The sad news is spreading today via East Village blog EV Grieve that '90s-era spoken word poetry celebrity Maggie Estep died of complications Monday following a massive heart attack on Friday. She was 50 years old.
If you were a teen or twentysomething in the 90s you probably heard Estep at least a dozen times on MTV. She was a fixture for a few years there, touring with Lollapalooza and appearing on the Def Poetry Jam, and making enough appearances during the heyday of grunge poetry hipness that the NYT dubbed her The Spoken Word Star in 1994. She even had the honor of being mocked by Beavis and Butthead, and served as a kind of punk poet laureate for the younger half of Generation X.
Estep set some of her work to grunge-y rock on albums like No More Mister Nice Girl, and as the Onion AV Club writes today, "Tracks like 'I'm Not A Normal Girl' and 'The Stupid Jerk I'm Obsessed With' found Estep embracing her own neuroses and taking aim at boringly conventional idiots — two of the guiding philosophies of Generation X."
Poems like "I'm an Emotional Idiot" showed her humor-infused, irony-tinged angst at its most distilled. Hear her read it live at the Def Poetry Jam below.
As revealed in that 20-year-old Times profile, Estep dropped out of high school at 17 and moved to New York in 1980 where she tried her hand at go-go dancing, dated punk musicians, and developed a heroin habit. She wouldn't start writing poetry until entering a rehab facility in the mid-80s, and ultimately she decided to attend the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. She would later become a fixture and frequent poetry slam winner at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Village, where MTV would end up scouting people for their spoken word specials in 1993.
In recent years she became a prolific novelist, writing mystery novels, dark comedies, and most recently 2009's Alice Fantastic, a story of "three eccentric women, seventeen dogs, and assorted lovers" centered around horse racing.
She was living in suddenly trendy Hudson, New York, teaching yoga, beginning a career in real estate, and was at work on a novel called The Story of Giants at the time of her death. This is her last piece of published writing, published on her blog on February 7, a little essay called "Strippers, Sluts, and Umlauts" in which she looks back on her brief career as a stripper. In typically self-deprecating style, she begins with the thought, "I always used to figure if I got really broke, I could be a stripper again but, at this point, I wouldn’t be getting top dollar."
Below, most poignantly, one of her last TV appearances, reading her poem "Happy" on the Def Poetry Jam in 2004.
And here she is at a reading in Rhinebeck, NY hugging writer Chloe Caldwell on February 7.
