We have lost one of the best American poets of our time this week. Maggie Estep passed away on Wednesday in Albany of complications from a heart attack that she suffered at her home in Hudson on Sunday, February 9.
Maggie Estep was a spoken word poet who helped put poetry and spoken word on the map and launch the art in the mainstream in the 1990s. She was a driving force in popularizing slam poetry and was featured on “Def Poetry” on HBO, MTV’s “Spoken Word Unplugged”, and “United States of Poetry” on PBS. She shared the stage with Henry Rollins, Jim Carroll and John S. Hall and took part in the Free Your Mind spoken-word tour and made appearances at Lollapalooza ’94 and Woodstock ’94.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdxGvKhS6wc
Whitney Matheson of USA Today writes, “I was among the young women who was entertained, and even inspired, by Estep’s confrontational performances and Beat-inspired writings of life as a struggling artist in New York. In 1997 she published a semi-autobiographical novel, Diary of An Emotional Idiot, and she wrote several more books after that, including the critically praised “Ruby Murphy” trilogy of mystery novels.”
Estep was a performer who brought a tough, sarcastic, and explicit style to the stage. That style was inspiring and gave many young poets in those days the courage to speak up and breath life into the words that were scribbled in journals and diaries, waiting to be heard by the masses. She made poetry accessible and appealing to a greater audience that the art form had known before.
“It was a fluke,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “I was writing and someone dragged me to an open-mike situation. I read and did really well. I seemed to have an immediate affinity to do it. That’s sort of how my performance style developed. I was so scared. I was very introverted, very shy. I got so nervous, I’d just rush through things and just pace. It evolved into my signature.”
We are very saddened to hear of her passing and send the deepest condolences to those she left behind. She will never be forgotten as she as left her mark on all of us whenever we step on stage and perform our poetry.
Club Helsinki in Hudson will be hosting a memorial event to celebrating Maggie’s life this Saturday, February 15 starting at 11 a.m.
