Poetry was originally intended as oral/aural medium. It was language as song, performed for an audience practiced in the art of listening. The way a poem looked on the page was relatively meaningless until the advent of print technologies. Now, as digital media makes it possible for poets to publish their work as audio tracks, we may see poetry begin a natural migration back to its traditional form–performance art.
A good place to find some of these aural treats, try PennSound, an ongoing project at the University of Pennsylvania, committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives of poets performing their work. According to the PENNsound Manifesto, every project on its database “must be free and downloadable.” Sounds good to me, I visited the archive and downloaded Tracie Morris’ From Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful, which was performed at the Whitney Museum’s 2002 Biennial Exhibit.


Tracie’s work is extremely hard to come by, so I was thrilled when I found this. I can’t think of a better artist to represent the off-the-page digital instinct. Tracie’s poem uses broken and remixed language–so ubiquitous in our media saturated atmosphere–to present a conflicted inner dialogue about racial identity and cultural conceptions (or misconceptions) of beauty.