Menu
Maybe someday
41
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
29/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Joshua Bennett
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
March 28, 2023
A history of the art form that has transformed the cultural landscape: spoken word.
What The Reviewers Say
A vibrant cultural history.
Other than a few cursory nods to Allen Ginsberg, Bennett doesn’t contend with the legacy of the Beat poets. There’s no reference to the so-called dub poets.
Bennett’s book is much more than a history: it’s a living poetic meditation on his own life as a poet and the lives of pathbreaking if largely ignored poets who did spoken word even before that moniker had been invented.
For [Bennett], spoken word isn't interesting because it won the culture war against stuffy academics and their dusty canons; the value of spoken word lies in how it reared and continues to nurture its own culture. And in his view, that heritage of autonomy and aegis should shape how people understand it. Bennett, a repeat slam champion who writes poetry and criticism, has intimate knowledge of his subject but approaches it with humility and imagination. He threads research, interviews, autobiography, and close readings of poems and related texts into a nonlinear jaunt through the spoken word archives.
