The Room Is on Fire: The History, Pedagogy, and Practice of Youth Spoken Word Poetry

by Susan Weinstein

The Room Is on Fire offers an overview of youth spoken word poetry's history, its practitioners, participants, and practices. Susan Weinstein explores its grounding in earlier literary/performance/educational traditions and discusses its particular challenges. In order to analyze these issues, the story of how youth spoken word poetry developed as a field is told through the voices of those involved. Interviewees include the people who organized the first youth poetry slam festivals, the founders of central youth spoken word organizations, and a selection of young people who have participated in their local programs and in regional and national events over the last two decades. Narratives about individual and communal efforts and experiences are supported by analyses of full-text poems by youth poets and by reference to contemporary scholarship in performance studies, critical youth studies, and new literacy studies. Blending history and theory with practical descriptions of how spoken word poetry is taught and how to produce spoken word events, the book will appeal to researchers, teacher educators, and K-12 teachers.

210 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 2018

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book I read with my fall grad seminar on Language, Literacy, Democracy, and Social Justice with a focus on the writing of students--former and current--from my program. This is Weinstein's second book. The first book, Feel These Words: Writing in the Lives of Urban Youth, grew out of her work at a Chicago alternative high school and was about the out-of-school literacies of some f her students--tagging, rap, letter writing, and so on--that her supposedly "deficient" students in an alternative Chicago school, revealing their rich proficiencies and love of language. (How do we suspect they have deficits? They don't do well on standardized tests, maybe they haven't gotten good grades).

This book is about an exciting and burgeoning area, the world of youth spoken word poetry, which helps give students voice to their perspectives and experiences. Weinstein's book gives us a succinct background to the history of slam/oral poetry performance/spoken word and in particular programs that have developed in the last maybe fifteen years beginning in big urban areas such as Chicago (Young Chicago Authors, that fostered Louder Than bomb spoken word competition, San Francisco, (Brave New Voices), and New York City (Urban Word), though she travels all over the country (and London) to see how differently programs and approaches have developed.

I have some experience in the Chicago sw scene, and know most of the people she mentions in that section, but I still learned a lot I didn't know about the history. This book will be particularly interesting for those hoping to develop a spoken word program, of which there are hundreds in the Chicago area alone. Louder Than a Bomb draws as many as 5,000 people every year. Who says poetry is dead?!

Both practical and theoretically based, this is a well-written and interesting book. Full disclosure: Sue is a good friend, but I hope you'll agree I am being fair in my assessment.