It's My Blog and I'll Critique If I Want To ...

[ocvictor]

Very sorry to anyone who's annoyed at the sheer amount of navel-gazing poetry slam theory I've been spewing lately. I'm working on writing something, and the blog's always been my best sounding board, and frequently, I find myself arguing against myself, just to test things out in my head.

Still, I understand slam's more than an academic concept to

Comments

[hot_rod_poet]

Yeah, it's a dangerous road to go down, 'cause I'm sloppy in my posts too. Posts/columns/articles like his annoy me, though, and so I fight dirty and pick on his contractions skillz.

Maybe if slam was explained in publishing-world terms to some of these people, they'd understand it more: Local slams are unsolicited submissions, the slush pile. Anybody can send in any awesomeness or crappiness they want. The audience and the agents and the booking hosts are collectively the interns, wading through what is presented to them to decide who gets features or goes to iWPS or Rustbelt or whatever. Those competitions are the journals. And some journals are awesome and some are spotty and some are armpit-wipers. From there, "getting a book deal" is equivalent to stringing together enough paying gigs or national slam cred so that you don't have to play the slam game to get recognition, you earn it on your own.

We can make a little conversion table that shows these equivalencies and those academics rolling into one slam a year with a 40 oz. of Haterade already half-drank can laminate the little card and put it in their wallet and reality-check their scale every so often and realize that the people on stage are trying to make good art--with varying success--just like so many other people submitting heartfelt-but-not-good poems to journals or putting up Radioheadesque songs on MySpace or entering watercolors in county fairs. All might be awesome art, but don't expect it all to be unique.

ok, MUST. STOP. RANTING. MUST. WRITE. POEMS.