For the past few weeks we've been continuing our discussion of spoken word poetry, though that discussion has branched off into related topics: namely, what defines poetry and should poetry be categorized into "literary" and "other." We read an article by a man named Dana Gioia called, "Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture." You can look at it here: http://www.poems.com/essagioi.htm
This is the article I want to talk about right now.

Gioia's statements are all based on his opinion that our society is seeing the decline of print as the primary form of communication. He supports this claim well, and it is not hard to see certain tendencies in our culture that make me want to agree. For example, I really don't think that children read any more, or at least not in the way that they once did. The accessibility of other forms of entertainment such as TV, movies, video games, music, and particularly the computer and internet, all make reading seem antiquated and boring. He listed some statistics I might question, however. After all, it's true that I probably spend a couple more hours a day looking at articles online than I do looking at an actual book - but isn't this still print? I mean, technically I could print the articles out and then read them in that way... so I'm not sure if the written communication is what is being abandoned or lost, so much as it is the physical manifestations of these texts in books, anthologies, magazines, newspapers, etc.

I also found it interesting that while Gioia believed print to be a dying media, he does not believe verse to be a dying art form. In fact, quite the opposite: verse is flourishing in non-print forms in a way that poetry hasn't seen in... well, ever. I particularly enjoyed this quote, which sort of sums it up: "From a poet's perspective, however, both the mass media and the culture critics miss the most interesting aspects of the new popular poetry, which is not the extravagant personalities of its creators or the sociological nature of its contents; rather, it is the unusual mixture of radical innovation and unorthodox traditionalism in the structure of the work itself and the modes of its performance, transmission, and reception." It surprised me to think of a poetry form like "rap" as "traditional" in any sense of the word, but as I thought more it seemed more true. Rap and spoken word poetry pick up many poetical devices that the modernists deemed unnecessary and lesser: rhyme, fixed meter, vivid sensory imagery.

It is not much of a stretch for me to think of some rap as poetry, as spoken verse. After all, as Gioia points out, "Rap has already become a major branch of commercial entertainment. It would be no exaggeration to say that rap is the only form of verse — indeed perhaps the only literary form of any kind — truly popular among American youth of all races. If there is a new generation of readers emerging in America, rap will be one of its formative experiences — just as jazz or movies were to earlier generations." Still, when I think about poetry, I'm hard-pressed to include something like 50 Cent's "In da Club"

Go, go, go, go, go, go, go shawty- ish yo birthday
we gon party like ish yo birthday
We gon sip bacardy like ish yo birthday
and u noe we dun give a f*** if that's yo birthday

and say it's in the same category as what I would consider more gifted and serious "poets" - even "popular" spoken word poets might agree. I don't really know.