Rosanne and Dan, Part I
by Jonathan Penton

A story, a story…

This story begins about 10 weeks ago, when my last article began. It begins when I decided to begin going to a local open mic poetry night.

This story begins in Atlanta, perhaps a decade ago, when cities like Atlanta and around the world began hosting poetry slams, giving rise to a new type of artist: the spoken word performer.

This story…

This story begins when a woman, who's name we will shabbily conceal with the initial B., decided to pee on the streets of Boston, a new experience for her.

This story begins a month earlier, when B. decided to pursue a pretty boy in order to distract herself from her own emotional turmoil.

This story begins when Sylvia Plath accidentally founded confessional poetry, which morphed into the sort of teenage angst poetry in which every line begins with the word "I."

This story begins when the sexual revolution tore down America's social restrictions on extramarital sex, yet failed to change the sexual politic, let alone educate young people on what was expected of them in sexual relationships.

This story begins the first time a white parent won't let their child listen to Elvis.

The astute reader will have by now noticed that I am suggesting this story begins with more than one event. A cheap pseudo-literary trick, on my part. My justification is that this story makes no fucking sense.

Rap music had the potential to do serious damage to America's status quo. Here was an art form that required no formal schooling, and no instruments, materials, or computers. The basics of the form could be taught to a child, allowing the artist to focus on content. Competency was judged not by adherence to a form, but by the ability to stretch the form, with irregular rhymes and odd pronunciations taking center stage. The potential for cunning wordplay and intelligent writing seemed limitless.

Fortunately for those threatened by growing art forms, the music industry was here to save the situation. It started by promoting rap as a novelty act, carefully twisting in misogynistic themes in the guise of humor, and keeping female rappers as far from the mainstream as possible. It kept the age of popular rappers as young as possible, eventually going so far as to promote children as legitimate artists, worthy of your entertainment dollars. With the exception of the Beastie Boys (who, by the way, SUCK DICK), it kept rap a mostly black phenomenon, promoting white rappers so silly they were doomed to cave in on their own faddish personality. It used existing cultural stereotypes to promote the image of rap as criminal, until the mid-nineties, when it began to directly associate every new major rap act with a lifestyle of crime, violence, and male sociopathy. Finally, about twenty years after "Rapture" hit MTV, it unveiled the ultimate anti-artist agenda: the "bling-bling" lifestyle, in which a few insanely rich rappers used their "art" to flaunt their enormous wealth, equating talent with money, and the pursuit of money with the refinement of talent. Rap, once the art form of the masses, is now the most elitist art form in America, with a few acts getting all the attention, and any populist or revolutionary artists considered not only unworthy, but antithetical to a rapper's lifestyle.

Not everyone took this in stride. A new art form arose, one that looked suspiciously like rap, although using a very different nomenclature. Enter the spoken-word performance poet. These "poets" used an unconventional rhyme structure in a very regular meter, memorized their lines, and performed their poetry live, using cadence, style and charisma to get their message across. They used no sound effects, relying solely on their own voices, although those that could would occasionally sing. In short, they were rappers, using the buzzword "poetry," that most unprofitable of all art forms, to distance themselves from the hypercommercialization of rap.

The word quickly spread to young white poets, who were still very much influenced by the confessional movement of Plath, Sexton, et. al. Here, the style of the art form changed, and as a rule, the substance did, as well. Whereas black performance poets would pontificate on society, white performance poets tended to focus on their own psychology. The two approaches were perfectly compatible (and, of course, there was much overlap). Performance poets became a staple of coffee shop poetry reads, despite the fact that performance poetry doesn't really resemble literary poetry at all.

The art form has exploded. Once again, artists are using their art to promote a variety of value systems, value systems that have nothing to do with material gain. They organize poetry "slams;" democratic, but often vicious, events in which performance poets are graded against one another, tournament-style, until winners are declared. (One could suggest that the idea of a "winning" artist is antithetical to what art is all about, but there are many who disagree.) Open mics and "poetry" nights have increased in number exponentially, to make room for the many performance poets and their excited fans. Mass media and financial interests are doing their best to make inroads, but they're meeting with little success: except for the occasional HBO special, most performance poets are maintaining their integrity, selling spoken-word CDs out of their duffel bags, remaining independent and unpurchased. What's more, it's working; in any major city, there are a number of performance poets making a living off their work, something literary poetry can't claim.

On the one hand, we can only commend these artists for facing the challenges of commercial American life and doing their own thing in a conformist society. On the other hand, they're in our way. I was talking to Pablo today, who said, "Slammers are the bottom-feeders of the poetry world. They come to an open mic in ones and twos, check out the scene, then invite all their friends, running over the event until the literary poets no longer feel comfortable. Then they leave for the next big event, and the poetry read dissipates."

"There's not much you can do about them, either," I said. "I mean, you can't really tell them to leave, that their art form is unwelcome."

"Fuck that," said Pablo. "Yes you can."

It's not just a matter of literary poets feeling uncomfortable when outnumbered. To a literary poet, performance poetry is usually pretty tiresome. Performance poetry achieves success on charisma and style, whereas literary poetry works on linguistic tricks and (hopefully) depth of message. While some performance poets have a bag of metaphors and a substantial message, they are in the very small minority. For the most part, a performance poet tries to refine his or her art by engaging the audience with rhythm, a powerful voice, and symbols they will immediately recognize; in other words, clichés. Since clichés are what a literary poet hates most, a performance poetry event can really piss a literary poet off.

So I've been going to this weekly open mic poetry read for about ten weeks. The atmosphere was always incredibly informal; people would play guitar, sing a little, rap a little, and read poems they had just written. One guy did an a cappella rendition of a Metallica song, an event which will stay with me to my dying day. Although I don't like competing with musicians any more than I like competing with performance poets, the atmosphere was very comfortable, and literary poets represented the majority of the readers. Furthermore, the quality of the literary poets was a cut above what you'd expect from an open mic. No one there was Ezra Pound or Allen Ginsberg, but there were some genuinely talented people, and I enjoyed listening to them, and thinking they might be listening to me.

I guess it was my fourth event when the first performance poets showed up, two of them. And I really didn't mind. They weren't overly commercial, and they didn't shout. They were quiet during readings, like literary poets. And I was already sharing the stage with musicians; performance poets seemed like a no-sweat deal. They weren't great, but they weren't bad, as performance poets go. They were a bit hackneyed, but so were some of the literary poets.

One performance poet, however, caught my attention with a particularly inane piece about his relationships with women—or, more accurately, women's relationships with him. It was a very familiar story, about how women don't like nice boys like the speaker, but instead go out with mean, rotten, scheming, thieving, lazy cheating men and then come crying things like "Men are scum!" over and over, to nice boys like the speaker, ignoring the fact that the speaker is desperately pining for them, and would treat them right, forever and ever, 'til the moon fell into the sea or one of them died from a hideous stomach cancer. It wasn't a whine, in this case; it was a gripe, which amounts to the same thing, but rather than appeal to women to come to their senses, the speaker made fun of their foolishness, ending his poem with the lines, "'Men are scum,' it's almost like a religion/ but really I think women just make bad decisions."

That bad decision, in case any of you didn't catch his logic, is failing to date him.

Hanging out with Pablo and Jennifer that night, I loudly and passionately declared that all relationship poetry is stupid. The tensions between men and women have existed since long before human language was invented, and only got worse then. The subject, I declared, has been explored to its full potential. There's nothing more to say about it; anything you say is automatically cliché. There are other things to write about. Keep your gripes with the opposite sex to yourself.

(Anyone who's read my poetry will know that I do not really adhere to this philosophy, but anyone who knows me knows that I toss out bullshit philosophies all the time. Hypocrisy bothers me not a lick.)

"The problem," said Jennifer, "Is that you read a fucking lot of poetry. Like, more than anyone. I mean, the published stuff on Unlikely Stories alone, and with all the rejections too, no one's going to write about anything you haven't read before."

There are certainly people who've read more poetry than I have, of course, even people my age. There are several who are hopefully reading this now. But Jennifer's comment was flattering, if untrue, so I decided to put it in this article. Moving right along…

Even in the context of relationship poetry, the "Men are scum" poem particularly irritated me. I've already mentioned how self-serving I find it, but it's arrogant, as well. The speaker not only was claiming that he was the best choice a woman could make, he was claiming that he was a greater authority than any woman on what women should be doing with their lives. Women are unhappy, his logic implies, because they don't have his level of wisdom in choosing the right man.

Not only is it insulting, it makes no sense from the context of male/female relationships. If you're a nice guy, and you find that women don't like nice guys, change. Why is it that you're a nice guy, I ask you? Because you've been raised to believe that that's what women want. If you find that, in fact, that is not what women want, become something else. Clearly, you aren't making women happy with your niceness. If a mean guy makes them happy, be mean. This isn't rocket science people.

I'm sure some women would claim that they do, in fact, want nice guys. I submit that their version of nice, however, is different from what many men consider nice. The performance poet we are discussing thinks of himself as "nice" because he tries to keep the emotional temperature constant. A "nice man" from a female perspective is more likely to be a source of emotional warmth. The difference is not terribly subtle.

And, perhaps most relevant, I'm not a nice man. Not by any definition or stretch of the imagination. When other men bemoan that women go out with assholes, the assholes that they refer to are men like me. I am the type that sends women crying into the arms of guys like him. As I listened to his gripes, I felt secure in my opinion that he and I were eternal enemies, and polar opposites.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what the Greeks called hubris.

To be continued…

Jonathan Penton is the overworked editor and publisher of Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.