WHAT IS SLAM POETRY?
jack mothershed


Two years ago or so, Mark Fabionar started a monthly poetry reading at Cal Poly called "Another Type of Groove." He was able to attract, though his budget was minimal, some very distinguished and popular poets.

I met Mark by virtue of our both working on behalf of poetry with the arts council. Mark told me about the Groove. I went to see. I was thrilled and, like anyone thrilled with something, I began telling everyone. A lot of that telling was done through The Poetry Page.

In the course of all that telling, the definition of what was happening got abbreviated and that provoked the question.

The question is this. What is slam poetry?

The quick answer, in case you have to leave now to flip the pancakes, is "nothing". Slam is not a kind of poetry. Slam is a kind of contest. rubberchicken's rules don't vary much from that but reflect additional considerations.
Judges, as you can see from that link, are normally asked to judge based on content and performance. Therefore:

WHAT IS SLAM POETRY? Performance poetry.

The slam poet never reads. The slam poet recites. Why do I say that? Because it is highly unlikely that a poem is being presented optimally if it is not presented from memory. I think that because that is my experience.

You could say, well then, isn't Adrienne Rich performing her poetry optimally? I don't think so. Isn't she performing it? Ummmm. Maybe, I don't think so. I think she is relying totally on content. She is reading her text and allowing the content to speak for itself. She is not performing it.

Is Buddy Wakefield performing his poetry? Yes! Yes! Yes! Definitely! Will Buddy Wakefield win a slam if he has no content? Nope.
If I go to a poetry reading and Buddy Wakefield is there and Adrienne Rich is there, who do you think you will enjoy more, the performance presentation or the content presentation? Answer - performance presentation - hands down.

I like to read Shakespeare. I prefer to see Shakespeare performed.

But if Adrienne Rich's material is oh so elegantly, aesthetically, and scientifically correct? And what if Buddy's material is differently elegant, aesthetic, and scientific? Well, we have to ask ourselves what element of content is the real determining factor about the quality of the content? Answer - the aha factor. In the end if a judge goes aha because the aha factor was good and the performance made the aha factor shine, the judge rates the poet highly.

The performance poets work their material until they live it, breathe it, feel it in every cell. The performance poet is an actor.The actor knows how to communicate. Well, couldn't Tom Cruise perform Buddy Wakefield's material? Yes. But the slam is a poetry contest and slam contests have rules and one of them is that the material performed has to be original.

The bottom line is this. A slam poetry contest is going to be held at the Cal Poly Pac Friday, May 21, 2004 at 7pm. If you really want to know what slam poetry is, go over there and pay your $15 and you will hear a number of champions and you will have a grand slam fun time. And next time I see you, you don't have to try to explain to me what slam poetry is. We will have a common understanding. Howl, dog!

For more info on the CalPoly Slam
click here.

The rest of this article is going to talk about what slam poetry is not - kinda.
Since slam poetry is not really a kind of poetry but rather a kind of contest and what we call slam poetry is better called performance poetry, we should perhaps consider correcting the name and practice using the term performance poetry.
Correcting the name is important because people have suffered for the misnomer. I have a friend who wanted to have poetry readings in the auditorium of his workplace. All was well until he used the word slam and permission was curtailed. When asked, the curtailers had no idea what slam poetry was but with a name like slam it could not be good. Patricia Smith lost her profession as a journalist because her pseudo news slam poetry was construed by her employers as news fabrication. You can hear her here.

Lack of understanding is just as likely among poetry "purists" as among corporate managers. Many prefer to complain about errors in a poet's punctuation over stopping to consider why the poet may have used erroneous punctuation to make a point (no pun intended). Or a "purist" will exult that they can refuse a particular poem because of grammar errors instead of finding that the message of the poem would be obscured if not presented in the persona of the poem's grammatically deficient protagonist.

During the past year I have been enamored with several poets. One of those is Robert Pinsky. The first sentence in the body of his THE SOUNDS OF POETRY IS "There are no rules." As much as I dislike sentences that begin with "there are", I love this one. It frees me to use any tool or technique I can to communicate. Simultaneously it makes me responsible for making those tools and techniques work. Not everything will work everywhere and nothing will satisfy every member of any audience. It is always this choice. Perhaps it IS this reality that produces devisiveness. To many, many of the devices used by respected poets much earlier in our history would be lost on many of our "purists."

Locally, we been talking a lot about how poetry relates to jazz, how jazz is a conversation, a syncopated conversation. Pinsky points out how some of the old poets used almost unseen techniques to jazz a poem. What is jazz? Variation. Gerard Manley Hopkins and his sprung rhythms. Ben Johnson would start a line with an anapest then switch to iambic or vice versa which is exactly what jazz musicians will often do. Just when you have started tapping to da dum da dum it suddenly switches to dum da dum da. Lines and syntax are "messed" with to speed up a piece and slow it down. Rhyme schemes can happen as often as needed in a multitude of flavors. None of this is new to slam poets - oops, I mean performance poets. Any beat will work. Hiphop, like jazz, is a simple rhythm scheme. But like country music, it allows so much room for simultaneous variations.

"Purists" rely on the support of whatever group they follow to give them their feelings of superiority, similar to those with religious convictions. Likewise groups of poets probably exist whose members are not interested enough in grammar to debug their poetry of grammatical errors. They also may feel that clinging to good grammar would separate them from their constituency just as "purists" may feel that accepting a poem with bad grammar might separate them from their group. Don't let all that stuff mess with you. Go for the poetry.

Blessed are the poetry lovers who don't care where they find their epiphany.

I am not about to transgress Mr. Pinsky's rule that there are no rules. I might however just point out some elements that do NOT have to be present to make slam poetry what it is.

Slam poetry does not have to violate rules of grammar although violations of grammar are often present.

Slam poetry does not have to contain words objectionable to some of the population although some poems are rife.

Slam poetry is not a kind of poetry that only young people can write although most slam poets are young.

Slam poetry does not have to have rhyme although much of slam poetry has rhyme schemes and rhyme schemes. It is possible to ponder that perhaps elitists are extremely fond of "free" verse because so much slam has rhyme.

Slam poetry does not have to be causist although it sometimes is.

Slam poetry does not have to be created and performed by non-lily-whites although some of it is. Consider Buddy Wakefield.

Observe that I could have eliminated the word slam from the above "not" statements. All these things could be said about poetry in general. That is the real bottom line.
Hey, don't slam that link on the way out of this article.