Eighteen years ago, Gil Scott-Heron warned that the revolution would not be televised. Predating public-access cable, camcorders and even pay-per-view, his prophecy has in some ways proved shortsighted. But his fingering of a media power structure was dead on. Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman nails the same conspiratorial culprit on Black and Tan Club; in a poem called "The American Urban Camp" she wryly imagines the tacit proclamation that bans black art: "Black works must be monitored. If they appear on television, they must appear only in comic or fantastic form. The black way of life must not be allowed to clutter the public air, public libraries or other public communication media."

Black and Tan and JazzSpeak, two spoken-word compilations produced by Harvey Robert Kubernik – producer of the 1990 Hollyword compilation and project coordinator for The Jack Kerouac Collection – show that even if such a proclamation exists somewhere, it hasn't shut folks up. In Los Angeles, where Kubernik and the bulk of the artists presented are from, the new hot spots are not dance or rock clubs but poetry cafés. Black and Tan – whose artists are all Southern Californians and mostly black or Latino – documents this street literary renaissance in all its multicultural splendor; voices from South Central and East L.A., Venice and Watts flow like a molten mosaic. The work ranges in style from Marisela Norte's lyric "Lost in Los," to the time-traveling cold anger of performance trio Black-madrid ("Invitation to Cut City") and Michelle T. Clinton's mock-confessional "The 100th Boyfriend," to Paul Body's anecdotal black-rock history lesson. Throughout the work, there is a sense of honesty, intimate and direct – as if the writers' need to tell their L.A. stories has kept them close to the flame of truth from which the abstract poets of academia have wandered.

JazzSpeak, a celebration of the music of the Black and Tan Club, unfortunately plays into clichéd associations of poetry with be-bop and berets; coproducer Jonathan Haft even calls his band the Beat Hotel. Kubernik indulges his worst L.A. tendencies, paying more attention to the profile of the poet and the number of jazz names dropped than to the quality of the work: Nothing is as insufferable as bad poetry, especially when it's Burton Cummings (yes, of the Guess Who) grousing about Wynton Marsalis. Works by such noted writers as Amiri Baraka, Michael McClure and Ishmael Reed counterbalance such awfulness, but too often, JazzSpeak sounds more dated than historic.

Tellingly, rap, the inspirational center of the new poetry, is completely missing from these compilations; just because it's on television doesn't mean it's not revolutionary. The process by which people overthrow cultural tyranny may not be broadcast on the nightly news, but it will be rapped over block-party sound systems, whispered at corner bodegas, proclaimed by Puerto Rican poet-priests and scattered over sax riffs in an L.A. studio. Both albums are available from New Alliance Records, P.O. Box 1389, Lawndale, CA 90260. (RS 621)

EVELYN MCDONNELL