POETRY SLAMMING

ON TO THE CHAMPIONSHIPS | August 8th 2008

Del Far/flickr

Competitive poetry might seem like an oxymoron, but this cathartic, performative form has a wide following. Alex Traub beholds New York's teams on their way to this week's national championships ... 

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

"I am faceless bullets fired from crooked guns!" bellows Jonathan Sanz, a poet performing at the Nuyorican Poet's Café. He says the line fiercely and slowly, making eye contact with as many poetry enthusiasts as possible. Satisfied, he waits another few seconds before continuing his reading.

It had been hours earlier when, after dropping a few relevant names and giving a smile to the bouncer, I was ushered past a line of skinny-jeaned, long-haired 20-somethings snaking down 3rd street in Manhattan's Alphabet City. Entering the café, the lone red-brick wall behind the stage looked stark in the otherwise black-box theatre setting. I quickly found a table near the front, where I was soon joined by a man who introduced himself as ‘Ngoma' (the lone name on his business card as well). He claimed to be a "multi-instrumentalist, performance poet, paradigm shifter, reiki 2 practioner, and sound healer." I grunted something about sound healing, as it was one of the two professions I recognised. His bowler hat and dreaded hair nodded and shook in eager agreement.  We were both there to witness the evening's poetry slam.

First invented in 1984 by Marc Smith, a construction-worker turned poet, poetry slams are competitions of spoken-word poetry. In a slam, participants get on stage and read for no more than three minutes and ten seconds; those who exceed this limit are penalised. The only other rules are that poets must read their own work and are prohibited from using props. Five audience members are randomly appointed judges who assess each poem with a score from one to ten (with their own placards, Olympics style). The highest and lowest scores are dropped, granting each poet a total score between zero and 30. The competitor with the most points after the slam is over (generally three to four rounds) is declared the victor.

These basic guidelines apply for all slams, including the lit-sport's Super Bowl: the National Poetry Slam. There are many niche championships, though, from the Nerd Slam to the Women of the World Poetry Slam; accommodations are made for every demographical misfit or minority. This year's team finals are being held this week, from August 3rd to the 9th, in Madison, Wisconsin, and three New York teams (regular slam favourites) have gone to compete. These are the very people I witnessed challenge each other at the Nuyorican, Ngoma chatting away by my side.

*****

Many slams begin with a "sacrificial poet", who performs his own work but is not affiliated with any team. Tonight begins with someone who calls himself Uninvited. High scores are thrown up as he plays to the crowd, deriding those who appointed "Communist crackheads to run FEMA," knocking George Bush's sexuality (making references to the vice president's first name) and invoking the story of Sean Bell, an unarmed man who was killed by New York police last year.

With that out of the way, the real slam begins. There are four rounds, for which each team delivers a new poet. The Nuyorican team first sends up portly Jamal St John, who offers a diatribe against the American femme idéale. He begins by proclaiming that his "queens are queen-sized", and then eulogizes "the beauty of the black female body...before they asked you to do Pilates." Finally, after every woman in the audience has fallen in love with him, he declares proudly that "real women have curves!" He coaxes an easy 29 points from the charmed judges. 

Urbana, the team from the Bowery Poetry Café, strikes back in the next round. Two poets, Soulful Jones and Kesed, deliver something together that begins: "Ever wanted to pacify the angry black man?" The poem then becomes a mock-infomercial performance piece, in which Kesed plays the "angry black man" and Jones a salesperson. As Kesed says "You know I hate white..." Jones interrupts with "...lilies", finishing the sentence with a smile. The mostly black audience breaks out in laughter. I, like other white people in attendance, shift in my seat and laugh too heartily at the punchlines. They receive a 30--the only perfect score of the night.

Their subject matter is not as singular as their score, though. In fact, race is the main topic of the night, followed by politics and sexuality. The poems tend to come from the self-perceived margins, with black people writing about race, Democrats about politics and women about sexuality. This lends slams a uniquely cathartic and topical bent.

The poets from the louderARTS project, another arts collective and the final New York team on its way to Madison, prove to be the least crowd-pleasing, the most offbeat and, not coincidentally, the most interesting. Jeanann Verlee, a short, red-headed and heavily tattooed poet with piercing green eyes, is a rare white performer and the only white female, thus far. She reads a poem from the point of view of Charles Chapman, a man falsely convicted of rape who was exonerated years later. Pointing to the ground, she ends the poem chillingly: "there is no resurrection here". 

Marty McConnell, the next louderARTS poet, talks about the life of a drag king (or her own life as one, I wonder). The poem accuses a man of being a "sucker for the sideshow", and describes her plans for "flashing the twat behind the dildo." Yet the poem manages to be a serious commentary on gender roles and sexuality. LouderARTS gets last place, with Urbana finishing first and the Nuyorican a close second. 

Later in the evening, I ask Verlee if I can watch her team rehearse before the National Poetry Slam. Several e-mails later, I have plans to visit them in Brooklyn over the weekend.

*****

Thirteen F-train stops and 25 blocks into Brooklyn, I find myself in an extremely large and seemingly vacant apartment building off of Ocean Avenue. Inside I find a tall, hairy man cradling a baby, a pre-teen with a quizzical stare and four women crowded around a table. I recognise both Verlee and McConnell; the other two, I soon learn, are Rachel McKibbens, another team-mate (it is her apartment, her pre-teen, her husband and baby), and Lynne Procope, the team's coach.

In a corner of the room stands a modern-day curio cabinet: a breakfront filled with everything from action figures to vintage dolls to a giant plastic skull on a glass-domed cake platter wearing a sleep-mask. The same wall bears a giant wooden deer's head, a framed case of dead insects and three cat masks. McKibbons, big-figured, pale-skinned, well-tattooed and surprisingly maternal, offers me some baguette with smoked Gouda.  We all munch away.

"Yes, it is absurd," says Verlee, about the seeming oxymoron of competitive poetry. "What is delightful," she carefully adds, "is it has piqued the interest of people who would never come to see poetry." 

Everyone jumps in. "As a society we're really interested in winners," posits Procope in her lilting, melodic accent. "Our slam is different. It celebrates really intelligent work. We even risk becoming inaccessible. It risks making people feel stupid." Does performing for randomly chosen judges encourage pandering? "You can't [just] say 'poems about having a rough childhood are pandering'," McConnell clarifies. She adds that poets "make tons of hard choices." Even so, Procope admits to a preponderance of poetry about "violence in schools, blackness, middle passage, womanhood." These poems, she says, run the risk of presenting "nothing new or difficult, no challenge...just repetition." 

Verlee's work seemed particularly out of place among the other spoken-word performances at the Nuyorican. "I've been told I'm weird because my poetry is more poetic [than most]", she acknowledges, "but it does well in slams". Verlee is quick to point out that "slam poetry is not a form". McConnell agrees, and neither woman accepts the label "slam poet". 

McKibbons points out that, in fact, both she and Verlee have theatre backgrounds. They all agree that their poetry is fundamentally performative, but they also understand themselves as writers, and believe their work holds up on paper alone. McConnell reckons that one of the ultimate benefits of slam is that "performance releases...new meaning. If it's not releasing new meaning," she ventures, "then why bother?" Slam is a way to widen an audience and interpret work, but that does not make it a lifestyle or profession. Rather, it is a way of icing the literary cake.

*****

Slam enjoys a unique feeling of community and self-sustainability. Slam poets often aspire to association with the Beat movement: I challenge you to find a spoken-word venue that does not feature the words "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..." on stage, around the bar or at least in a bathroom stall.

In some ways, the comparison is valid. Like the Beats, slam poets inspire each other's work, buy each other's books, write their own manifestos and histories, and create their own venues. But while Beat poets aspired to be "Beat", slammers rarely accept the label "slam poet". Perhaps that is why the Beats consisted of a tightly branded group of under a dozen friends, and why slam has 75 teams at this year's championships.

(Alex Traub is a writer based in New York.)