13 March 2006

Poetry Slams Rock Literary World

Competitive poetry readings attract enthusiastic audiences

A poet performs at a poetry slam in Austin, Texas. (© AP Images)

By Steve Holgate
Special Correspondent

Portland, Oregon -- Here’s a quiz.  What is a concert without music?  What is a game show without a game?  What literary movement has swept the United States and much of the rest of the world over the last few years?  These apparently unrelated questions have the same unlikely answer: poetry slams.

The two words -- poetry and slam -- do not fit together easily. But Marc Kelly Smith, the founder of poetry slams, says, “It is the marriage of the art of performance with the art of poetry,” with the added excitement of a competition. 

Slam venues across the United States share some general characteristics: poets sign up to read their works in a local coffee shop or bar or church basement in front of rowdy audiences that have been encouraged to cheer, applaud, whistle and boo.  Particularly vocal audiences have been known to jeer poets off the stage.

Backing up these spontaneous judgments is a panel of judges, who are picked at random from the audience a few minutes before a slam begins.  These judges apportion points to each poet, assessing both style and substance, and, at the end of the evening, a winner is declared. 

Critics of slams -- and there are many -- complain that they glorify performance over content, attitude over the word.  Slam advocates say that those that disdain them simply do not accept that literary judgments can be made by ordinary people who do not have academic titles. 

Smith says that audiences come for the poetry and unabashedly enjoy the performances.  Slam poets may recite their poetry with the driving rhythms of rap artists, the histrionic flair of Shakespearean actors or the howl of the beat poet.  There are some limits; they cannot sing or use music and they cannot use any kind of prop or costume to enhance their reading.  It is the poet onstage in front of a microphone.

Poetry slams were born 20 years ago, when Smith, a construction worker at the time, organized the first one at a Chicago bar.  The rock concert-like atmosphere projected the ironic, self-referential, and often angry style of the 1980s punk music scene.  In more recent years, reflecting the cross-pollination of America’s multicultural nature, delivery styles increasingly come from hip-hop culture, which began in the African-American community.  The result is a dynamic artistic movement, with hundreds of poets participating in front of thousands of spectators each week.

According to its champions, poetry slams have enlivened a moribund poetry establishment.  Smith said, “Most poetry events are like most art events – there’s no audience.”  He said most poetry readings are like museum events.

He set out to change that and has succeeded.

“The slam,” Smith says, “has gone around the world, with strong movements in Europe and Asia.  The poetry slam’s working-class political sensibility and ability to build community have broad appeal."

It is mainly the competitive aspect of slams that has generated the detractors.  Many critics dismiss the slams as showboating, exalting ephemeral theatrics over poetic accomplishment.  The traditionalist critic, Harold Bloom, has decried slams as “the death of art.”  Yet, even its most adamant critics admit that poetry slams have brought a dynamism and popular interest that poetry has long needed.

Poetry read in slams can reflect the traditional school of literary poetry even while challenging it.  One slam poet, Michael Brown writes:

“I’m not much of a performer,
One of those that struts and shines ...
I’m from the old school,
Where poets named things,
Told the truth.”

The poetry itself tends toward free verse and a highly personal tone, reversing what Smith says is a 20th-century Western tradition of “removing the poet from the work.”  In keeping with this ethos, slam poet Brenda Moosy writes,

“When the man came to install my hot tub,
I said ‘It must be in a clearing, mister,
‘Cause I want to see the stars!’”

Slam supporters enjoy the vitality of their grass-roots events as well as the artistic communities that have been evolving from them.  They say the critics have missed the point, distracted by “unseemly” competition and by the raucous enthusiasm of the audience.  They say the slam poets honor the word above the event, and the poetry over the popularity. 

The slam poets and their fans continue to read and to listen, to write and to cheer.  They know that they are part of a new artistic community that is vital and alive.  In the unofficial motto of slam master Alan Wolf, “the points are not the point; the point is poetry.”