“Spirit Guide:
Carlos Cumpian on Poetry, Chicano Culture, and the Emergency Taco”
By Benjamin Ortiz, for “Our Town” in the Chicago Reader
September 05, 1996
Category: Literary Reviews
“Reading Out:
D-Knowledge pushes poetry into the light”
By Benjamin Ortiz, for the Chicago Reader Calendar Section
January 29, 1998
The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us. We are no better than you…Did you suppose there could be only one Supreme? We affirm there can be unnumbered Supremes…”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
The static scratch of a turntable needle plucks into a trumpeting groove of dramatic bombast, bringing Zarathustra’s fire from the mountains for fight-to-the-finish phonetic fisticuffs at tonight’s full-court, one-on-one, make-it-take-it poetry rumble. We find ourselves in medias res, the joust afoot, vendettas flagged and fallen, the bitter taste of beer and too much cigarette smoke fueling hearty wordsmiths to more and more feats of fearless foolishness on the microphone passing hands, the masses encircling victors and consoling the vanquished, and always the words, oh the words, representing all sides, cultures, and peoples in a microcosm of this country’s formative tongues: formal verse, free verse, monologues, mano-a-mano sonnets, parables, odes, ballads, schizophrenic rambling, antichrist rants, hip-hop meditation, old-school rap, new-school lyricism, athletic assonance, dirty limericks, head-to-head haiku, twisted tales, iambic pentameter, napkin-scribbled words of wisdom, beat-box scratch-verse, abstract experimentalism, drunken-master mind-over-matter magic—all styles and subjects for the sport of the spoken word.
