Slam poetry
Slam poetry (also: Spoken Word , spoken-word Poetry, Stage seal performance poetry or the like..) Is a literary flow, which with respect to the genus poetry the lyrics belongs. Although characteristic texts combine lyrical, epic and scenic means in various ways, the majority of methods of prosody and metrics are used.
This current of poetry has come into the public eye above all in the context of poetry slam stages . In contrast to the term poetry slam, which describes a literary lecture competition, slam poetry is "audience-related and live-performed literature." Marc Kelly Smith , founder of the first poetry slam and self-proclaimed Slampapi, describes the literary trend with the simple words:
"Slam poetry is a style of poetry that's composed for the purpose of being performed in front of a live audience and in a competitive arena."
"Slam poetry is a poetic style that was developed for lecturing in front of an audience at a competition venue."
Contrary to the opinion of some slam poets , the literary scholar Mario Andreotti says:
"Slam poetry is basically everything that is presented or performed in a poetry slam."
Other short literary forms such as narration , satire or parody , which are performed at poetry slams, belong to the epic genre .
Beginnings and development
From 1993, the Hamburg Mojo Club hosted literary events entitled “Urban Poetry”, at which performance poets from the London label Apples & Snakes presented their texts. English - speaking spoken word poets like Lemn Sissay gave guest performances in various German cities. In 1995 the performance poets Bob Holman and Miguel Algarin traveled to Berlin as representatives of the New York “Nuyorican Poets Café” to invite German-speaking slam poets to a lecture tour in the USA. In the months that followed, a network of performance poets and literary organizers formed in German-speaking countries and soon organized the first poetry slam competitions.
While many stage poets became more professional in the following years, slam poetry found its way into the literary scene as a literary genre beyond the competition format : slam poetry and performance poetry have been heard at literary festivals since 2000. Some stage poets also presented full-length solo programs.
Event series such as “Poetry in Motion” ( Lyrik Kabinett Munich), “Respect the Poets” ( Theater Konstanz and Theaterhaus Stuttgart ), “Grend Slam” (Essen) or “Slam Revue” (Berlin, Jena and Nuremberg) could serve as a presentation platform for Establish slam poetry and performance poetry. The “ Textbox ” developed by Bas Böttcher presents slam poetry at book fairs and in art museums at home and abroad. Literary works by slam poets can now also be found in school books and anthologies of German poetry (" Der Neue Conrady ").
Style and literary classification
The combination of writing and the art of presentation is characteristic of slam poetry: song-like text forms with catchy passages are usually presented in free lecture in front of an audience.
“Slam poetry can only be vaguely assigned to the traditional genres, rather it contains a combination of prosaic, lyrical and dramatic forms within individual texts or in the genre in general. Through the numerous rhythmic, condensed and sound-emphasizing texts, Slam-Poetry shows that the lyrical, but also dialogical-dramatic forms have by no means retreated within contemporary culture. "
With regard to its content and motives, this literature is very variable. The range of topics includes social and relationship conflicts as well as fashion and zeitgeist phenomena, pop culture and politics.
German-language slam poetry can be associated with various movements in literary history :
- Dadaism and sound poem : 1916 led Hugo Ball in Cabaret Voltaire first time so-called sound poems on to which the contemporary audience should have reacted with strong emotions. Ball wrote about the new meaning of the voice in literature:
“Reciting aloud has become a test of the quality of a poem, and I have been instructed (from the podium) to what extent today's literature is problematic, that is, explained at the desk and more lively for the collector's glasses than for the ears Man made. "
- At the end of the 1950s, German-speaking avant - garde writers such as Franz Mon , Oskar Pastior and Ernst Jandl rediscovered the stylistic devices of Dadaist stage poetry. Michael Lentz , German slam champion in 1998, published a two-volume dissertation on sound poetry / music after 1945 in 1999 .
- At about the same time, the Beat Generation was formed in the USA : Authors like William S. Burroughs were looking for new forms of expression for their literature, for example at a reading in the Six Gallery (a so-called poetry jamming ) in San Francisco at Allen Ginsberg 's recited his poem Howl for the first time .
- Thirty years later, the beatniks had an impact on the German-language social beat , a literary underground movement of the 1990s that was also influenced by authors such as Charles Bukowski , Jörg Fauser and Thomas Kling , who himself took part in poetry slams. Many social beat activists are active in the poetry slam scene today.
- Oral poetry refers to early oral storytelling in terms of cultural history and orally transmitted literature: This includes narrativesongs, epics and improvised chants. Here, too, “frequent repetitions, simple melody models and certain metrical forms” can already be described, as they also characterize slam poetry . Similarly, Steffi Gläser sees “reduced complexity on the level of narrative structure, syntax and choice of words as well as the structuring of long passages through parallelisms” as characteristic of slam poetry.
- Even pop literature was compared with slam poetry and separated them. Petra Anders defends the poetry slam format in contrast to pop as communicative and production-oriented:
“In contrast to pop literature, slam poetry is a productive act […]: In a target-oriented, dramaturgically designed staging, the pop literary archive of brands and consumer goods is ironically broken in slam texts. The self-staging of the first-person narrator in pop novels gives way to the assumption of a speaking role [...], tendencies of irrelevance in pop literature are also exposed without slam poetry being moralizing. In order to reflect on the present, slam poetry makes use of humorous means, especially irony [...] and demands [...] active participation in cultural and societal practice. "
- The term spoken word describes a form of orally performed poetry from the tradition of oral poetry, which first spread in the Afro-American subculture in the early 1990s : Deriving from hip-hop and rap , spoken word was socially critical and anti-academic. Today spoken word includes all types of performative poetry or prose, including contributions on poetry slam stages. Boris Preckwitz tries to summarize the American performance poems of the spoken word with Goethe's definition of the ballad : Goethe saw the ballad as the "living primordial egg" of poetry, in which the later separate genres of poetry, epic and drama were still united.
Poetry slam as a literary genre?
The cultural studies research argues that it is in slam poetry less a literary genre as an art form that combines the both literary and non-literary aspects: are the dominant performance and competition aspects of the (so Florian tree), for example, in the tradition classical-antique poet contests and are closely related to rhetoric.
Authors and works
In the forums of the spoken word scene, many authors found the opportunity to present and further develop their individual art of language and poetics , with different paths being taken in the literature, music or cabaret business depending on their individual background. Since 2000, authors have increasingly emerged with literary publications in book and CD form or with their own stage programs, including Bas Böttcher (This is not a concert), Timo Brunke (All that. All of these things), Alex Dreppec (The double standard of submissive Despoten), Fiva & Radrum (headphones), Nora-Eugenie Gomringer (say something about the night), Jürg Halter (I've touched the world), Dirk Hülstrunk (antibodies), Till Müller-Klug (the speaking drug), Sebastian Krämer (lullabies for staying awake ), Michael Lentz (that ends well. Speech acts), Mieze Medusa and Markus Köhle (double textpresso, speech node) or Boris Preckwitz (szene.leben) . Authors such as Micha Ebeling (Restekuscheln), Volker Strübing and Tina Uebel stand for the prose style . Authors such as Philipp Scharrenberg , Florian Cieslik (Jenseits von Edeka) or Sebastian23 are closer to the comedy genre .
literature
- Boris Preckwitz: Slam Poetry: Rearguard of Modernity . BoD, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-8311-3898-2 (Master's thesis, 1997).
- Boris Preckwitz: Spoken Word and Poetry Slam. Small writings on interaction aesthetics . Passagen Verlag, Vienna 2005, ISBN 978-3-85165-712-8 .
- Petra Anders: Slam Poetry . Reclam, 2008, ISBN 978-3-15-015060-3 .
- Petra Anders: Poetry Slam. Lessons, workshops, texts and media . Schneider Verlag Hohengehren GmbH, Baltmannsweiler 2011, ISBN 978-3-8340-0896-1 , p. 186 .
- Sulaiman Masomi: Poetry Slam. An oral culture between tradition and modernity . Lektora Verlag, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-938470-84-8 .
- Bas Böttcher / Wolf Hogekamp (ed.): The Poetry Slam Primer . SATYR Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-944035-38-3 (poetry slam anthology on the subject of language).
- Stefanie Westermayr: Poetry Slam in Germany. Theory and practice of a multimedia art form. 2nd, expanded edition . Tectum, Bielefeld 2010, ISBN 978-3-8288-2383-9 (standard work).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. Katja Baigger: Mörike reloaded - everyday poets for the masses , in: NZZ from April 29, 2008, as well as: Petra Anders: Poetry Slam in German lessons, chap. 1.2.4: Slam poetry as contemporary literature, pp. 73ff.
- ↑ Boris Preckwitz: Spoken Word & Poetry Slam, p. 31.
- ↑ Bas Böttcher: "Slam-poetry has little in common with the comedy genre, which unfortunately is often heard in poetry slams today." In: www.basboettcher.de. Retrieved April 19, 2016 .
- ↑ Mojo Club - Urban Poetry 1993–2003 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Boris Preckwitz: Slam Poetry - Rear Guard of Modernity, p. 62.
- ↑ Ko Bylanzky: The unfinished history of the Poetry Slam in facts and figures ( Memento from August 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ For example with “Lyrik am Lech” or Lyrik Eins. Muffathalle, Munich . ( Memento of the original from July 9, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ For example Timo Brunke: From understanding to mouth ; Sebastian Krämer: Krämer at night ( Memento of the original from July 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. or Michael Lentz: SPRECHAKTE X / TREME .
- ↑ Respect the poets - Best of Poetry Slam and stage literature
- ↑ Slam Poetry Show "Grend Slam"
- ↑ Slam-Poetry in the Textbox, Leipzig Book Fair, 2010 ( Memento of the original from January 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ Slam-Poetry: Staged Poetry on the Stage (PDF; 188 kB)
- ↑ In Slam-Poeten, Slam-Poetry, Poetry-Slam: a literary and literary sociological investigation, p. 7f., Steffi Gläser gives some hints on the origins of stage poetry. She names Dada, hip-hop, the beat generation, spoken word, social beat, pop literature and the Chicago performance art scene of the seventies.
- ↑ In Spoken Word & Poetry Slam, p. 62, Preckwitz mentions the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann in particular , who developed an early performance theory in his writings.
- ↑ Diary entry from: Hugo Ball: Escape from time . Zurich 1992, p. 105.
- ↑ The influence of concrete poetry and experimental lyric poetry on the poetry slam is discussed, for example, in the following quote: “There is no doubt that he [Jandl] exerted a great influence on the youngest experimental [slam] poets like Alex Dreppec or Michael Schönen who are today Play with sounds, letters and repetitions. ” Source ( Memento of the original from December 30, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Kling, Thomas: Itinerar. Pp. 63-64.
- ↑ cf. on this the statements by Oliver Bopp from Ariel-Verlag and his publications Bam Wam. A history of the social beat scene ( ISBN 978-3-930148-13-4 , 131 pp.) And Ruckzuck Kultpoet. How to become a scene poet ISBN 978-3-930148-26-4 .
- ↑ cf. CM Bowra: Poesie der Frühzeit, Munich 1967 and WJ Ong: Orality and Literacy. The technologicalization of the word, Opladen 1987
- ↑ Steffi Gläser: Slam-Poeten, Slam-Poetry, Poetry-Slam: a literary and literary sociological investigation, p. 65.
- ↑ Slam Poetry: Staged Poetry on the Stage (PDF; 188 kB)
- ^ Westermayr: Poetry Slam in Germany. Theory and practice of a multimedia art form. P. 12.
- ^ Preckwitz: Spoken Word & Poetry Slam, p. 81
- ↑ cf. Hartmut Laufhütte : Afterword. In the S. (Ed.): German ballads. Stuttgart 1991 (UB 8501), p. 619.
- ↑ Florian Baum: Rhetoric-theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of poetry slam. Master's thesis University of Tübingen 2002.
