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Louder Than A Bomb tells the story of four Chicago high school poetry teams as they prepare to compete in the world's largest youth slam. By turns hopeful and heartbreaking, the film captures the turbulent lives of these unforgettable kids, exploring the ways writing shapes their world, and vice versa. Louder Than A Bomb is not about "high school poetry" as we often think of it. It's about language as a joyful release, irrepressibly talented teenagers obsessed with making words dance.

The lives of three outspoken poets intersect as they harness the power of the word. CJ Suitt confronts the racial injustice of a Southern black male. Kamaya Truitt-Martin competes in poetry slams across the country to heal a broken home. Jeremy Berggren employs art and poetry to cope with PTSD and to bear witness to the suffering of veterans. The 19th-century poet John Keats said, “Truth is beauty,” and beauty is harsh.

A poet in The Gambia starts a festival to develop local writers; a South African spoken word artist fuses poetry with Hip-Hop; a Nigerian poet inspired by the streets of Lagos.

The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, hip hop of the 1980s and early 1990s, and spoken word poetry have each attempted to initiate the dialogical process outlined by Paulo Freire as necessary in overturning oppression. Each art form has done this by critically engaging with the world and questioning dominant systems of power. However, unlike the Black Arts Movement and early hip hop, spoken word—with its growing foothold in urban classrooms and contemporary culture—may be in a unique position to facilitate unprecedented social change by providing students with a platform from which to question and negotiate the conditions of their lives.

In this essay, the authors present experiences as writers (poets), thinkers, and activists to explicate the literary genre of slam poetry and its affordances as an artistic resistance toward the end of identity, agency, and activism. These areas of development are critical for youth because they are beginning to be navigated and established during adolescence. As youth engage in individual identity formation and define their values in relation to the world around them,slam has the potential to act as a vehicle for that exploration.

In this article, Maisha T. Fisher explores the resurgence of spoken word and poetry venues in the Black community and their salience as venues for cultural identity development and literacy practice. Calling them African Diaspora Participatory Literacy Communities (ADPLCs), Fisher describes two open mic poetry settings that recall the feeling and communal centralily of jazz clubs and literary circles of the Harlem Renaissance. These ADPLCs are predominantly created and supported by people of African descent who actively participate in literacy-centered events outside of school and work settings. Through ethnographic research, Fisher explores how these venues function as literacy centers in two communities. Fisher discusses the cultural practices that underlie the organization and orchestration of these events, explores what inspires and motivates participants, and examines how these venues operate as sites for multiple literacies.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

From The Encyclopedia of Chicago