Who Needs Poetry?
Photographer Lina Pallotta was taken in as family within New York City’s underground poetry circles of the 90s and 2000s. Decades later, her book Tongue on Flames reflects on the legacy of that community, and on what it can still offer today.
By Gaia Squarci. Photographs by Lina Pallotta.
“I can’t remember how it started. I found myself in the middle of it.” Poetry slams — improvised spoken word battles — were born in Chicago in 1986 with poet Marc Kelly Smith and brought to New York by Bob Holman. In the Lower East Side of the 90s, places like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Bowery Poetry Club and St. Mark’s Church became hubs of counterculture and independent thinking.
That’s the thing about subcultures: you can ignore them entirely, and life goes on. But the moment you step inside, that space expands into a network of recognition and solidarity. In this case, the network ranged from figures like Saul Williams and Patti Smith to voices yet unheard.
Photographing poetry is a daunting task, but Lina Pallotta focused on the energy surrounding it. The book moves through flashes of faces, gazes, gestures, surfacing from the black pages like unstable memories. Audience participation was at the core of those nights. As Bob Holman put it, judges “rate the poem between 0 — a poem that should never have been written — and a 10!, a poem that causes mutual simultaneous orgasm throughout the audience.”
Tongue on Flames also brings together poems by Paul Beatty, Patricia Smith, Janice Erlbaum, Pedro Pietri, Sapphire and John Giorno, alongside an opening poem by Holman, written in the 90s anticipating this book. “I think that sense of community remains,” says the author.
Her approach has always been subjective, just like the language of the slam, which turns individual experience into something shared. Lina Pallotta hopes the book reaches beyond those already interested in poetry, as a space of presence not meant to be polished, but to hold an energy that embraces all kinds of emotion. Raw, dirty, honest, imperfect, uncomfortable.
Tongue on Flames is published by Nero Editions and available at €32.
