POETRY SLAM TO POETRY JAM. I first experienced the power of performed poetry in the mid-Eighties, when I attended readings by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Robert DeNiro was at one Yevtushendo tribute at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, reading from "Babi Yar," but his rendition wasn't the one that blew me away. To my surprise, DeNiro's performance was pretty much the kind of blasé poetry reading I had come to expect, lacking the intensity of his screen and stage performances. (My favorite DeNiro moment that evening occurred after we had evacuated the building due to a bomb scare. The star of Taxi Driver returned my "goodbye" wave as he departed in the backseat of a cab.)

It was not DeNiro, but Yevtushenko himself who raised my poetic consciousness at the church and another event with Allen Ginsberg at the Village Gate. Yevtushenko's dramatic, incantatory readings made me realize just how powerful a poetry recital could be, integrating poetics with singing and dramatics. Suddenly I had a much better idea of how classical poets had worked their magic.

I had similar experiences attending poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café about ten years ago. The performances were wildly inconsistent, but the brilliantly ad-libbed hosting of MC Bob Holman and the readings by poets such as Maggie Estep, Hal Sirowitz, and Edwin Torres were thrilling, titillating, tickling, and even transcendent at times.

Another poet I saw at the Nuyorican slams was Tracie Morris, but it wasn't until I saw her at another venue that I witnessed how powerful her own performances could be. That venue was Harlem's Apollo Theater, at a program devoted to the Roots of Hiphop. Morris delivered a poem that I had heard before at the Nuyorican, but at the Apollo I saw for the first time how a hiphop crowd responded to her, clapping in time and shouting back at her.

The Nuyorican crowd had never grooved along with a poet the way the Apollo crowd did. At the Apollo, Morris was in her element. Suddenly, she struck me as a much more moving poet than I had suspected her of being.

Over the years, performance poetry continued to merge along with hiphop into mainstream US culture, in books, movies, and audio recordings as well as live events. And now Russell Simmons, producer of HBO's Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, is now presenting the critically-acclaimed Broadway poetry revue Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.

When the show's nine poets took the stage last night, I couldn't ignore how they seemed to have been packaged like hiphop poetry's version of the Spice Girls or the Backstreet Boys. They were diverse in a Benetton kind of way, charismatic and obviously "representative" of different types, though blondes were only present in the poems themselves. The poets flaunted their "differences" like badges, clearly buying into identity politics, often along ethnic and class lines.

But once the performances were underway, the intensity of the readings eliminated most of my skepticism about the packaging. Like other poetry performances I admired, the show offered great examples of the form as a means of entertainment, enlightenment, and exuberant self-expression. The performers excelled at keeping the audience in their sway—as attuned to the wordplay as the Apollo audience had been—adding to the theatrics in the same way.

Now that hiphop poetry has come out of the giddy world of slams and arrived mass-marketed in the media and the Broadway stage, I wonder whether it will continue to emerge as a newly popular form of literary entertainment. So far it's been a thrill to see it take shape over the past two decades.