What Is Poetry Slam? : The Introduction I Read This Morning
I opened my feature/Q&A at Frederick Community College with this prepared statement, which I wrote at 6 AM this morning.The audience was mainly college students and faculty with no Slam experience. Between this statement, 40 minutes of my poetry, and a nice Q&A we had an awesome time.
Enjoy.
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Let me begin with this:
The short answer to the question, “what is a poetry slam?” is this: it’s a mock competition in which poets get up on stage, share their work and are judged by an audience.
The question after that is, “So what?” Here is the so-what:
Last night at the hotel I was so graciously provided to stay in before coming here this morning, I received a phone call from a producer of an NPR show. She was putting together a segment featuring David Orr, a notable poetry columnist who had just released a new book about poetry, a so-called guide to modern poetry. I must point out that this is David Orr I’m talking about, so when I say “notable poetry columnist” I mean “writes about the stuff that he likes but is mostly known for writing about the stuff he doesn’t.” So when I got a call from the radio show producer last night about what I thought about the fact that he doesn’t mention Poetry Slam in the book despite its continued and overwhelming popularity two decades and running, I struggled to see why anybody should be surprised by that. That one of the most important developments in modern poetry in the last 20 years is missing from his book on modern poetry is equally no surprise. People like David Orr are civil enough, but they hate Poetry Slam.
Why?
If David Orr were here he might find some of the work I’m about to perform engaging and clever. I am not prone to the bombastic style that overwhelms a poem’s merits that I am sure he hates. I am a very pleasant performer of poetry. I even know when not to curse. I do not feel he would like my work sitting on the page so much. It looks all wrong by academic standards. But then, trying to read my work is a lot like trying to hear music by reading sheet music. This is true of a great many slam poets. We are largely performance poets who make their bones on the stage first, not the page, and many have to find their way to the power of the written word after we’ve come to a realization that we have something to say worth hearing. I know it’s backwards, but it works on all the important levels.
About those levels:
- I know a woman who quit drugs one week, started reading poetry at my show the next, and hasn’t fallen off the wagon since, going on ten years.
- One of the best poets I know is only a poet at all because she was driving around looking for a restroom and happened upon our venue. She saw a poem or two on her way in and out and decided she would come the next week and give it a shot.
- Every week I have more people in my audience with prescriptions for disorders - or needs them - than a free clinic.
All of these people stand on a stage, perform the stories of their lives and then let a room full of people judge their merits in a poetry slam. They do this over and over again. They take people’s number one fear - public speaking - and commit an act of sharing so frequently personal that it staggers the mind with its audacity. It is not always great art - many are not great poets - but there isn’t one who doesn’t want to be, even fleetingly, just once, one week out of the hundreds of weeks that make up their lives. Poetry slams don’t prove that you are good. They do not require that you be good. They merely ask that you try…very publicly and democratically and by fire. Poetry slams are the most democratic tool of the arts. What is more democratic than delivering your work to a body of strangers in a bar or a coffee shop or a theater of thousands or a television audience and saying, “Judge this simply based on whether I have touched your soul, on whether or not you LIKE it”? Sure, lots of art strives for this, but only the art that appears in poetry slams begs for it by definition.
So I’m going to read you some poems, good poems, poems that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Poetry Slams, wouldn’t exist except that I wanted to prove over and over that I could recreate myself, improve my worldview, or change something important in a roomful of people. Thanks to poetry slams I don’t believe that changing “even one person’s mind” is good enough. This is why slams continue to grow, how they have changed the face of poetry: because they challenge the poet’s very self, and push back in a literal court of public opinion the audience’s self. YOU know if you’ve given your best effort or if you’ve coasted by on your performance or good looks or rehashed, cliche messages. There is something very zen about poetry slams in that way, something you grasp differently than you might through publishing or writing workshops or open mics or - contrary to David Orr’s opinion - MFA programs. It is not a zen every slam poet reaches. Even within the slam we have our quests and sometimes the dragon of the self is overwhelming. The best slam poets understand that they aren’t beating other poets or Poetry, but themselves.
So I dedicate this performance to all of the poets out there who come out and pour themselves onto the stage and prove that even a little courage is a big deal. And I want to dedicate this PERFORMANCE to David Orr, who might have liked it against his better judgement (which is frequently off the mark and overly-severe, but whatever, man).
Let’s do this.
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I will add that, thanks to Keith Ruckus, I almost ended up on NPR tomorrow with Orr to discuss this very issue. Alas, at the last minute it was not to be. That's okay; I got a long drive home tomorrow. Plenty of time to think about what to say when we actually meet face-to-face.