This comprehensive review of Chicanx poetry considers the lyric poetry of Greater Mexico as an ongoing evolution of and conversation with varied poetic traditions at the crossroads of geopolitical, cultural, and expressive exchange. This chapter addresses this arc, beginning with oral forms such as the corrido, and examines the ascendency of poetry in the early borderlands press, which was anchored by colonial New Spanish lyric poetry. The focus then turns to the flourishinging of Chicano/a/x poetry in the 1960s through the 1980s via the establishment of Chicano/a/x publication outlets and independent printing presses as well as through Chicano/a/x-specific literary prizes. The chapter concludes by considering the form’s coevolution with Chicano/a/x identity and politics to the present day, including a return to oral forms such as slam poetry, and its evolving relationship with other Latino/a/x cultural productions.

This chapter traces the movement of slam and spoken-word poetry from a subjugated and lesser art form to an established and valid one in the early twenty-first century, while suggesting that these institutionalizing forces and desires can be caught up in anti-Blackness. The emergence of HBO’s Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry Jam in 2002 offered a highly produced and stylized televisual marker of contemporary spoken word and slam success, centering the young Black poetic voice in way that popularized a particular defiant Black aesthetic and had the general cultural consciousness assuming that slam was indeed a Black thing. The emergence of a new “quiet style” in locations such as the Minneapolis/St. Paul literary scene and the multimedia company Button Poetry can be seen, in contrast, as advancing the ideal of the disembodied performer who, through the rejection of theatrics, focuses on the “real” art of poetry.

Contending with Kei Miller’s declaration in ‘A Smaller Sound, A Lesser Fury: A Eulogy for Dub Poetry’ that the genre has died, this essay uses the lens of transition to demonstrate the continued vitality of this Jamaican-rooted performance and neoliterary genre that serves political and aesthetic needs of the variously disempowered. The essay suggests Miller misconceives what dubpoetry is, threatening its vital social work and doing a disservice to the older generation of dubpoets and their inheritors. Providing evidence that the majority of first-generation dubpoets continue to create new work, collaborate, develop new subgenres, and teach, the essay offers close readings of work by dubpoetry’s heirs. Jamaican dubpoetry band The No-Maddz, Jamaican-British spoken word poet Raymond Antrobus and Canadian dub inheritors Klyde Broox, d’bi.young anitafrika and Kaie Kellough are shown to effect presentational, generic, thematic/political and media transitions in and from dubpoetry.