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Zero Point Zero: Report From IWPS, 2008
Over the years, I've developed a somewhat undeserved reputation as being anti-poetry-slam, mostly because I've been an outspoken critic of the tired, overworked, and ill-written pieces I've seen on stage at numerous slam events, both local and national, over a lot of years.
I say "somewhat undeserved" because I've never been opposed to the actual event or its spread; still, I've been enough of a critic (and a harsh one at that) of much of the work that has come out of the scene over time, and of what I've considered to be the undeserved reputation of some of the "stars" of the movement, that I can understand why people have seen me that way.
I attended my first slam sometime in the early 90s during the early stages of its migration from its ancestral homeland of Chicago to other cities around the country and the world. I first attended a National Poetry Slam in 1997 and have been to both NPS and the newer, Individual World Poetry Slam (IWPS) many times since then; I competed on teams for my home venue in Worcester in 1999 and 2001 and have emceed, managed, and worked behind the scenes on events, sometimes without actually attending them as I served on selection committees and the like.
It had been a few years since I had attended my last event, in Austin TX in 2006; feeling a need to reconnect with the slam family, as we call ourselves, I decided to make the trek to the IWPS held this year in Charlotte, NC, and see what was up with this unruly, curious beast: a mock-competitive event held to crown a "winner" at a most subjective form of self-expression.
What follows is a series of observations and thoughts about the current state of slam, at least as it appeared to me this past week. I walked into the event with few expectations; I emerged cautiously pleased and more hopeful about it than I expected. This is an analysis of why that happened, and what it may mean for me and for others interested in the future of what has come and may come from the slam world.
A note about this essay before you begin: it may feel to some of you that it belabors its points; it's occasionally contradictory (I have, in some cases, more questions than answers); and at times it may offend some people.
Just like a slam.
One of the major epiphanies I received this week (or rediscovered -- I've certainly thought it before even if I've never discussed it extensively) involves a clearer understanding of the dynamics that surround that word, "slam." I need to address that if this article is going to be coherent at all, because I'm going to focus only on two aspects of this, and on one more than the other.
I think there are three separate and interrelated concepts at play when we speak of slam.
First, of course, is "slam as activity" -- the simple act of performing original work within set time limits in front of an audience with randomly selected judges assigning scores to the work presented on a scale of one to ten. That's the basic meaning that got this whole mess started -- the activity created by Marc Smith back in the mid Eighties, which is now common in poetry venues all over the world.
Second is "slam as artistic movement," referencing the various phenomena that have come from the ongoing dissemination of poets and poetry associated with the activity: the network of venues and the communication channels among them that have allowed poets to travel and perform for each other extensively; the television shows and YouTube videos that are watched and dissected by aficionados; the CDs and DVDs, the soundfiles and chapbooks that form the "canon," if you will, for poets and lovers of this work.
It also refers to the ongoing, informal and formal conversations among slammers and fans that sustain the movement and keep it going, growing, changing and evolving. While those happen face to face in venues all over the world, more important, perhaps, is the Internet side of the movement: the Livejournal, Blogspot, Facebook, Myspace, listserv, and forum posts that slammers use to talk, fight, and support one another in their efforts. While the media that support them may be very new in the greater scheme of things, the conversations themselves are not much different from the types of conversations that have gone on for millennia among artists, and are in and of themselves important, as documentation for the ongoing progress of the movement and as a place for the creation of a common ground for discussion.
Third is the category which, I think, promotes the greatest controversy and struggle among those interested in slam: it's "slam as genre," the notion that there are distinct characteristics common to poems inside the boundaries of the movement. As of now, there are many poets whose entire experience of poetry is contained within what they see at slams; I think it's only natural to look at what's out there within the body of work written by those poets and see if there is indeed something common to their work that represents the creation and perpetuation of a genre called "slam poetry."
Certainly there are poems being slammed out there that are not part of the genre; when we refer to "slam as activity," I don't believe that there's anything wrong -- in fact, I think there's something vitally important -- with using those poems in slams, and some of them will do well (by which I mean they will make an impact on a slam audience, even if they don't score well) and have an effect on the genre if they are heard by enough people, absorbed, and emulated. But they aren't really my concern here; I'm more interested, for the purpose of this article, in the poems that conform to certain characteristics I'm going to describe in a moment.
More to the point -- I'm going to try to look at WHY those characteristics have become common, at why they do well in slams, and at how they serve to reinforce the slam movement's popularity and utility. I'll also be looking at how the genre is changing, and how the recent IWPS event served as a showcase for those changes.
So -- what is a "slam poem?" I think there are some very broad guidelines for inclusion in the genre.
1. A slam poem has a purpose. It's designed, front to back, to deliver -- punchlines, morals, lessons, stories, incitements to action, testimony. A slam poem isn't about ambiguity, meditation, introspection, or observation without judgement; it is designed to make sure that the listener gets something very specific from the poem and remembers it afterward. There may be moments of introspection and ambiguity within the poem, but they serve to illuminate and support the larger purpose.
2. A slam poem is self-contained. It starts somewhere, ends somewhere else, with a more or less linear path from beginning to end, and it's relatively easy to identify the main points on that journey after it's over. It's designed with a purpose in mind, so there's little room for exploration of tangents, contradictions, and facets that don't illuminate the main thrust of the poem. When the poet walks off stage, when the poem is done, it's done, and there is a sense of closure for the audience that the journey (or section of a larger journey) contained within the work is complete. There may be more to say, but it will come in another poem.
This isn't to say that slam poems are all narrative versus lyric, that they can't include elements of surrealism or absurdity, take the reader down odd alleyways within the context of the poem, or that they all include morals and lessons.
What I do mean to say is that a slam poem needs to do all of its assigned work in a set time frame, so the available space in a slam poem is usually fully occupied in getting that work done. The writer may pose questions that are left open at the end of the poem, but they aren't usually critical to understanding the poem's main message or point.
3. A slam poem is meant to be heard more than it is meant to be read.
This doesn't exclude the possibility that the poem can be read on a page and not do its work well; many can be. In keeping with its performance roots, though, a slam poem is designed with one or more elements that can be best appreciated when performed.
A rhythm, a repeated line, a single line that stands out from the rest because of vocal emphasis; a theatrical device such as the use of multiple voices or creative blocking; the use of impressions, accents, dialects, slang; a delivery reminiscent of some other kind of well-known public speaker (think preachers, auctioneers, politicians, advertising spokespeople, rappers, singers); borrowings and adaptations of well-recognized catchphrases or slogans already in the popular culture -- the list of ways this can be done is endless.
Personal preference revealed here: the better the writer, the less a poem needs to borrow its auditory "'hooks" from elsewhere. That doesn't mean that talent isn't derivative of or influenced by those things any less, just that there is a more judicious use of them by better writers.
4. The slam poem, whether by intention or by perception, is seen as an expression of the poet's own experience. Even if a poet is doing an obvious "persona" piece -- a poem in the voice of someone who is obviously not the poet -- there is an identification being made between the poet and the speaker of the poem. The audience is compelled to believe that the poet, on stage, is given personal testimony of their own feelings, opinions, and experiences, even if they choose to do it through the words of another person.
This perception of identification has led to some of the greatest controversies in the slam world, usually predicated upon learning that a poet did not, in fact, go through something they described in the first person in a poem. While I've said before that I think this is a silly criterion to apply to poetry as a form of creative expression -- no one, for instance, thinks that Tolkien actually fought orcs or delivered the One Ring to the fires of Mount Doom, but we accept that the work is moving nonetheless -- it operates strongly enough within the genre that it needs to be noted.
5. Any slam poem can break one or more of these guidelines, but it can't break all of them. For instance, a great performer, someone with great stage presence, can get away with breaking the first two guidelines by writing the performance cues into the piece. Likewise, a mediocre performer who can write a good self-contained poem that makes its point well can do well -- again, not necessarily judged by scores, but by impact on the greater audience for the piece.
Note that nowhere in the guidelines are there prescriptions as to topic, tone, or subject matter -- a good slam poem can be about anything at all, from pudding to incest. It can be funny, serious, gloomy, angry...whatever. I don't see topic matter as being particularly germane to slam as a genre, although there are specific topics that lend themselves well to this sort of work. I'll get to that, and the question of how the audience views the intersection of performer and poem, in a bit.
So...on to IWPS.
The Individual World Poetry Slam is one of the three events sanctioned by Poetry Slam Incorporated (PSI) for poets from all over the world to come and compete, read, and hobnob with each other, and to showcase the "best" slam poets in the world for a general audience. The oldest of the three events, the National Poetry Slam (NPS), highlights team performance; IWPS features individuals in head to head competition, as does the recently added women-only Women of the World Poetry Slam, or WOWPS.
While the standard time limit for poems at NPS is three minutes, poets at IWPS have to compete using poems of different lengths -- there are one minute, two minute, three minute, and four minute rounds throughout the two preliminary days of competition (finals is all about the tried and true three-minute poem format).
Note that in none of those titles given above is the word "Championship." Slam as activity, by its very nature, implies that who wins on a given night might not win in front of different judges, and the outcome of the competition was not originally the point of slam. (Some would say it still isn't. I think that's disingenuous, even if I feel that way myself sometimes.) This has not deterred slam poets from treating the events as a place to crown their "champions," and the events have certainly come a long way from the original intent of just letting folks from different scenes compete against each other for bragging rights, and to hang out. While there are certainly "winners" of these events, the title of winner of the National Poetry Slam, IWPS, or WOWPS carries a certain permanent cachet for the community that lasts long after the event is over. As a result, the poetry of the "winners" tends to be held up as the "standard" for slam poetry, at least for a time.
The IWPS final night this year was a study in the current state of slam. The competition featured past champion and slam favorite Buddy Wakefield, stars and stalwarts like 6is9 (Khary Jackson), Joaquin Ziahuatenejo (this year's winner), and Queen Sheba, and relative unknowns such as Jason McBeth (who came out of nowhere to take the runner-up slot) and Joshua Bennett, a 20 year old from the Youth Slam scene. Tara Hardy, an old school slammer from Seattle, wowed the crowd with subtle and complex work on forgiveness, peace, justice, and sexuality; Lizz Straight from Florida delivered a haunting piece that used the metaphor of origami to describe the folding down of a woman's spirit after the death of a child; The Original Woman roamed the crowd to deliver a manifesto on the contrast between real life relationships and fairytales. The crowd of slam aficionados and novices ate it all up, and it was the most entertaining night of slam I've seen in quite a while.
In addition to being entertained, though, I was intrigued by what I was hearing in a way I haven't been for some time, and the gist of that intrigue was this: that while on the surface, a lot of what I was hearing recalled some of the worst cliches in recent slam poetry (rapid fire delivery, linkage of disparate topics for buzzwords' sake, mining of personal trauma and social injustice for audience reaction, etc.), the truth was that within the existing style, there was a lot of good writing and interesting play with the standard tropes of slam poetry.
An example: 6is9's first round poem on Martin Luther King, Jr. Beginning with a slow, measured recitation of negative statements about King discovered in his FBI files and later -- recountings of infidelity and violence against women, plagiarism of his doctoral dissertation, even the fact that he was not originally born with the name "Martin Luther King" -- with no defensiveness or refutation, the poem built to a crescendo of speed and volume as the poet pleaded with the audience to consider and honor the real man and not the myth built around him, closing back on a quieter note, to massive positive reaction. I thought to myself and said out loud as it concluded, "That was brave" -- and also unexpected; the poet risked early alienation of the crowd by seeming to attack a beloved hero, only to make his accomplishments more real and astonishing in the end, offering a subtle contrast to the famous "content of our character" line so identified with King. It was the work of a poet who (despite his nervousness, as I know he was concerned about how it would be taken) had control of his work on stage and on page.
There were similar moments throughout the night, and I thought about them even as I reflected on the good poems I'd heard on the previous two nights of competition -- poems that took similar chances on audience reaction, that explored traditional slam topics in interesting ways; poems from poets with reputations as "arrogant blowhards" (not my words) that worked the quieter end of the performance spectrum.
Was there still bad poetry at the event? Hell, yes; I heard a lot of it. I heard poems rife with pop-culture references that served to excuse the poet from working to explicate their own ideas. I heard obscure rants that threw every topic in the current Zeitgeist into one poem in a clumsy effort to make connections among seemingly disparate current affairs. And I heard some yelling that I suspect was done in the belief that volume and passion would compensate for lack of craft. But it was balanced, for me, by the good stuff I heard. And I was struck, as I said earlier, by the fact that seemingly well-worn topics were being presented in new ways -- not across the board, but in enough places that it was noticeable.
I noticed something else too -- that in preliminary bouts especially, where the ratio of wheat to chaff was more out of balance, the judges themselves tended to select better written work over more passionate delivery. When two poets telling similarly powerful stories were in a bout, the better written poem -- the piece that used better metaphors, had better internal coherence, used language in unusual and original ways without sacrificing meaning, etc. -- tended to score higher. (Disclaimer: obviously, I didn't see every bout, and the judgement of what makes a poem "better" than another is partly subjective. But that was my experience -- that as a person who's seen countless slams, I rarely would have scored poems differently from the judges when it came down to relative scores -- what they scored higher, I would have also have scored higher.)
There's a persistent criticism of slam, one that emanates from some its practitioners and which also shows up in academic critiques of the format. It's that the subject matter of the poem will, in many cases, trump the craft involved in writing a good poem. A poem about personal trauma (so this theory goes) or a hot button issue will score higher because it "touches" the audience, or because they don't want to "judge" the performer for their personal experience. (Some poets themselves indeed feel that it should be that way; take a look at various slams, and on forums on the 'Net for reactions to critique of "true" poems if you don't believe me.) Testimony, for some, trumps art -- at least according to this theory.
I saw ample evidence at IWPS that this particular belief may not hold as much water as previously believed. There were lots of poems about personal trauma -- the most bizarre example of this came at the beginning of the competition in a "Last Chance" slam to choose the final poet to compete in the main event, where three separate poets did poems about sexual abuse of children happening on a Sunday; two referred to the family being at church as creating an opportunity for the abuser, and one was about a priest abusing an altar boy -- but overall, those poems that were better written about the same topics still did better and had a greater impact on the audience.
For more about this observation, I think it's time to move on to the final topic I want to address. Why do hot button topics -- poems on the effects of racism, injustice, war, personal trauma, and the like -- do so well in slams? How do these poems reflect the desires of the "slam audience?" Where do art and craft intersect with giving voice to the inner expression of poets and the audience? And why is this issue a bone of contention for some poets in the slam community?
Watching the audiences at IWPS, I thought a lot about what makes a person choose to go to a poetry slam over other "entertainment" options. At the beginning of the week, the crowds were largely made up of hardcore slam fans and the various entourages that traveled to Charlotte with the poets; but as the week wore on, the crowds became larger and more diverse in visible terms of race, ethnic background, age, and socioeconomic status; people were coming out on a Friday and a Saturday night, paying money for tickets, to see poets.
Why do people choose this option? There are probably as many reasons as there are people in a given audience, but I suspect that there may be some common bonds among them, and some common experience with poetry in performance, that apply to many.
For one thing, I don't think we can discount the fact that this type of poetic work is available to more people now than ever before. Between Def Poetry Jam, the appearance of well-known slammers on Broadway and in movies, TV shows, and commercials -- not to mention the ubiquity of YouTube videos that get sent around to more people than you'd think -- there's more pure spoken word/performance poetry out there than ever before. Many people walking through the door of a slam event can be reasonably expected to have some notion of what they're likely to see, and to have chosen, specifically, to see that.
Second, the predominance of hip-hop culture in the overall pop culture scene has also made a lot of people more comfortable with hearing "spoken word" work. I don't make the mistake of equating rap with slam poetry, a mistake that happens all the time -- the news stories I've read that mistakenly derive the origins of slam directly from rap and hip-hop would fill a book -- but to completely disregard the idea that there's a connection in the minds of many in the audience also seems to be a mistake to me.
While those two factors would obviously account for many perceptions of what the "style" of slam should be, I think there are also factors in those areas, and in the larger culture, that would predispose them to wanting to hear certain topics, or at least to be prepared to hear them.
Let's face it -- we live in an era of trauma as news and general background for our lives. The news is replete with stories of death, crime, and abuse; popular talk shows and music and media address the topics regularly, for good or for ratings; the American public conversation in particular has revolved around issues of government misconduct, racial strife, minority rights, and empowerment and disempowerment for as long as most of us can recall. I suspect that a lot of people coming to slams, knowing however much or little they know about it as genre, movement, or activity, are expecting to hear work on these topics; they have their own opinions, their own experiences, on those issues, and are looking for reinforcement of their views or or at least fodder for further thought.
(A point: the desire to be amused is also a major reason for folks who come to see slams, and I'm not spending a lot of time talking about the considerable amount of funny poetry that shows up in slams. But there seems to be far less controversy among slammers about the funny poems, and I'm really trying to address the stuff that poets who dislike topical poetry get worked up about. I'll speak more to the issue of funny poetry in a follow-up article.)
Even those who know something about the broader world of poetry -- the "mainstream" if you will, if slam isn't considered part of the mainstream (which I'm willing to debate these days) -- are probably coming with the idea that many poets on stage will be baring their souls and talking about deep, personally important things. They want to see that catharsis on stage. They want to share in the feeling of being moved -- and in fact, I suspect many of them want those poets to provide them with a vicarious experience of saying those things they themselves cannot say.
I emceed a bout on the second night of competition this year. As part of every slam at the national level, we introduce the judges and tell the audience what they said in answer to the question, "What makes you qualified to judge a slam?" Sometimes the answers are silly, sometimes less so. The answers I got from my five randomly chosen judges that night (I wrote them down) were:
-- I want to cry tears of joy tonight.
-- I love to hear people expressing themselves.
-- I'm an independent free thinker.
-- I'm a fan of creativity.
-- I'm ready to be excited by what I hear.
I can hear, in those answers, a hint of a willingness, a desire, in those people to see themselves in the place of those poets on stage -- to have those poets do something for them that they may not be willing or currently able to do themselves, to speak for them; at the very least, I think, those answers represent an openness to being overwhelmed and moved. I suspect, without being able to prove it, that they spoke for many in that audience, and for many in the general audience of slam.
If we take as a given, then, that slam poets are acting in many cases as stand-ins and suppliers of satisfaction for the audience's desires to have a powerful emotional experience -- and I'm willing to argue that -- then the popularity of topics common to many slam poems make sense. The slam offers a place where those topics can be discussed and judged and cheered and jeered with little danger to the audience. (Danger to the judges is, of course, another topic, but poet/judge animosity is less dramatic than it's played up to be in most cases.)
And after all, these are not new topics for art. Struggle, strife, conflict, tension, rising above adversity, liberation from personal and political oppression -- all of those have been the stuff of much art over the ages. All we're seeing here is a new iteration of that eternal dialogue between artist and society about society.
What's striking, though, is how many people within the slam world -- slammers, for the most part -- reject out of hand the notion that those topics are still worthy of poets' attention.
I'm referring to various comments from some in the movement over the years about how "tired" and "played out" certain topics are; about suspicions and accusations that certain poets are "exploiting" personal trauma for points and attention; about how poets should stop writing about the experience of being African-American, gay, women, etc., and come up with "something new."
There is also the curious and unsettling distaste that arises when a poet is discovered not to have actually experienced something they wrote about in the first person; when a poet conceives of a poem in which the speaker of the poem makes a personal testimony about something that later turns out to have been experienced second hand, or in some cases is a work of pure fiction, some poets see that as a betrayal of the old saw, "Write what you know," and call it dishonest.
I've been seen as part of this chorus in the past, although not always fairly. My issue has always been about bad writing on certain topics, not on the topics themselves, but to ensure that I'm clearly understood, I want it to be clear to everyone that I stand apart from it now, and I want to call it out.
Let me speak -- quickly -- to the first person fictional narrative issue first. I've written about it a lot over the years in this column, and find nothing new to say about it now; suffice it to say that if a poet can deliver emotional authenticity effectively, and if the audience can take an authentic experience from the work -- namely, one that is informed by and about the truth to be found in the experience as related in the poem -- I could care less about whether the poet had it happen to them in real life or not. After all, isn't this the mark of a good artist? In other disciplines -- I'm thinking specifically of acting -- we do not automatically assume that we are seeing the artist laid bare in their work; we may remark on how well written or acted the performance was, but we suspend disbelief while we are in the performance in order to engage with the work. Why is it any different for a poet? Good creative writing may deliver more truth than simple testimony. We ought to honor that achievement, not disrespect it. Poets ought to be no more slaves to "just the facts" than any other artists are.
As to the "tiredness" of certain topics: I'm as tired of badly written political poems/trauma poems/personal testimonials and the like as anyone else. But for many people, those topics matter; they are the reasons they seek out poetry, hunger for expression, seek out someone who can speak to their experience and appeal to their own emotions.
Maybe they haven't had an abusive parent, but they empathize with what is presented in a poem about incest and it moves them to action of some sort. Maybe they have an inarticulate rage or sadness about a personal experience, and hearing a poem helps them to articulate it in a new way. Maybe a funny poem about being overweight moves them to see their own struggles with weight in a new light. Maybe a poem about a teacher's epiphany regarding a child with Tourette's Syndrome and how it informs their own struggles with being clear and thoughtful in speech and deed makes them consider their own lives...
There are a million examples, of course, that I could use here, but the bottom line is this: the topics we choose are the topics we choose, the ones that move us. To arbitrarily decide that poets who work with those hot button topics are in some way "lesser poets," or are in some way "cheapening" slam or poetry in general, is reprehensible to me. The minute we go, "Oh, here we go...another identity poem..." without stopping to see how the poem does its work, and if it covers new ground, or old ground in a new way, we are guilty of a sort of cultural elitism that is inimical to the aims of slam -- both the original aims and the current environment.
Bottom line, again and more simply: it is a luxury to be able to forget about race, gender, sexual orientation, personal trauma and cultural background. To say that every poem on those topics is by definition not worthy of scrutiny for its level of quality is an act of prejudice. To not afford them a listen may be your personal choice, and a legitimate one, but it's a lousy way to address a critique of slam poetry in general.
As I alluded to earlier and state more explicitly here, there's a communal aspect to a poetry slam that transcends, in many ways, the aims of the poets in the slam. Working within the bounds of how both poets and audience see that communal aspect, many poets I heard at IWPS this year are working at preserving the rituals, guidelines, and forms they've learned in their experience with the slam movement, while expanding the tradition in new and exciting ways. There will continue to be bad slam poems, but no one can say there are no good ones being written; more to the point, I believe that there is indeed a new body of work within the conventions of the slam genre that represents a healthy trend. I am cautiously optimistic for its continued growth.
Submitted by Tony on Monday, December 22, 2008 (19:08:23) (2697 reads)
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| "Features: Zero Point Zero: Report From IWPS, 2008" | Login/Create an Account | 24 comments |
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Re: Zero Point Zero: Report From IWPS, 2008
by Anonymous on Monday, December 22, 2008 (15:21:49) |
awesome article, mr. brown
LS
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Re: Zero Point Zero: Report From IWPS, 2008
(Score: 1 )
by ocvictor on Monday, December 22, 2008 (15:42:20) |
Excellent article.
I think, and it's Lea who brought this up first, that the poem being written in first person is pretty much a staple of the genre. Not exclusively, of course, but the sense of monolouge is often central to the slam poem's success.
Which brings me to:
There is also the curious and unsettling distaste that arises when a poet is discovered not to have actually experienced something they wrote about in the first person; when a poet conceives of a poem in which the speaker of the poem makes a personal testimony about something that later turns out to have been experienced second hand, or in some cases is a work of pure fiction, some poets see that as a betrayal of the old saw, "Write what you know," and call it dishonest
You're right, there's a definite cognitive breakdown in the use of persona, and I'd say that the line is muddy, at best. Patricia smith's poem "Skinhead," for example, is a brave poem, an attempt to examine the mind of of something that is clearly "other" than the poet herself.
But Rives' "Deaf Poet" (or whatever it's called) gets a lot of flack from people who believe that he's trying to capitalize on something that's not his experience. Whereas the Smith's intent is to examine evil, and the use of the persona is excused, Rives' intent seems to many to appear heroic without actually being so, which many find distasteful.
I'm not entirely sure the criticism is completely founded, as the sentiment elicited in the poem's listener is real, regardless of intention, and to break it down further to intention seems an exercise in deconstructionism, and is at best an academic exercise. To my mind, only the experience of that poem in the moment of performance matters.
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Re: Zero Point Zero: Report From IWPS, 2008
(Score: 1 )
by twistednexus on Monday, December 22, 2008 (17:09:01) |
Interesting read. Two thoughts...
I've not had the pleasure of making it out to the national events recently. Have you considered what impact (if any) that several years of iWPS may have had on the Charlotte audience?
Regarding Persona pieces, my concern was always the followup. I've seen poets go to lengths to maintain a persona. I imagine there are several reasons to do this (merch sales, subsequent scores, etc) but its always seemed ... questionable. Why not be honest about it later?
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Re: Zero Point Zero: Report From IWPS, 2008
(Score: 1 )
by ElProfe on Tuesday, December 23, 2008 (00:53:00) |
Some random thoughts on this. I appreciate the article, and the time you took to write it, Tony.
1) I wonder how much of the "veteran slammer" critique of slam poetry comes from the insularity of the slam scene itself? And how much of that is self-imposed? The thought is ironic, considering the democratic nature of slam's founding.
2) There are, of course, more than a few poets who have moved from slam into various other artforms (including more than a few academes who now refuse to admit their sordid slam pasts). And we're all products of the world around us. But I find for the most part that slammers heartily buy into some of the more limiting critiques of their artform: that it's an offshoot of hip-hop; that it's only meant to be performed; that a slam poem must, at all costs, be three minutes long. Et Cetera.
Even growth within the slam scene isn't really growth so much as it is simply aging: The irony of the veteran slammer critiquing identity poems and such is that he/she does so while presuming that their own poems have grown...when in fact they have fallen into their own tired tropes.
And really, if the slam is that bad, then why does the critic (vet or not) continue to slam?
3) That said, I have no problem being a "hater" and telling a young slam poet (or an OLD slam poet for that matter) to crack a friggin' book once in a while. Nothing bothers me more than horrid grammar, malapropisms, mispronunciations, utter cliche, and similar foolishness in a poem. Even colloquial speech requires construction and clarity. This coming from someone who makes up words in Spanglish.
4) I'd also be interested to hear how much you think that capitalism compromises the poems in slam. Yes, as audience we want to be moved, but does that need constitute an economic demand that a slam poet must fill? On a philosophical level, the level that asks us to fulfill our obligations to each other as humans, maybe so. But if you've ever heard two poets discuss the marketing possibilities of spoken word cd's, how many units they'd like to sell, how many college gigs they'd like to hit, how they're planning to attend NACA, how they want to sell out Radio City....well, it gave me pause, I'll say that much.
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Re: Zero Point Zero: Report From IWPS, 2008
(Score: 1 )
by Tony on Wednesday, December 24, 2008 (16:42:37) |
A note from Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz on the article. She brings up a good point in noting an important oversight on my part in discussing the critical elements of the slam movement; an oversight driven by my trying to get the article done and out there, not one of ignorance or of feeling that the books she mentions have not been critical to the movement. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, Cristin!
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From my article:
"Second is "slam as artistic movement," referencing the various phenomena that have come from the ongoing dissemination of poets and poetry associated with the activity: the network of venues and the communication channels among them that have allowed poets to travel and perform for each other extensively; the television shows and YouTube videos that are watched and dissected by aficionados; the CDs and DVDs, the soundfiles and chapbooks that form the "canon," if you will, for poets and lovers of this work."
Cristin's addendum:
I don't disagree with any of the above, but I would also want included some of the major books and projects which helped define slam too.
SlamNation, Aloud, Spoken Word Revolution and Spoken Word Revolution: Redux have been hugely influential in both spreading the word of slam through out communities which may not have every heard of slam before AND introducing some of slam's better poets to academic and mainstream communities.
Also, in the last year, there have been three histories of the slam movement published. Words In Your Face (covering NYC and beyond), A Bigger Boat (covering the Albuquerque scene & their NPS) and Let Them Eat Moonpies (about the first 8 years of the Rust Belt Regionals), plus we are looking forward to Susan B. Anthony Somers-Willett's The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America coming out on University of Michigan Press next year.
I don't think any of these projects fit into any of the descriptions you have above for our canon (with the exception of SlamNation, which could be classified as a DVD).
The backbone and heart of the Poetry Slam community and its art will always be independently produced materials -- be that chapbooks, or CDS, or blogs -- but that doesn't mean that you larger projects don't have their place in the canon too! And that canon without quotes to me! 
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She's right; those are an important part of the canon. I'd also add the various anthologies of poems performed at NPS from The Wordsmith Press,
and "Poetry Slam," edited by Gary Mex Glazner, from Soft Skull Press.
In the last year or two, former slammer Derrick Brown's Write Bloody Press has begun to publish books by former and current slammers such as Buddy Wakefield, Anis Mojgani, Lea Deschenes, Victor Infante, and others, and support them with freewheeling, wide ranging tours of colleges and larger venues, truly adding together the worlds of performance and page poetry.
Ventures like these and others are also part of the maturation taking place within the slam movement.
Thanks for the heads up, Cristin, and my apologies.
Tony
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Re: Zero Point Zero: Report From IWPS, 2008
(Score: 1 )
by Ransacked on Wednesday, December 31, 2008 (12:37:49) |
Tony: Thank you for all the thought, effort, and good writing that so clearly went into this. I appreciate that you're trying to something different with this post-event blog post (lots of people just do "top 10 IWPS memories" or a collection of shout-outs to friends). I think you've succeeded in kicking off a good conversation, which will happen here and elsewhere in "slam as activity," to use your term.
You've done a better job than most of nailing Jell-O to a wall: you've got a workable if subjective definition of slam as a genre. I'd add that slam poetry as a genre tends to be written as free verse or prose poems, with the only rhymed, metered work borrowing very heavily from rap. I'd also add that slam poems tend to scattergram very tightly in durations between 2:40 and 3:05. The varied time rounds at IWPS are the exceptions that prove the rule, frankly. Slam poems are three minutes.
(I do find it somewhat refreshing that we're not bound by the unspoken links of duration and tone one finds in television or cinema. Cartoons and sit-coms are 30 minutes, dramas and soap operas are 60 minutes, as if one can't be funny for an hour slot or one can't say something serious in just half an hour. An identity poem about rape and a comic monolog about toothpaste and KY jelly are both going to be 2:50.)
As of now, there are many poets whose entire experience of poetry is contained within what they see at slams;
That's very true, a sign of how far slam has come, and it scares the hell out of me. If slam started out as a gateway into poetry, I worry that people are having so much fun chatting and smoking cigarettes in the lobby that they'll never bother to enter the friggin' building. More and more I see it as my duty to read very academic, formal work on open mics and in slams just to remind people that those are still options.
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