Bum Rush the Page

October 22, 2001
To most readers, the hundreds of tightly rhymed, orally friendly poems here will read as "slam." But in his introduction, Medina, a poet and activist, takes great pains to separate the poems from slam's crowd-pleasing limitations, and uses the term "def jam" to describe the political spoken-word poetry he and Rivera, also a poet-activist, have collected. Medina's and Rivera's emphasis is on the poem and its subject matter, not the poet, which makes for a remarkably democratic anthology. Every poet has about the same page and a half of space. The book's design puts the poets' names in a very small type. None of the big names—June Jordan, Reg E. Gaines, Edwin Torres, Wanda Coleman, Patricia Smith and Amiri Baraka—are given more attention than the less published. Organized by subjects such as "Blood, I Say, Study our Story, Sing this Song," "Drums Drown Out Our Sorrow" and "Seeds of Resistance," most of the poems use urban imagery, tough talk and declaration. Most are identity-centered, anti-racist and pro-activist. Many focus on current events. There are, for instance, at least four poems about Amadou Diallo, the unarmed Ghanaian immigrant killed by New York policemen as he stood in his doorway. All mention the 41 shots; all include the word "mother." There are poems about Shaka Sankofa (convicted of murder at 17, and executed nearly 20 years later under Texas's then-Governor George W. Bush), and homages to Cuban bandleader Tito Puente. Some readers will wish for more variation of theme and for more layered meanings, but the topicality and directness of the poems make this an ideal textbook for introductory poetry classes, especially for urban high school students, and for anyone interested in poetry as a social art.

October 15, 2001
There's no doubt that the crowd-rousing competition of poetry slams has injected an often marginalized literary genre with new energy and brought it out of the academy and into people's lives, where it belongs, but much of the impact of spoken-word poetry is rooted in its bravura performance, not its often banal writing. Coeditor Medina acknowledges this flaw and then triumphantly refutes it by presenting a solid volume of smart and exhilarating poetry by poets from diverse backgrounds participating in poetry slams across the country. Poems by such well-known front-liners as Wanda Coleman, Michael Warr, and Patricia Smith are interleaved with poems by emerging poets forging dramatic new forms to express outrage and sorrow over the endless cascade of tragedies born of racism and greed. Here are poems about sex, love, family, poverty, police brutality, Hollywood's perpetuation of stereotypes, and the willful blindness of Washington. Poets of the body, the home, the neighborhood, and the world-at-large, Medina and Rivera's contributors are passionate, witty, wise, socially conscious, and artistically adventurous.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)