The lineage of the form

Poetry was said aloud for most of its history and written down for a comparatively short part of it, so a poem performed at a school open mic tonight is closer to the older habit than a poem read silently from a book.

That is a lineage rather than a family tree. These traditions did not hand the form on politely from one to the next, and several of them were happening at the same time in different cities without knowing much about each other. What follows is the sequence a young writer is actually standing at the end of.

Older than the page: the griot and oral poetry

Older than the page is the plain fact about poetry, and the griot is the clearest surviving example of what that meant. In the Mande societies of Mali, Guinea, Senegal, The Gambia and their neighbours, a griot is a hereditary specialist who holds genealogy, history and praise, performs it on formal occasions, and is trained inside the family from childhood. What a griot is sets out the role in detail, including the two entirely unrelated things that share the spelling in English.

Similar roles existed elsewhere, which is worth saying so that the point does not collapse into a single origin story: the Irish and Welsh bardic orders, the Norse skalds, the Homeric singers, the Indian and Persian reciters. In every case the same three techniques recur because they are what an unaided memory needs, and all three are still in use in a spoken word poem tonight. Repetition holds structure. A fixed rhythm keeps a line intact. Formulaic phrases give the performer somewhere to stand while thinking.

The reading as an event: the 1950s

The reading became an event in the middle of the twentieth century, and the moment usually pointed to is the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco on 7 October 1955, where Allen Ginsberg first read Howl to a small audience in a converted garage. What changed there was not the writing but the occasion: the reading was publicised, it was crowded, it was social, and it treated a poem as something that happened in a room at a particular hour.

Coffee house readings, poetry with jazz behind it and the small press circulation that went with it followed through the late 1950s. The line from there to a contemporary open mic is real but partial. It supplied the room and the informality, and very little of the voice.

The Black Arts movement and the poem as public speech

The Black Arts movement supplied the voice, and it is the single most direct ancestor of the way a spoken word poem sounds now. Between roughly 1965 and 1975 it built its own theatres, presses and magazines in Harlem, Detroit, Chicago and elsewhere, and it argued that a poem should be addressed to a Black audience, in the language that audience actually spoke, and delivered where that audience already was. Its presses and theatres, and the parts of its politics that are still argued over, are a subject of their own; what belongs here is what it did to the sound of a poem.

Two of its products matter directly here. The first is the assumption that a poem is spoken to somebody rather than left on a page for whoever finds it. The second is a delivery style, audible in the recorded work of the Last Poets, who formed in Harlem in 1968, and in Gil Scott-Heron's records at the start of the 1970s: rhythmic, unhurried, plainly political, and built for the ear. Listening to the form is the fastest way to hear the inheritance rather than read a description of it.

Dub poetry, and how the form arrived in Britain

Britain got the form through the Caribbean rather than through America, which is why the British scene sounds different. Dub poetry, written to reggae rhythm and to Jamaican speech, came into London in the 1970s, most publicly through Linton Kwesi Johnson, and behind it stood Louise Bennett's insistence from the 1940s onward that Jamaican Patois was a language for poetry and not a joke. Benjamin Zephaniah carried the same work into schools, television and print for four decades.

The institutions followed. Apples and Snakes was founded in England in 1982 and remains the main organisation developing performance poetry there. The Poetry Society ran SLAMbassadors, the national youth slam championship, from 2001 to 2018. Hammer and Tongue runs slam heats in English cities with a national final in London. The result is a circuit where the American word spoken word and the older British phrase performance poetry are used for the same evening, sometimes on the same poster.

The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the invention of the slam

The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is where the reading turned into a competition that the rest of the world then copied. It began in 1973 in Miguel Algarín's living room on East Sixth Street as a gathering of Puerto Rican writers in New York, took the name Nuyorican from a word that had been an insult, and later bought the building on East Third Street where it still has its address. After it reopened at the end of the 1980s, a slam ran on Friday nights and the format reached a far larger audience than the Chicago room where it was invented.

The scoring itself came from Chicago. Marc Smith, a construction worker and poet, began a scored reading at the Get Me High Lounge in 1984 and moved it to the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in 1986. The first National Poetry Slam followed in San Francisco in 1990, and televised versions in the 2000s took the format to an audience that had never been in either room.

Hip hop, and the argument about whether it is poetry

Hip hop begins in the same decade as the Cafe, at a party in the Bronx on 11 August 1973, and it is the part of this lineage that gets argued about hardest. The case for it is technical: rap is written down, built out of rhyme, metre and metaphor, and rehearsed before it is performed, which is a description of poetry. The case against is also technical: the beat is a fixed grid that a poem does not have, and calling rap poetry can quietly suggest it needed the promotion.

This site takes the argument seriously on both sides and reproduces no lyrics anywhere, on the same principle that keeps young writers' poems off it. What matters for a young writer is that hip hop is where most of them first hear complex rhyme done at speed, and that is a craft inheritance whichever way the definitional argument goes.

Slam poetry and spoken poetry: two words from two parts of this story

Slam poetry and spoken poetry come from different points on this timeline, which is why they are not opposites and not synonyms either. Spoken poetry, or spoken word, names the whole practice and inherits from every tradition above. Slam poetry names what happens when that practice is put inside the 1984 Chicago scoring game, and it describes a room rather than a style.

What a young writer inherits from all of this is a set of techniques and an audience, not a title. The griot's role is hereditary and specific to particular societies, and nobody becomes one by performing at an open mic. The honest version of the inheritance is smaller and more useful: poetry worked out loud for thousands of years before it worked on paper, the techniques that made that possible still work, and the room in front of a young poet on a Thursday night is the oldest part of the whole arrangement.