Slam Criticism VII: The Yawning

[scottwoods]

A comment I made over here about the recent spate of attention (read, criticism) Slam has received. I post it here because I won't be doing a column about it because my whole poetry career is proof that the criticism is stale and uninformed.
With footnotes!

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Is it that point in the cycle again? Man, let me break out my shroud and

Comments

[upendedurn]

Thanks for putting all this in perspective, Scott.

[scottwoods]

:-)

I got a fever

[nelsonbob]

and the only thing that'll cure it is...

MORE COWBELL

Just could not help myself...

Re: I got a fever

[scottwoods]

Doh!

Re: I got a fever

[dj_muse]

That's actually what I thought first. I'm an uneducated slam poet fan.

Re: I got a fever

[nelsonbob]

Not to say that I don't take it seriously, but I have come to see it as fighting over cloud castles... I've come to just focus smaller, on the poets that come to my show, and making them better and feel good about their work... the rest of this is for others to battle over.

[elliotharmon]

I get really irritated by the dichotomy of slam vs. everything else. When Robert Bloom makes his latest pronouncement about slam being the death of art, I think a lot of people in the slam world actually see him as having some kind of mandate in the poetry world, when really his piece of the poetry world is laughably small. The rest of the world has very much moved on.

[elliotharmon]

Heh. I mean Harold.