The young man at the microphone stands in the beam of the spotlight on stage, but he doesn’t stay still. He can’t.

As he begins to speak, the rhythm of his words moves his arms and his head and sometimes his feet. He spits out the verses he’s woven about what makes him angry, what gives him joy, what turns him on, what makes him laugh, and what he thinks has gone wrong in the world. He wields agile alliteration, vivid imagery, clever metaphors, and a sharp dose of truth, with the members of the audience poised to grab hold of the next line, not knowing what torrent of words will follow his next breath.

What they do know is that this poem does not belong to literary ghosts from the past; it is here and now, grabbing them by the shoulders and demanding their attention.

If you based your view of American youth on what you see on MTV or the nightly news, you’d never imagine that there are teenagers composing lines of verse in the margins of their notebooks during class or dreaming up poems on the bus. But they’re out there. And they have seized upon a medium called “spoken word” to express themselves to their peers and to the world. Their passion for this art form has taken hold in high schools — with after-school clubs where students break into freestyle poetry jam sessions called ciphers — and on college campuses where open mic nights offer an alternative to house parties and the bar scene.

Spoken word is not a new poetic form. It dates back to Homer’s Odyssey and African storytellers, resurging in more recent times through the beat poets of the 1950s and 1960s and competitive events — called slams — of the 1990s. Its appeal is the exact opposite of curling up in a chair to read poetry in isolation.

“To hear a poem is to experience its momentary escape from the prison cell of the page, where silence is enforced, to a freedom dependent only on the ability to open the mouth — the most democratic of instruments — and speak,” wrote Billy Collins, poet laureate of the United States, in his introduction to the 2003 anthology Spoken Word Revolution.

Members of Generation Next — raised on technology like personal computers, cell phones, and the Internet — are invigorating spoken word with social activism rooted in the origins of hip-hop music and art, and a rejection of the roles and identities assigned to them by popular culture.

And now spoken word has taken up residence on the UW-Madison campus, in the form of First Wave, the nation’s first college learning community devoted to urban art. Fifteen students selected for First Wave can major in any subject — from English to theater to biology — while working on their spoken word poetry, dancing, or visual art.

“There’s a lot of Walt Whitmans and Langston Hugheses and Robert Frosts right among us ... and we just have to give them a forum. And this is it — this is the forum for that at a university,” says Willie Ney MA’93, MA’94, director of the UW Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, creator of First Wave, and tireless advocate for the power of urban arts.

The students’ arrival on campus caps off a two-year sprint that has catapulted the UW to the forefront of the spoken word movement, due in large part to the success of a national spoken word program for high school students conceived by a UW graduate, along with the infectious enthusiasm of key administrators who realized its potential to revolutionize recruitment and diversify the campus.

“I guess it sounds like a big goal, but we want to change the world. We want to make a difference in it,” says Kimanh Truong x’11, a writer and spoken word artist from Chicago who is a member of First Wave’s inaugural class and wants to become an English teacher. “A lot of people who watch spoken word are shocked by what we’re saying — and I always tell my teacher that the future of the youth isn’t dead, it’s thriving in our cafeterias.”

A first-generation American, Truong wrote her first spoken word poem in high school, a product of her frustration about being one of two Vietnamese students. “I was just sick of everyone not knowing the difference between Vietnam and other Asian countries,” she says. “I wanted to fight back the stereotypes, and it helped me clear my mind and my thoughts a lot.”

And Truong ultimately fell in love with the community that spoken word provided when she first got involved with a group called Young Chicago Authors. “I’ve met so many people through spoken word competitions that I never would have crossed paths with, people who have definitely changed me into a better person,” she says. “We’re all so different, but we all can agree on the fact that we love to write.”

The first time Jair Alvarez x’11 performed one of his own poems, “Admitted,” which told his story of coming to the United States from Puerto Rico as a non-English speaker, he stood before just twenty people in a spoken word club at Madison West High School, where he graduated last spring before joining First Wave.

The American dream
Kills us off
But with enough
Strength
Determination
Imagination
From our nation
We will make it
Let them hate it
Try and procrastinate it
But we will cross that stage
and accept it

“I forgot my place and I was shaking ... hard,” Alvarez says, waving his arm rapidly back and forth for emphasis.

Advice from a friend helped to prepare him for performing in front of even larger groups.

“‘I know you know most of the people at your school,’ ” he says the friend told him. “ ‘There’s four hundred of your friends and you’re just saying the poem to them.’ ... When I got up there, I still got nervous, but I was always able to play it off because I just moved around.”

Nervous is the last word anyone would use to describe Alvarez on stage as he emceed an arts assembly in the closing weeks of his senior year at West. He confidently presided over the program with a touch of swagger, introducing other poets, urging classmates to make some noise, and jumping around with students who hopped on stage to dance during a freestyle rap performance.

He confidently performed a poem with fellow West student Dan Bunn about the dangers of public apathy and what he later described as “the government’s not caring about the people, they’re just making people like sheep.”

on Capitol Hill, they’re raising no capital to fill
schools with new sense,
instead they spend, tax halves of paychecks, to
attack women and children of other
nations.
then the nuisance becomes the needed, when
you’re drafted or recruited,
Selling dreams, like you want to be pine-coffin
suited and booted.

“A lot of times my personal issues are kind of broad issues,” says Alvarez, who plans to go to law school and aspires to be a U.S. senator, the highest office he can reach as a non-native citizen. “For example, if I’m writing about poverty, I’m not the only one going through that so, you know, other people can also relate.”

Poetry slams were hitting it big as James Kass ’91 was studying for a master of fine arts in fiction at San Francisco State University in the early 1990s. While the campus was an incredibly diverse place, he couldn’t help but notice that the writing programs were not. Kass, who focused on Afro-American studies courses while getting his English degree at the UW, knew there were poets and writers who were not being nurtured as artists and did not have a place to present their work.

At the same time, Kass was struck by an onslaught of anti-youth propaganda in the media that portrayed teenagers as thugs or hyper-sexualized. “There was never an opportunity for just an average, everyday kid to say something,” he says. “And the average, everyday kid is, you know, saddled with a ton of things.”

His early workshops for aspiring young poets in San Francisco drew a melting pot of eager participants.

“The first kids who came were the kids who were already writing, and they were writing out in their own little neighborhoods or in their own little isolation, so they came to sort of meet other kids,” Kass says. “And right away, there was this incredible demographic diversity in the room ... from ethnic, to gender, to orientation, to how kids were doing in school. Some of them were total dropouts, some of the kids are straight-A students.”

Those early events grew rapidly into Youth Speaks, the national organization that Kass still leads, which, in addition to offering comprehensive programs in the San Francisco Bay area, networks with organizations across the country to bring spoken word to kids through high school clubs, writing workshops, and teen poetry slam contests. UW-Madison’s Office of Multicultural Initiatives operates similar programs, with students and poet mentors who perform for and lead workshops in middle schools, high schools, community centers, and other venues in Madison, Milwaukee, and throughout Wisconsin.

The national program is playing a role in redefining poetry itself by taking it back from institutions that focus too much on form and reverence for past masters, “letting kids understand,” says Kass, “that poetry is something that can be liberating, it can be educational, it can be entertaining. For teenagers, this is a time where you’re questioning so much and learning so much — it’s perfect. The ability for it to be an anchor in kids’ lives — which are oftentimes tumultuous — where they can always go to the pen and the paper and, no matter where they are, that provides an anchor for them, an opportunity to continue to engage with who they are and what they believe in the world.”

And youth spoken word poetry contests or performances can be remarkably different from the adult slam scene, which is notable for ego as much as art.

“The youth, for the most part, are taking the stage and using the opportunity to communicate directly with their peers about the specific thing that they want to talk about,” Kass says. With adult poets, he says, the vibe can be more about, “Look how great I am.”

Karlo Martinez lost his place midway through a performance before students at Middleton High School, a fifteen-minute drive west on University Avenue from the heart of campus. The award-winning student poet, now a senior at Madison West High School, was cruising through his poem, spitting rhymes and tapping his chest when his face went blank and the flow of words stopped. He started to pace, mouthing silently, for what probably felt to him like hours, trying to find the next line.

“It’s all right,” said one voice from the darkened seats of the auditorium, where Middleton students just weeks from their summer vacations had gathered for the midday assembly. “It’s okay,” others said, buoying him to reclaim the thread of his lost thought and finish the piece to loud applause, whistles, and cheers.

Martinez and the other poet mentors channel that support back to the students during visits to creative writing classes made up of juniors and seniors. Program director Josh Healey ’05 puts one class through a writing exercise, asking them to brainstorm stereotypes. “Dumb blonde,” “spoiled brat,” “carefree superstar,” and “outcast transgender” are offered up.

Healey directs the students to take on the character of a stereotype they’ve identified and write a short piece that starts with the line “I’m not who you think I am.” Healey tries to help push things along by posing questions for them to ponder as they write: “What part of it is true? What do you wish you could be? Who knows the real you? Why don’t people know the real you?”

The exercise achieves far more than simply illustrating that stereotypes are bad. It demonstrates, says Healey, “the power of telling stories and using your story to break down barriers.”

In another Middleton writing class, juniors and seniors break into groups with the mentors, who listen to them read original work and offer advice on both writing and performance. Their teacher, Chris Cummings, marvels as he watches his students engage with poetry.

“I don’t know how [the mentors] pull it off,” he says. “They shouldn’t be getting them to talk at all.”

The city of Madison’s four public high schools are within ten miles of campus, but despite the physical proximity, some students — particularly students of color — see the UW as out of reach, out of touch, or both. Ney saw spoken word as a vehicle to change that perception, by putting university resources into launching and supporting spoken word programs in the high schools.

That realization came in 2004, when he invited Kass, Youth Speaks Artistic Director Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and a few of the country’s top poets to perform on campus during Cinefest, a Latin film festival sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives. Ney organized workshops and performances by the artists at three Madison high schools, where the reaction was so passionate that students left their seats to do spoken word poetry freestyle from their diaries and notebooks. A few months later, Kass and his staff returned to Madison to run spoken word workshops in the schools and host poetry slams. The experience, Kass says, taught him more about the city of Madison in two weeks than he had learned in five years as a student on the UW campus.

Today Ney’s office has spoken word clubs at Madison’s East, La Follette, Memorial, and West high schools, with members taking part in local and national youth spoken word poetry competitions. The result, says Ney, is a “deep-seated cultural link” between students of color in Madison schools and the university. Teens who have never before set foot on campus are finally making the short trip to participate in cultural events such as a performance by Bamuthi, who was an interdisciplinary artist in residence during spring semester.

“This university, just by tapping into our own school district, could be as diverse as our school district. Our school district is a reflection of the broader United States,” Ney says.

And now, First Wave students, who will reside in the same residence hall and work on their art alongside one another in and out of the classroom, will help to build a pipeline between UW-Madison and students around the country engaged by spoken word and hip-hop, Ney says. Some UW poets have already performed at national conferences and are slated to perform at Madison Square Garden during a New York Knicks-sponsored college fair and poetry slam audition.

“Imagine you have a block of four kids who are the best young artists, going to a school, any school, but an urban school particularly, and doing a show, a twenty-minute show, in front of all 1,500 students and saying ‘Why don’t you come join us?’ ” Ney says. Instead of the expected admissions officers, “the people who make the pitch will be the students themselves.” And they make compelling messengers, offering prospective college students a glimpse of what their own experiences could be.

It took just one meeting for Darrell Bazzell ’84, UW-Madison’s vice chancellor for administration, to decide that the university should commit resources to a spoken word program on campus and in local high schools. He agreed to fund tuition for First Wave students during their first year, hoping to help leverage support from private donors through the UW Foundation to cover the remainder of their undergraduate education.

“What’s so powerful about that is [the program] cuts across all cultural lines,” Bazzell says. “This isn’t just a program for African-Americans or Latinos — there are majority students in the program. It cuts across all racial boundaries in a very profound way.”

That’s evident from looking at the membership of spoken word clubs in Madison schools and at the inaugural First Wave class: the poets and artists are African-American, white, Latino, Native American, Asian, and biracial.

“It’s not surprising that you see a higher proportion of students of color who use this medium, so to speak, because oftentimes in mainstream society we don’t always feel that there are mechanisms to express ourselves in ways that are meaningful and really let us basically tell our story,” says Bazzell, who is African-American. “The students who I hear talk, it really resonates with me, the messages they’re communicating. I come from an urban environment; I lived in lots of big cities growing up, so I, myself, experienced the same frustrations in terms of not really feeling that I had outlets to express myself in ways that people understood and appreciated. So, for me, part of it was just about creating an opportunity for self-expression.”

Jeff Chang, a journalist who wrote Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, agrees that the program can help bridge the campus with urban communities. “Far too many ‘elite’ universities have a distant relationship to the urban youths who need their resources and can potentially transform the campuses the most,” Chang says. “We’re talking about some of the brightest urban youths in the country coming to Madison. They’re so talented and thoughtful and moving that no one can help but be inspired by them.”

For young spoken word poets, their very personal, and sometimes painful, stories of rape, the death of a loved one, or struggles with depression or cultural identity are often the foundation of their earliest work. Once the students are exposed to other poets and literature and styles, Ney says, “their poetry develops and expands, and then it becomes more regional and national and then global. So you see these kids who begin with that raw, visceral poetry ending up with these sonnets and these forms that are more traditional lyrical forms that not only help them to succeed academically — often for the first time — but also make it hard to believe the kids are teenagers with the depth and breadth of their writing skills they’ve acquired.”

And for many students, the act of writing and performing gives them something more than they might have expected when they first started.

“I don’t want to sound corny, but I think, in a lot of ways, art, not just spoken word, has seriously saved my life on a couple of occasions,” says Kelsey Van Ert x’11, a poet and singer from St. Paul, Minnesota, who is African-American, white, and Latina. She first visited Madison in 2005, when she won an adult poetry slam contest, and is now one of half a dozen First Wave students who are the first in their families to go to college. Without First Wave, she says, she wouldn’t have considered enrolling at a “huge school” like UW-Madison. “That sense of community [will] really help me stay focused in my studies,” she says.

Four years ago, Van Ert wrote about the suicide of a friend, a twelve-year-old girl, in her poem “Yolanda.” At first, she couldn’t perform the work because it was too painful to think about her friend. In time, she began to perform it, finding that doing so was “incredibly healing.” Then, as she heard from others who had experienced similar tragedies, she learned that her performance achieved something else. “I realized that this piece can be used for change,” she says.

A caption in the paper revealed the truth
Of how young Yolanda stole her own youth.
So I did exactly what adults told me to do.
I talked to my teachers about it in school.
But they were (too) religious to hear me out
And that was my best friend they were talking about.
Oh how bad I wanted to say goodbye so
I could release all this pain I had inside.
But no one would drive me to her funeral.
And I got violent whenever my conservative classmates and teachers
told me Yolanda was in hell well
“She’s not in hell!”
I’d Yell.

The journey Van Ert and other First Wave students take each time they think about their lives, transform their thoughts into words, commit the words to paper, and speak the words aloud as others listen is a liberating and moving journey.

“If you write the piece and you memorize it and then you perform it, especially for the first time, you go somewhere else, you revisit that moment,” Van Ert says. “Whatever is hurting you ... it’s out there, you just let it go and you feel a lot lighter. And I feel like a lot of kids don’t understand ... how powerful that is, in any art form.”