Opinion : Highly inflammable sensitive art

The world – if we do believe journalists, politicians, economists and other media experts – truly lacks poetry. Facts, analyses, concerns, all kinds of warnings, precautions and advice actually mark our nights and days and change our perception of the world.

This media buzz – we hear without paying attention to it and some well-known companies monitor (the unit of media buzz determining the exposure and tone of a media event, a celebrity or a business – depending on the visibility of the event, measured in numbers of pages or minutes dedicated to the event; also depending on the audience of the media supports, measured in numbers of readers, listeners, viewers or web users) – is very far from the idea of arts, the pure concept of beauty.  Information is no longer only meant to give hindsight, it becomes useful for the great powers; and the freedom of speech, a concept particularly important to the journalists, becomes an unstable concept – with its foundations being shaken by the new political and economic issues now in the forefront.

In the shadow of these misfortune giants, poetry is on duty. Poetry is not just about assembling sounds, rhythms and words; it is also the arts of awakening our senses. Feelings, sensitivity; poetry is touching through the images it suggests. It is stirring our feelings up, giving a real meaning to living – with, for instance, a usually worrisome mist turning into something magical under Charles Baudelaire’s “misty shroud” expression, boosting our imagination.

Poetry is a show. Sometimes it is a life size show – everyone has already felt, while contemplating the ocean or any other landscape, the magic of a truly poetic life –, sometimes it is a living show – open poetry stages, theatre expression, slam. Poetry actually is a living and highly inflammable show stirring up anyone feeling, perceiving, writing, declaiming or listening to it.

The newest poetry movement, the slam movement – founded 25 years ago by Marc Smith in Chicago – is a real living show – as a spoken and theatrical art, the slam movement binds performance to words. Initially declaimed a capella under the form of “spoken fights”, the slam has been evolving since then. It is sometimes now enriched with acoustic, electrical, metallic or exotic sounds whose musical/vocal poetry arouses reverie, trips, meditation, contemplation and thoughts; the slam as a whole  being invited in Avignon at the time of the festival.

As a movement of popular expression initially outside traditional artistic networks, the slam and its wide variety of forms – an open stage, a spoken word song, even a rap track – continue to represent today moments of pure poetry to anyone who, refusing any kind of noise pollution, still knows how to listen and to pay attention to the voices highlighting the great words. Those voices – some of them being very talented – highlight what the freedom of speech should always be: an ideal never perverted by the units of media buzz.

Far from the media business, the slam is a real piece of art – what is art if not the search for a lost heaven, the memory of what was and no longer is – or, at least, of what is no longer surfacing. What does no longer exist in the world as usually presented is the free word, i.e. composure, silence. The slam, which is the opposite of silence, takes some breath and plays with rhythms and respirations, creating some silent moments that are here to make us hear a different story, a story written by day-to-day poets fighting for an artistic ideal and another world – yet sometimes at their image. 

When the world lacks poetry, certain voices rise in some sort of ultimate effort. Dramatically, those voices have found with the Internet, another media, and its social and cultural networks such as MySpace, an area of eagerly awaited freedom, whose symbol is the web 2.0 – the web 2.0 enables people to create and share contents (from texts to sounds and images). Initially anarchic, the Internet is, as any other media, increasingly regulated, monitored and controlled; therefore becoming a subject of investigation for the media buzz professionals.

If the freedom of speech always risks being perverted by trend and analysis offices – at last plunging in the net of these maniacs acting under daylight and not even hiding themselves behind what is economically and politically correct – poetry is living on this environment of corruption. Subversive, poetry has the inner ability to endanger the established order – notably when the latter does no longer know anything about passion, compassion and magic and when it forgets everything about emotions because of thoughts and logic. Any resemblance with an existing order would obviously be an accident and might have stirred smiles up if poetry had never wondered about the darkest pages in our history, sometimes turning this art into a difficult but necessary lucidity asking questions, not about the place of poets, but about the place of the humankind.