Tongue on Flames – Preorder

Tongue on Flames is a testimony to the underground poetic energy that pulsed through New York from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. It’s a nocturnal dive into the city’s spaces dedicated to poetry: The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, St. Mark’s Church, Fez Cafe, Bowery Poetry Club, and many others.

The Nuyorican Poets Cafe—founded to give a stage to artists traditionally underrepresented in mainstream media and culture—became the cradle of New York’s weekly Poetry Slams: audience-judged poetry battles that were part performance, part competition. Bob Holman, a poetry activist, was the witty, humorous, and bold slam-master of the Friday Night Slams. He would later go on to found the Bowery Poetry Club.

The movement itself began in Chicago in 1986, launched by poet Marc Kelly Smith. Poetry Slams are improvised battles of spoken word poetry, a free and lively stage where great artists and unknown voices share the same space. They embrace a wide spectrum of styles, cultural roots, and approaches to writing and performance. Audience participation is at the heart of it all. As Holman once said, “judges picked whimsically from the audience […] 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 brings together an extensive selection of Pallotta’s photographs and seven textual contributions from defining voices of the era—Bob Holman, Paul Beatty, Patricia Smith, Janice Erlbaum, Pedro Pietri, Sapphire, and John Giorno—alongside a critical essay by Michele Bertolino.

The project is supported by Strategia Fotografia 2024, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.