Prior to the poetry slam movement (and even today in many literary circles) poetry readings were, for the most part, poets reading to other poets. If there happened to be a genuine audience of non-poets present ready to listen to the art they cherish, they were usually droned into a dazed stupor by poets mumbling in a monotone and the stifling nature of the reading event itself.
Slam changed that. Poetry slam events are word circuses, school rooms, town meetings, playgrounds, sporting arenas, temples, burlesque shows, revelations, mass guffaws, holy ground, and possibly all of these mixed together. The audience is the primary judge of the quality of the poetry and its presentation. They have permission, in fact a responsibility, to talk back.
Maybe there have been occasions when you’ve found yourself seated in the front row of a poorly ventilated auditorium listening to an award winning poet recite the best of his or her works and have been sorely disappointed. “Time and time again, the crème de le crème of the printed page have displayed no interest in performing, or even a faint desire to add a little inflection to drive home a hot metaphor. They smugly drone on like dust caked ceiling fans.”
In our book, Stage a Slam, published by Sourcebooks Joe Kraynak and I laid out clearly the principles that have poetry slams and slammers so successful:
Slam invigorates poetry by giving as much weight to the performance as it does to the text. At a poetry slam, a light-hearted scrap of doggerel performed passionately can prove stronger than a superbly crafted villanelle recited by a poet who barely exhibits any signs of life, and by the same token a fine poem partnered to a fine performance can bring the rafters down. The goal of performance poetry is to couple the best possible text to the best possible performance – to compose superior poems and perform them with razor-edged precision.
The points are not the point… the point is poetry.
This adage, coined by slam poet and organizer Allan Wolfe of Asheville, North Carolina, is often repeated at the commencement of slam competitions around the world to remind us that competing in a poetry slam is not about getting the highest score, walking away with a pocketful of cash, or trying to fill a trophy case. The true goal is…
to inspire people from all walks of life to listen to poetry, appreciate and respect its power, and ultimately to take the stage and perform their own original works.
The competitive aspect of slam poetry has succeeded at achieving this goal. Slam draws droves of people, some of whom swore off poetry in high school and college, to its bosom, and most are shocked to discover that they actually like it, or at least like some of it.
Although the first show to be called a slam was at the Chicago’s Green Mill Tavern, the seeds of the slam movement were sown at the Get Me High Jazz Club (1984/85) on the near northwest side of Chicago, in a beaten-down section of the city that is now, decades later, one of the slickest places to see and be seen in.
The ill-bred poets of the Get Me High adopted and lived by the following principles:
The poet on the stage is no more important than the listening audience.
Performing is an art, as much an art as crafting the text itself.
If you’re speaking onstage you have an obligation to do it well; after all you’re competing with all other forms of entertainment.
And as poet philosopher Wendell Berry instructs us, poetry is not to glorify the poet, but rather to celebrate the community around the poet.
These principles do not seem outrageous today, but in 1984 they were radical. The ‘establishment poets’ declared through their upturned noses that performance cheapened poetry; the true poet lets the words, however flat and mumbled off the page, do all the work.
Early slammers groomed their texts for performance, red-penciling out abstractions and obscurations and substituting vibrant, concrete language, pertinent themes, and vivid imagery complemented and supported by the most genuine, precise, and powerfully expressed performances they could muster. Their goal was to communicate, and if the room’s response was poor, they reworked the text, polished the performance, and gave it another sounding when the next opportunity rolled around.
Sometimes they produced sparkling gems; many times they comically shredded a failed poem on stage to the roar of the edifying crowd. They learned the craft and style of performance poetry by trial and error.
The audience learned too. At a poetry slam, you don't sit at a table with a text in front of your down-focused eyes following along as the poet drips and drabs his words. You lock your line of sight on the poet and tune in to what she’s saying and how you're hearing it.
Many of us have forgotten what it is to really listen. We've become visual, video-based, text-based, bar-code-reading junkies. We skim newspapers for headlines, zone out in front of TV screens, play video games for entertainment, and punch out hasty text messages via e-mail and instant-messaging programs.
Gone are the days when the populous pressed its ear to a radio speaker for scratchy fast-breaking world-shaking news or to hear the Shadow eeked through a dark doorway on Mystery Theater. Gone are the days when students were expected to recite the classics from memory.
Attending poetry slams gives folks a chance to practice the art of listening, to appreciate and comprehend the richness of our language and the inventiveness of performing wordsmiths. After you’ve ingested a few slams, you might even notice that you hear more of what everyone has to say in other areas of your life.
Tomorrow more of the same — what are ingredients make slams so delicious to their hungry audiences?