Poetry Slam: You're Doing It Wrong
I recently composed a very long treatise on Slam and where I thought it should go. I posted it online for public consumption and comment in December of 2011 (“Poetry Slam: The Next Level”). The last part of that document contained a section entitled “Death by Slam: The Competition and how it will kill NPS & Slam”. As notorious as it sounds, this section as released didn’t contain all of the information I wanted to put in it, mostly because I wanted to keep the overall point of the document aimed at looking at solutions. In the interest of getting to the things poets should do to keep Slam relevant and awesome, I did not dig too deep into what I believe the actual root of the problem is. I will seek to rectify that now by focusing ONLY on the problem. Please note that this piece should not be taken whole without at least referencing my previous effort. This is more of an addendum than a separate platform.
In 2008 I wrote an article about poetry slams for the internationally focused journal World Literature Today (Jan/Feb 2008) in which I describe the movement as the “ultimate democracy in art”. When I wrote that four years ago I was referring specifically to the way in which audiences determine the degree of discourse with poetry in a specific moment in time, how Slam asks the audience for the art it presents to weigh in emotionally, verbally and physically on the art - and sometimes artists - before them. What was equally democratic about Slam that the article didn’t elaborate on was how Slam as a movement generates the engine that makes the movement possible, specifically the organization of it, and how those changes define what it art it presents. So let’s get into that now.
I’d like to lead this essay with a partial quote I made in response to my friend Bill MacMillan’s essay on Slam a couple of days ago:
“...it's no coincidence that Slam was created from the imagination of people who didn't care about scores and is being demolished by the values of people who do.”
In slam, the desire to accommodate all poetry somehow turned into an accommodation of all motivations, and this is where Slam fell off. Remember: the goal wasn’t ever to declare a genuine or uncontestable winner, or a best team or a best poet; the goal was - and on paper remains - to engage and instill in audiences a love of poetry. You may think you’re accomplishing that task by doing your awesome poem, and Slam wants very much for that to be true. It certainly allows for that. It doesn’t tell you what kind of poetry or which poem to perform. It leaves those decisions solely up to you, the artist. And the second you step down off that stage at the end of your poem, you have accomplished that goal, haven’t you? You got to perform what you wanted the way you wanted to and people got to hear you. Congratulations!
But wait: what was my score? you want to know. Did I help my team? What does a 9.7 mean? What do three 9.7s mean?
And while this looks like where the problem starts, it isn’t. The problem started when you made the decision to read Poem X to net Score Y, for whatever reason. It might have even started when you sat down to compose your poem, thinking about how it might “do” in a slam. (Don’t lie to me. I know you have done it.) You, my friend, have forgotten the basic point of Slam, and while the points may not be the point, there is one point that is: we are here for the audience as servants of poetry, not as servants of a competition in the interest of ourselves. So: Slam has not gone off mission. Slam poets have gone off mission. This would have happened a long time ago, mind you. By the time SlamNation was being filmed in 1996 this was probably already off the rails.
Scores by themselves are nothing. They are numbers, crude and quickly-determined representations of the thoughts of five randomly selected people in a room, probably hearing poetry for the first time in many cases. These are not sterling judges of art. These are people out to have a good time, or out on a date, or culture seekers jiving on the level of an art gallery hop. And Slam would have it no other way! This is who art is FOR, Slam says. Whoever walks in off the street should not be surprised that poetry exists. Poetry should not be beholden to the masters of its craft or its institutional gatekeepers. The institution can and should sometimes be a bar, Slam says. But not because these are great places to have art contests, which is what people who care about scores don’t seem to be able to retain as a goal, value or philosophy, yet seek to impose upon the infrastructure of slam and slam poets every day.
I’m not one of those people who think we should get rid of scoring. I don’t need another open mic in my life. Scoring is a tool and for some poets it is a draw and for some audiences it is a fine caprice. I have nothing against math. I have everything against pretending that math MEANS anything in a poetry slam.
This is not to say the numbers mean NOTHING. At the very least they grossly tell us what five people thought of a poem which, while not exactly discourse, is information that taken as a whole could tell an artist something about their performance or the content of their work and if it succeeds as an expression or a story or a tool...BUT THAT’S IT.
People who think scoring is overly important to Slam are guilty of a separate crime as well: they want to make a stand for making Slam a genuine contest, yet almost never want to take the step that would truly begin to make that a reality: handpick qualified judges of poetry. I don’t want to go too far down this road because that’s a lecture unto itself (and yes, I know it was tried before at a National Poetry Slam many years ago and I would venture that it was done wrong then and has little bearing here), but it would be remiss to talk about how all of these contest elements are batted around every other year, seemingly in earnest, while this most basic principle of contests goes largely dismissed. Not that I’m surprised, mind you. People who think Slam is something to be gamed on for fun or profit don’t want real judging. I mean, they want a game, not a contest. But when they apply contest values and contest focus to the game, it’s not a game anymore…it’s a contest. The National Scrabble tournament isn’t a game anymore; it’s a contest, with real scores, real enforcement, real applications and real prizes. Here’s the thing about professional Scrabble (and professional poker, professional Magic: The Gathering, and professional Monopoly, which are all games I love and play incessantly that also have professional level national contests): I don’t play in those tournaments, not because I might not be good enough, but because they’re not designed for people like me. They’re designed for people who like to play for money or stature or have serious competitive streaks instead of personalities. They’re not entirely fun ventures (unless you elicit fun from stress, money, stature or competing). And I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to commit hours, days, weeks or years to anything that’s supposed to be fun that isn’t once you apply certain elements to it. Life is too short and I can have a better time on my couch for free.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean we should exclude people who care about points from participating. Slam is indeed for everyone! But that should have meant that you can play if you’re willing to do it THE WAY IT WAS MEANT TO BE DONE, for the REASONS IT WAS MEANT TO EXIST. Slam’s problem is that we’ve always interpreted that to mean that everyone should have a say in how it’s realized. Everyone shouldn’t. What we should have done was been more clear about what it was for early on and stuck to those guns. The minute one of the poets said, “You know, things would be more fair if…” they should have been kicked out of the room. Making things more fair means making things more serious, increasing the stakes in the one element that was supposed to mean the least: the scores. The mantra “The points are not the point, the point is poetry” isn’t strong enough. The mantra now should be, “If you care about the points you’re doing it wrong.”
None of this is without solution. We took a big stab at this at NPS a few years back by removing individual rankings (and lo, the world did not in fact end and I would posit that NPS got better as an event). But we could do more. Here are my two additions to the pile of ideas meant to get Slam back on track at the level of “competition” (alongside the other stuff I wrote in that other 26-page treatise):
1) Cut the rulebook in half.
I don’t mean get rid of authorship or team piece rules. These rules are in line with why and how art should be created originally, so let’s keep them for the few of us who simply can’t understand that you shouldn’t cheat and lie to make art, fine. But the costume rule? The prop rule? Dump ‘em. These are contest rules made by people who care about how “fair” a slam is. We should forget all pretense to fairness and throw all of our energy as artists and people who believe in the transformative power of poetry into putting on the most engaging, most uplifting, most human spirit rooted showcase of art possible. Fairness is a contest artifice in Slam, and so long as you don’t have real judges you don’t have a real contest. Rules like this make us all look and sound alike, make us think alike, make us use one another as touchstones when we should be looking at what other arts have to teach us about our own.
So keep the lie, the tool of scoring. It still “works”. But we have to get the poets to stop making us care about this, and focusing our energy on developing things in a way that makes this important. It is SO unimportant. I’ve got an impressive resume for a poet with no formal training, no degree and coming out of a small art scene. I didn’t need to place in any national competitions to make that happen,. I just had to be the poet that people heard about, the guy they wanted to see, the guy whose work they wanted to read. I know plenty of poets who haven’t won slams that are more respected, booked and better than many of the ones who have. If I can be myself - whatever that means in AND out of Slam - and push my art and still have those things be original and productive and working without caring about scores, why would I ever change that? And why should we as a community ever promote any idea, rule or person that wants to?
The day the rulebook went over five pages, we lost this fight to people who missed the point.
2) Change the time limits of rounds to 1-, 2-, 3- and 4-minute rounds.
I know you travelled across the country to perform your poetry. I know it cost a lot of money and you asked for a lot of support from your community to get there. You’ll be damned if you’re going to come to Nationals to read a couple of one-minute poems. I get it, truly I do. I am not saying you should come to Nationals to read a one minute poem, even two of them. I would never tell you how you and your poets should spend your locally-earned resources (unless you asked me first). But I WOULD tell you that maybe Nationals isn’t for you.
Twelve 3-minute poems used to be kind of engaging, but as scores became more important and there seemed to be more at stake if you won a slam (another value that got out of wack), the work started to change, en masse. The voices got eerily similar, the syntax, the rhythms. The performances began to blend between teams, some of whom had never been in a room before that bout. People’s inflections rose on the same beats and dropped in the same places. And don’t get me started on the content! For all the jokes that pepper discussions among Slam poets about race cards and rape poems, most of them are just as guilty as the poets they’re joking about. Where is the joy in all of this? I thought I was going to come see a show that uplifted me as a person, that would expose to me a fresh and meaningful insight into the human condition! Something I could RELATE to, not as a victim for two hours, but as a person who watches movies or laughs at 30 Rock over the office water cooler or plays Angry Birds; that might bring forth a tear or a laugh, not just a grunt (and my god, why are all of these people snapping their fingers at every other word? Are they even listening to what they’re co-signing?). As an audience member I walk away from many bouts thinking that slam poets have no hobbies or peace of mind whatsoever, that they take joy in nothing, that they must all be suicide hotline counselors or undercover SVU detectives. And while I don’t want to make light of people’s genuine offerings, you should know that it does not come without psychic consequence in the grand scheme of your art, and that consequence is very likely to be that you miss your audience and mission entirely.
As an audience member, not as a SlamMaster or a poet or president or anything else, let me say this: 12 3-minute poems that mostly sound alike are BORING. A show in which half of the poems are about the same devastating acts of humanity is not life-changing; it is BORING. A bout in which half of the poets all sound like Anis Mojgani (whose work I love) or Rachel McKibbens (whose work I will have laid in my grave) is BORING. A team that all sounds like their coach is BORING. An all-black team whose poems are all about racism is BORING. An all-woman team whose work is all identity-based is BORING. None of your tattoos or haircuts are engaging enough to make me not be bored by this. And while influence of young poets entering Slam has a lot to do with this, and the exodus of older voices in Slam that didn’t have to contend with these influences certainly has a lot to do with this, a lot of this would go away if the scores and the rules were re-prioritized or jettisoned altogether.
The Midwest poetry Slam League (MPSL) understood that. It demanded that teams have at least 1 group piece and that there be a free-for-all; round that’s only rule was time; you could bring in costumes, music - whatever - in that round. And while the MPSL isn’t around anymore, it was fun while it lasted and it generated a lot of interest in poetry and a lot of great work and relationships. It shored up the region’s awareness of itself for both audiences and organizers and it did so with a show that was less than an hour long, exposing poets top the rewards to be had in their own backyards. Now, the last thing many of the Midwest organizers wanted to do was be on the hook for yet another competition, so it was very important that anything else we signed up for that looked like a slam had to not FEEL like a slam. And that’s how it was run: few rules, reasonable commitments, emphasis on fun. And audiences loved it. And the poets enjoyed getting to stretch their limbs. The 1-, 2-, 3- and 4-minute rounds you have in iWPS and WOWps? Those came out of the trial runs done with this format in the MPSL.
Changing the round times doesn’t make this go away overnight, but it at least forces the poets to think outside of their normal rhythms, gimmicks and influences. It would compel some of us to turn to, I don’t know, poetry outside of Slam to see how poets before and around us wrote anything less than 3-minutes long. And so on.
In conclusion, Harold Bloom once famously said that he thought poetry slams were “the death of art”. Without putting too many words in his mouth I think it fair to say that he was speaking to what slams let in the door in the name of poetry, meaning the work was largely sub-par and rote. Oh Harold, if you only knew. Slam isn’t going to die, and lord knows the national competitions aren’t where Slam lives every other week of the year. Slam is fine and continues to grow, and it is largely recession proof. Slam isn’t NPS alone. NPS isn’t even close to being what 50% of what Slam is philosophically or physically. But NPS is certainly where Slam best shows itself to the world at large and it is my hope that we get back to what it was for, not what it allows.
Those of you who care about scores - on whatever level - should know that you are here at Slam’s indulgence. You are not what Slam was meant to BE.
In 2008 I wrote an article about poetry slams for the internationally focused journal World Literature Today (Jan/Feb 2008) in which I describe the movement as the “ultimate democracy in art”. When I wrote that four years ago I was referring specifically to the way in which audiences determine the degree of discourse with poetry in a specific moment in time, how Slam asks the audience for the art it presents to weigh in emotionally, verbally and physically on the art - and sometimes artists - before them. What was equally democratic about Slam that the article didn’t elaborate on was how Slam as a movement generates the engine that makes the movement possible, specifically the organization of it, and how those changes define what it art it presents. So let’s get into that now.
I’d like to lead this essay with a partial quote I made in response to my friend Bill MacMillan’s essay on Slam a couple of days ago:
“...it's no coincidence that Slam was created from the imagination of people who didn't care about scores and is being demolished by the values of people who do.”
In slam, the desire to accommodate all poetry somehow turned into an accommodation of all motivations, and this is where Slam fell off. Remember: the goal wasn’t ever to declare a genuine or uncontestable winner, or a best team or a best poet; the goal was - and on paper remains - to engage and instill in audiences a love of poetry. You may think you’re accomplishing that task by doing your awesome poem, and Slam wants very much for that to be true. It certainly allows for that. It doesn’t tell you what kind of poetry or which poem to perform. It leaves those decisions solely up to you, the artist. And the second you step down off that stage at the end of your poem, you have accomplished that goal, haven’t you? You got to perform what you wanted the way you wanted to and people got to hear you. Congratulations!
But wait: what was my score? you want to know. Did I help my team? What does a 9.7 mean? What do three 9.7s mean?
And while this looks like where the problem starts, it isn’t. The problem started when you made the decision to read Poem X to net Score Y, for whatever reason. It might have even started when you sat down to compose your poem, thinking about how it might “do” in a slam. (Don’t lie to me. I know you have done it.) You, my friend, have forgotten the basic point of Slam, and while the points may not be the point, there is one point that is: we are here for the audience as servants of poetry, not as servants of a competition in the interest of ourselves. So: Slam has not gone off mission. Slam poets have gone off mission. This would have happened a long time ago, mind you. By the time SlamNation was being filmed in 1996 this was probably already off the rails.
Scores by themselves are nothing. They are numbers, crude and quickly-determined representations of the thoughts of five randomly selected people in a room, probably hearing poetry for the first time in many cases. These are not sterling judges of art. These are people out to have a good time, or out on a date, or culture seekers jiving on the level of an art gallery hop. And Slam would have it no other way! This is who art is FOR, Slam says. Whoever walks in off the street should not be surprised that poetry exists. Poetry should not be beholden to the masters of its craft or its institutional gatekeepers. The institution can and should sometimes be a bar, Slam says. But not because these are great places to have art contests, which is what people who care about scores don’t seem to be able to retain as a goal, value or philosophy, yet seek to impose upon the infrastructure of slam and slam poets every day.
I’m not one of those people who think we should get rid of scoring. I don’t need another open mic in my life. Scoring is a tool and for some poets it is a draw and for some audiences it is a fine caprice. I have nothing against math. I have everything against pretending that math MEANS anything in a poetry slam.
This is not to say the numbers mean NOTHING. At the very least they grossly tell us what five people thought of a poem which, while not exactly discourse, is information that taken as a whole could tell an artist something about their performance or the content of their work and if it succeeds as an expression or a story or a tool...BUT THAT’S IT.
People who think scoring is overly important to Slam are guilty of a separate crime as well: they want to make a stand for making Slam a genuine contest, yet almost never want to take the step that would truly begin to make that a reality: handpick qualified judges of poetry. I don’t want to go too far down this road because that’s a lecture unto itself (and yes, I know it was tried before at a National Poetry Slam many years ago and I would venture that it was done wrong then and has little bearing here), but it would be remiss to talk about how all of these contest elements are batted around every other year, seemingly in earnest, while this most basic principle of contests goes largely dismissed. Not that I’m surprised, mind you. People who think Slam is something to be gamed on for fun or profit don’t want real judging. I mean, they want a game, not a contest. But when they apply contest values and contest focus to the game, it’s not a game anymore…it’s a contest. The National Scrabble tournament isn’t a game anymore; it’s a contest, with real scores, real enforcement, real applications and real prizes. Here’s the thing about professional Scrabble (and professional poker, professional Magic: The Gathering, and professional Monopoly, which are all games I love and play incessantly that also have professional level national contests): I don’t play in those tournaments, not because I might not be good enough, but because they’re not designed for people like me. They’re designed for people who like to play for money or stature or have serious competitive streaks instead of personalities. They’re not entirely fun ventures (unless you elicit fun from stress, money, stature or competing). And I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to commit hours, days, weeks or years to anything that’s supposed to be fun that isn’t once you apply certain elements to it. Life is too short and I can have a better time on my couch for free.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean we should exclude people who care about points from participating. Slam is indeed for everyone! But that should have meant that you can play if you’re willing to do it THE WAY IT WAS MEANT TO BE DONE, for the REASONS IT WAS MEANT TO EXIST. Slam’s problem is that we’ve always interpreted that to mean that everyone should have a say in how it’s realized. Everyone shouldn’t. What we should have done was been more clear about what it was for early on and stuck to those guns. The minute one of the poets said, “You know, things would be more fair if…” they should have been kicked out of the room. Making things more fair means making things more serious, increasing the stakes in the one element that was supposed to mean the least: the scores. The mantra “The points are not the point, the point is poetry” isn’t strong enough. The mantra now should be, “If you care about the points you’re doing it wrong.”
None of this is without solution. We took a big stab at this at NPS a few years back by removing individual rankings (and lo, the world did not in fact end and I would posit that NPS got better as an event). But we could do more. Here are my two additions to the pile of ideas meant to get Slam back on track at the level of “competition” (alongside the other stuff I wrote in that other 26-page treatise):
1) Cut the rulebook in half.
I don’t mean get rid of authorship or team piece rules. These rules are in line with why and how art should be created originally, so let’s keep them for the few of us who simply can’t understand that you shouldn’t cheat and lie to make art, fine. But the costume rule? The prop rule? Dump ‘em. These are contest rules made by people who care about how “fair” a slam is. We should forget all pretense to fairness and throw all of our energy as artists and people who believe in the transformative power of poetry into putting on the most engaging, most uplifting, most human spirit rooted showcase of art possible. Fairness is a contest artifice in Slam, and so long as you don’t have real judges you don’t have a real contest. Rules like this make us all look and sound alike, make us think alike, make us use one another as touchstones when we should be looking at what other arts have to teach us about our own.
So keep the lie, the tool of scoring. It still “works”. But we have to get the poets to stop making us care about this, and focusing our energy on developing things in a way that makes this important. It is SO unimportant. I’ve got an impressive resume for a poet with no formal training, no degree and coming out of a small art scene. I didn’t need to place in any national competitions to make that happen,. I just had to be the poet that people heard about, the guy they wanted to see, the guy whose work they wanted to read. I know plenty of poets who haven’t won slams that are more respected, booked and better than many of the ones who have. If I can be myself - whatever that means in AND out of Slam - and push my art and still have those things be original and productive and working without caring about scores, why would I ever change that? And why should we as a community ever promote any idea, rule or person that wants to?
The day the rulebook went over five pages, we lost this fight to people who missed the point.
2) Change the time limits of rounds to 1-, 2-, 3- and 4-minute rounds.
I know you travelled across the country to perform your poetry. I know it cost a lot of money and you asked for a lot of support from your community to get there. You’ll be damned if you’re going to come to Nationals to read a couple of one-minute poems. I get it, truly I do. I am not saying you should come to Nationals to read a one minute poem, even two of them. I would never tell you how you and your poets should spend your locally-earned resources (unless you asked me first). But I WOULD tell you that maybe Nationals isn’t for you.
Twelve 3-minute poems used to be kind of engaging, but as scores became more important and there seemed to be more at stake if you won a slam (another value that got out of wack), the work started to change, en masse. The voices got eerily similar, the syntax, the rhythms. The performances began to blend between teams, some of whom had never been in a room before that bout. People’s inflections rose on the same beats and dropped in the same places. And don’t get me started on the content! For all the jokes that pepper discussions among Slam poets about race cards and rape poems, most of them are just as guilty as the poets they’re joking about. Where is the joy in all of this? I thought I was going to come see a show that uplifted me as a person, that would expose to me a fresh and meaningful insight into the human condition! Something I could RELATE to, not as a victim for two hours, but as a person who watches movies or laughs at 30 Rock over the office water cooler or plays Angry Birds; that might bring forth a tear or a laugh, not just a grunt (and my god, why are all of these people snapping their fingers at every other word? Are they even listening to what they’re co-signing?). As an audience member I walk away from many bouts thinking that slam poets have no hobbies or peace of mind whatsoever, that they take joy in nothing, that they must all be suicide hotline counselors or undercover SVU detectives. And while I don’t want to make light of people’s genuine offerings, you should know that it does not come without psychic consequence in the grand scheme of your art, and that consequence is very likely to be that you miss your audience and mission entirely.
As an audience member, not as a SlamMaster or a poet or president or anything else, let me say this: 12 3-minute poems that mostly sound alike are BORING. A show in which half of the poems are about the same devastating acts of humanity is not life-changing; it is BORING. A bout in which half of the poets all sound like Anis Mojgani (whose work I love) or Rachel McKibbens (whose work I will have laid in my grave) is BORING. A team that all sounds like their coach is BORING. An all-black team whose poems are all about racism is BORING. An all-woman team whose work is all identity-based is BORING. None of your tattoos or haircuts are engaging enough to make me not be bored by this. And while influence of young poets entering Slam has a lot to do with this, and the exodus of older voices in Slam that didn’t have to contend with these influences certainly has a lot to do with this, a lot of this would go away if the scores and the rules were re-prioritized or jettisoned altogether.
The Midwest poetry Slam League (MPSL) understood that. It demanded that teams have at least 1 group piece and that there be a free-for-all; round that’s only rule was time; you could bring in costumes, music - whatever - in that round. And while the MPSL isn’t around anymore, it was fun while it lasted and it generated a lot of interest in poetry and a lot of great work and relationships. It shored up the region’s awareness of itself for both audiences and organizers and it did so with a show that was less than an hour long, exposing poets top the rewards to be had in their own backyards. Now, the last thing many of the Midwest organizers wanted to do was be on the hook for yet another competition, so it was very important that anything else we signed up for that looked like a slam had to not FEEL like a slam. And that’s how it was run: few rules, reasonable commitments, emphasis on fun. And audiences loved it. And the poets enjoyed getting to stretch their limbs. The 1-, 2-, 3- and 4-minute rounds you have in iWPS and WOWps? Those came out of the trial runs done with this format in the MPSL.
Changing the round times doesn’t make this go away overnight, but it at least forces the poets to think outside of their normal rhythms, gimmicks and influences. It would compel some of us to turn to, I don’t know, poetry outside of Slam to see how poets before and around us wrote anything less than 3-minutes long. And so on.
In conclusion, Harold Bloom once famously said that he thought poetry slams were “the death of art”. Without putting too many words in his mouth I think it fair to say that he was speaking to what slams let in the door in the name of poetry, meaning the work was largely sub-par and rote. Oh Harold, if you only knew. Slam isn’t going to die, and lord knows the national competitions aren’t where Slam lives every other week of the year. Slam is fine and continues to grow, and it is largely recession proof. Slam isn’t NPS alone. NPS isn’t even close to being what 50% of what Slam is philosophically or physically. But NPS is certainly where Slam best shows itself to the world at large and it is my hope that we get back to what it was for, not what it allows.
Those of you who care about scores - on whatever level - should know that you are here at Slam’s indulgence. You are not what Slam was meant to BE.