Voicing the Lyric: Spoken Word and Slam

This paper will discuss spoken word and slam poetry as the natural descendants of the
Greek lyric. This may include some piecemeal historical spans and summations, but I
hope that the characteristics of each of these forms will become clear momentarily.
When we think of the lyric form, there are a number of features which come
immediately to mind:

Short, occasionally rhyming, stanzas
First-person speaker/persona subjective experience
Song-like outpouring
Sense of honesty, directness, spontaneity, sincerity
Strict form/rhythm
Focus on single image/experience
Sensory detail
Regarding Greek lyric, there is the added difference in prosody, namely that
Greek lyric prioritised meters of long and short syllables, unlike traditional English
verse, which prioritises stressed and unstressed syllables.

For a practical example of the Greek lyric, we can turn to Pindar, 5
th
century BC Greek
poet, allegedlythe first Greek poet to reflect on the nature of poetry and on the poet's
role, most famous for his Victory Odes. Victors in Olympian (or Pythian/ Nemean/
Isthmian) games would commission odes to commemorate their achievements.
Extended mythical narratives usually occupy the central portion of the ode.

Extract from
Pythian 1: for Hieron, son of Deinomenes, from Syracuse, victor in the chariot race.
(Written c.470 BC)
O Muse, beside Deinomenes as well sound forth a song,
I bid you, to reward the four-horse chariot []
If in your speech you keep due measure, drawing many strands
together in brief compass, peoples censure will be less,
for over-fullness blunts
with its relentlessness the quickest expectations,
and citizens are prone to secret heavy-heartedness
above all when they hear of others blessings.
But nonetheless, since envy is superior to pity,
pass over nothing that is noble. Steer your people
with justice as your rudder; forge
your tongue upon the anvil of plain truth:

the slightest spark struck off moves weightily,
coming from you.

As a Greek lyric, this would have been performed to an audience, accompanied with
music.
Most of you will already know that the word lyric has the same root as the word lyre
the Greek word, (pronounced: lyriks) meaning literally relating to the lyre.
According to Felix Budelmann in The Cambridge Companion to the Greek Lyric, Lyric
[] was coined with hindsight for what had previously been [] more loosely songs.

In the same Companion, an essay by Michael Silk entitled Lyric and lyrics: perspectives,
ancient and modern, outlines his belief that, There have been many significant poetic
engagements with Greeklyric poems over the centuries, but there is no later equivalent
to Greek lyric poetry as such, and in particular there is no equivalent to it in the
Romantic and post-Romantic world.

This paper aims to challenge that assertion.

If we remember the general definition outlined at the beginning of lyric poetry as a form
as one that encompasses:
Short, occasionally rhyming, stanzas
First-person speaker/persona subjective experience
Song-like outpouring
Sense of honesty, directness, spontaneity, sincerity
Strict form/rhythm
Focus on single image/experience
Sensory detail
I am satisfied with Pindars aptness.
How does this challenge Michael Silks assertion that there is no later equivalent to
Greek lyric poetry? And how does this relate to spoken word and slam poetry?
I want to take another look at Pindars poem without my red marks.
There is one line in particular in this extract that grabs me every time.
Forge/ your tongue upon the anvil of plain truth.
Its so forceful, so tangible and a perfect metaphor for what spoken word and slam
poetry try to achieve.
the slightest spark struck off moves weightily,/ coming from you.
Its a line that is ahistorical and pan-historical, and it is the crux of my argument today.
Languages can die, civilisations can disappear, but expression is eternal.
And this is where spoken word and slam comes in. Youre probably wondering when
Im going to get around to the thorny problem of musical accompaniment.
with spoken-word [] all that lives on the page are the lyrics. The music of the
poem lives in the performer.
-Mark Otuteye, Slam Poetry and the Cultural Politics of Performing Identity
(2005)
I worried at first that this was a cop-out, but I think theres a pertinent point to be made
here. Its not coincidental that Otuteye uses the word lyrics.
W.R. Johnson, in his monograph The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern
Poetry (1982), outlines that, the idea of poetry and music, performed before an
audience, is strange to us, makes us think vaguely of lutes and viols and counter-tenors
[] and we must rethink what musical poetry might be; we must perform a hard act of
historical imagination. [] In trying to grasp the nature of the Greek lyric, we have
somehow to imagine musical performance without obscuring our imaginations with
what we know of contemporary music and its performances. [] music intensified the
words that the poet and his audience shared; it did not substitute for them or suborn
them as decoration. In this sense, what we must bear in mind is that this was not so
much a musical poetry [] as a performed poetry.
Spoken word and slam undoubtedly share all of the characteristics of lyric we outlined
at the start of this paper. (First person perspective, song-like outpouring, sense of
honesty/directness, sensory detail.)
With one notable exception, as Jess pointed out to me a few weeks ago Slam poetry
and spoken word tend to play fast and loose with rhythm and form. Performed poetry is
not so concerned with metre and prosody as it is with expression and beat. I think this
only strengthens its connection to the Greek lyric the emphasis on spoken word and
slams musicality in words is an echo of the lyrics origin from musical accompaniment.
Like Greek lyric, spoken word and slam is a live event; they are transitory, ephemeral,
but immediate.
Amongst all these comparisons and contrasts, spoken word and slam share another
similarity with their Greek antecedents: resistance.
Perhaps, for a new generation, the poetry slam is the equivalent of the Beatnik
coffeehouse scene. Not! Lorenzo Thomas in 2000.
The characteristics of spoken word and slam which differentiate themselves from
the lyric form may be that they are forms of poetry which are meant to be subversive,
underground, forceful, even aggressive. Slam poetry and spoken word, it must be said,
actively evade academic attention.
But even there, slam and spoken word do not stray too far from the Ancient Greek
tradition.
Platos Republic, in which he outlines his idea of the just city-state and the just man,
written in the 4
th
century BC, also has something to say about the role of poetry:
hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be
admitted into our State.
Plato is advocating propaganda.
As a side point, I discovered in my travels that Gary Mex Glazner in his
book Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (2000)
allegedly states that spoken word was performed at the first Greek
Olympic Games. This is a connection I would love to make but I hesitate to
refer to Wikipedia as a trustworthy source of information. If anyone
present has more on this, please do let me know.
Where Plato suggests using poetry as a political tool, a lot of contemporary spoken
word and slam use it as a tool of political subversion. But here, too, it is important to
remember Pindar hence my Powerpoint footer, borrowed from Pindars ode: forge/
your tongue upon the anvil of truth, which I added as a nod to that element of
subversion. Pindar advocates directness, brutal honesty and even in a poem for which
he was commissioned to write on the victor Hieron, he subverts that responsibility by
placing his own voice directly within it, as a qualitative piece of advice:
pass over nothing that is noble. Steer your people
with justice as your rudder; forge
your tongue upon the anvil of plain truth:

the slightest spark struck off moves weightily,
coming from you.
What is the significance of the connections between Greek lyric and spoken word / slam
poetry?
For poetry as a subversive practice to be seen as a modern, or at least, post-Romantic
phenomenon is erroneous.
Expression is eternal, and freedom of speech is something that should be regarded
seriously as attaining to the truth.
By viewing spoken word and slam as the rightful inheritors of poetic tradition, I hope to
illuminate their importance and depth. I also wanted to give a new perspective on a
very old tradition and examine a few of the startling similarities between the two.
I felt the most appropriate way to conclude this presentation was with some spoken
word, but just before I welcome Jess on to the stage Id like to read aloud a few lines
from the piece shes about to perform:
Do we see that the fault, dear brutes, lies not in our stars,
Nor in our form,
But in the inability of ourselves to defend it in an academic context [?]
I hope to some extent I have defended it, but no more of that.