Word Up: Spoken Word Poetry in Print

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the author of Calling Texas and Earth Prime.

This collection is billed as the first spoken-word anthology in print.
It was inspired by the “Word-Up” video series on MuchMusic and
contains various kinds of performance poems by contemporary Canadian and
American poets. There has been a rebirth of oral poetry in the last few
years, poems influenced by rap music, the Beats, stand-up comedy,
alternative music, and the performances in “poetry slams,” which are
competitions devoted to the improvisation of poetry.

These poems doubtless lose nearly everything in their transformation to
the printed page. Most of them come across as bad imitations of beat
poetry or rap songs, with their style limited to obvious rhymes or
numbing parallelism. The attitudes are appropriately disheveled and
rebel-lious, though MuchMusic is a highly successful commercial
enterprise and therefore part of the Establishment.

A few serious writers have found their way into this collection, like
Julie Bruck, Jeannette Armstrong and John B. Lee. Ironically, the poems
by co-editor Jill Battson are much better—and less flamboyantly
artless—that most of what she and Norris have included by others. The
book is beautifully produced, a kind of slick iconoclasm for just under
20 dollars. The Beats were never so well merchandised.