Thanks to Best American Poetry for inviting me to be this week’s guest blogger and my apologies if what I present does not satisfy the expectations of their readership. My expertise is limited to a discipline I resurrected from the closets of disuse. Performance poetry, a.k.a. slam. Some say it has changed the game for anyone pursuing a vocation in poetry. Others scoff at it. From inside and outside the slam community prejudices and misconceptions have twisted the principles that fueled what I and those who followed my lead spawned over thirty years ago. Even Poetry Slam Inc. (PSI) the national non-profit organization sends a skewed message:
Simply put, poetry slam is the competitive art of performance poetry. It puts a dual emphasis on writing and performance, encouraging poets to focus on what they're saying and how they're saying it.
No. The principle definition of slam poetry, the practice started in Chicago in I984, is performance poetry — the remarriage of the art of performing verse with the art of writing it. Two art forms entangled into one offering more choices for effective poetic communication than exists on the unspoken written page.
But yes, there is a very popular competitive element embedded in most performance poetry communities. Competition has fueled much of what is known worldwide as slam. But without passionate and professionally crafted performances no competitive format, however well conceived, could have kept (and continue to keep) people engaged and eager to be engaged again and again at poetry slams.
The Uptown Poetry Slam at the Chicago’s Green Mill Tavern, the first performance poetry show to be called a slam, is the longest running night club show in the city, maybe in the country. Anyone who has attended it will testify to the fact that the slam competition is game, a dramatic device for focusing an audience’s attention on a platform of performance poetry presented by poets daring enough to be vulnerable as both writers and performers. Two art forms melded into one.
This was the starting point for what has now spread across the globe. It is what I and others dared to partake in back thirty years ago. We performed our stanzas. We brought the emotions and images, the attitudes and conviction, the music of the words we wrote to life with our bodies, voices, and minds. And it pissed off the old guard who claimed that “acting” poetry defiled it. But so what, we had a growing audience and they didn’t.
Time has proven that what was once dismissed as a barroom fade has staying power and importance equal to any other school of poetry in the history of literature. Tomorrow I will describe some of the root principles essential slam’s initial and ongoing success in gathering and expanding an audience for poetry never thought possible.