The Black Arts movement

It is the closest ancestor of the way a spoken word poem sounds now, and it is the reason performance, rather than publication, became the natural home for a certain kind of poem.

It was a movement of institutions as much as of poems, and that is the part usually left out. Its poets did not simply write differently: they built the presses that printed them, the magazines that reviewed them and the rooms they read in, because the existing ones were not going to do it.

Why it was created

It was created in direct response to a killing. Malcolm X was assassinated on 21 February 1965, and within weeks the poet LeRoi Jones, who took the name Amiri Baraka, left Greenwich Village for Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School. BARTS lasted less than a year, ending in funding disputes and internal conflict, but the model it set out was copied quickly in Detroit, Chicago, Newark, San Francisco and New Orleans.

The argument behind the move was blunt and it explains everything that followed. A Black writer in 1965 who published with a New York house was addressing, in practice, a white readership, through white editors, in venues Black audiences did not attend. The response was not to complain about access but to build a parallel set of institutions and to write for the audience that was actually there.

What it argued poetry was for

Poetry, on this argument, was for a community rather than for a page, and it was answerable to that community. Larry Neal set the position out in an essay titled The Black Arts Movement, published in The Drama Review in 1968, which described the movement as the artistic counterpart of Black Power and called for an art with its own standards, its own critics and its own symbols.

Three consequences ran straight into the writing itself. Poems were composed for the speaking voice and for reading aloud in public. They used the vocabulary, rhythm and syntax of ordinary Black American speech rather than translating it into a literary register. And they were often occasional in the old sense, written for a specific meeting, funeral or anniversary, which is a description that fits a great deal of contemporary spoken word too.

What it built: presses, magazines and theatres

The institutions are the movement's most durable product, and several of them outlived it by decades.

• Broadside Press, founded by the poet Dudley Randall in Detroit in 1965, which began by printing single poems as cheap broadsides and went on to publish many of the movement's central figures.
• Third World Press, founded in Chicago in 1967 by Haki Madhubuti with others, and still publishing.
• Negro Digest, edited by Hoyt Fuller and renamed Black World in 1970, which gave the movement a national critical forum.
• The Journal of Black Poetry, which published new work outside the established literary magazines entirely.
• Black Fire, the 1968 anthology edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, which collected the movement's writing in one volume and functioned as its manifesto.

Established poets moved towards the movement as well as away from it. Gwendolyn Brooks, already a Pulitzer winner, attended the Black Writers' Conference at Fisk University in 1967 and afterwards changed both her publisher and her direction, moving to Broadside Press. Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Jayne Cortez and Etheridge Knight are the names most often listed alongside Baraka and Neal.

The visual art, and where the work is now

The visual art of the movement was public, printed and cheap to distribute, which was a deliberate choice rather than a limitation. The Wall of Respect, painted in 1967 at 43rd Street and Langley Avenue in Chicago by artists of the Organization of Black American Culture, put portraits of Black heroes on the side of a building in the neighbourhood and set off a mural movement in other cities; the building was lost after a fire in the early 1970s. AfriCOBRA, founded in Chicago in 1968, developed a shared visual language of high colour, pattern and legible text, and worked in prints precisely so that the work could be owned.

Photography carried a parallel argument, notably in the studio and fashion work of Kwame Brathwaite, whose images of the Grandassa Models in Harlem gave the phrase Black is beautiful a visual form. The work is now held across public collections in the United States, and museums including the National Gallery of Art in Washington hold pieces by artists associated with the period. The fullest recent survey was Soul of a Nation, Art in the Age of Black Power, which opened at Tate Modern in London in 2017 and then toured American museums, and it is where much of the current public interest in this work began.

Why it was significant, and what is contested

Its significance is easiest to state as three changes that stuck. It established that a poem could be addressed to a specific community in that community's own speech without apology. It built distribution that did not depend on anybody else's permission. And it made the reading, rather than the book, the primary event, which is the structural fact spoken word inherited.

What is contested is worth stating with equal directness, because a young writer who is told only the first half will meet the second half unprepared. The movement's cultural nationalism was prescriptive, and critics inside it as well as outside objected to the idea that art should be judged by its political usefulness. A significant amount of the writing was hostile to women, to gay people and to Jews, and this has been documented rather than alleged. Baraka himself repudiated Black nationalism in the mid 1970s and moved to a Marxist position, which is part of the record and not a footnote to it. Holding both halves is the honest account.

The line from those rooms to a poem said aloud tonight

The line from those rooms to a contemporary open mic runs through recorded voices rather than through anthologies. The Last Poets formed in Harlem in 1968 and put spoken poetry over percussion in front of a mass audience. Gil Scott-Heron's records at the start of the 1970s did the same with more music behind them. That delivery, unhurried, rhythmic, direct and political, is audibly the parent of what a slam poem sounds like.

The organisational line is shorter still. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe opened in 1973 with a comparable argument about a different community, and the competitive circuit that followed it in the 1980s and 1990s inherited both the sound and the assumption that a poem is spoken to somebody. The stage and its circuit describes the rooms that resulted, What a griot is sets out the older tradition of a poet attached to a community, and The lineage of the form places all of them in order.