Rouge’s 2015 All City Teen Poetry Slam Festival. Tyeone and Vincent competed as members of the McKinley High School team, and I am grateful that they consented to this use of their images.
Assisting me at LSU with the invaluable work of transcription and data organization (and not named elsewhere in these acknowledgments) were Elizabeth Gilliland, Bill Moran, Mary Pappalardo, and Nayyir Ransome. Support for this project was provided by the following awards: three Regents’ Research Grants (2016, 2013, 2010) from LSU English, two Manship Summer Research Fellowships (2014, 2007) from LSU’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and a post-tenure sabbatical (2012) and Faculty Research Grant (2006) from the university.
Finally, thank-you to Senior Acquisitions Editor Beth Bouloukos and Senior Production Editor Ryan Morris at State University of New York Press for their careful guidance through the publication process, and for the beautiful cover. Thanks, too, to typesetter Aimee Harrison for her generous last-minute efforts.
Work from this research has been published in the Harvard Education Review , International Journal of Education and the Arts , and the collection Contest(ed) Writing: Reconceptualizing Literacy Competitions , edited by Mary R. Lamb.
Please note: Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of quoted material. If any omissions have been made, please contact the author.
INTRODUCTION
I have never attempted to write history before, but this book has taught me how daunting it is to construct a narrative that connects dots among living people and real events. Perhaps the successful narrative is the one that makes those dots seem like the only ones the author could have chosen, those people and events the only significant ones that could have been connected. Yet that is not an honest narrative. An honest narrative might focus on the same people and events, but it would regularly remind its audience that another author would surely have chosen different dots or drawn different lines among them. There are details in this book that will surely be contested, or whose framing will not match others’ experiences. I have checked the information I offer and the claims I make here in multiple ways, but at the sa