Poetry slam
A poetry slam is a competitive art event in which poets perform spoken word poetry before a live audience and a panel of judges.
Poetry slams began in Chicago in the 1980s, with the first slam competition designed to move poetry recitals from academia to a popular audience. American poet Marc Smith, believing the poetry scene at the time was "too structured and stuffy", began experimenting by attending open-microphone poetry readings, and then turning them into slams by introducing the element of competition.
The performances at a poetry slam are judged as much on performance as content, and poets may compete as individuals or in teams. The judging is often handled by a panel of judges, typically five, who are usually selected from the audience. Sometimes the poets are judged by audience response.
History
American poet Marc Smith is credited with starting the poetry slam movement at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago in November 1984. In July 1986, the original slam moved to its permanent home, the Green Mill Jazz Club. In 1987, the Ann Arbor Poetry Slam was founded by Vince Keuter. In August 1988, the first poetry slam held in New York City was hosted by Bob Holman at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.In 1990, the first American National Poetry Slam took place at Fort Mason, San Francisco.
Today, there are regular poetry slam competitions all around the globe.
While slam poetry has often been ignored in traditional higher learning institutions, it slowly is finding its way into courses and programs of study. For example, at Berklee College of Music, in Boston, slam poetry is now available as a minor course of study.
Format
Different formats of poetry slams exist throughout the world. Generally, however, in a poetry slam, members of the audience are chosen by a master of ceremonies to act as judges for the event, though scoring can also be done by the audience. After each poet performs, a score is awarded to the performance. Scores generally range between zero and ten.Before the competition begins, the host will often bring up a "sacrificial" poet, whom the judges will score in order to calibrate their judging.
A single round at a standard slam consists of performances by all eligible poets. Most slams last multiple rounds, and many involve the elimination of lower-scoring poets in successive rounds. An elimination format might run 8–4–2; eight poets in the first round, four in the second, and two in the last. At the end of the slam, the poet with the highest number of points earned is the winner.
Props, costumes, and music are typically forbidden in slams, which differs greatly from its immediate predecessor, performance poetry.
Other rules for slams include enforcing a time limit, after which a poet's score may be docked based on how long the poem exceeded the limit for. The time limit is usually around three to four minutes.
In an "Open Slam", the most common slam type, competition is open to all who wish to compete, given the number of slots available. In an "Invitational Slam", only those invited to do so may compete.
Theme slams
In 1998, spoken word poet Emanuel Xavier created the House of Xavier and the Glam Slam, an annual downtown arts event staged at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. The fusion of ball culture and poetry slam competitions featured four open categories such as Best Erotic Poem in Sexy Underwear or Lingerie, Best Verbal Vogue and Best Love Poem in Fire Engine Red. Winners of each category received a trophy and went on to compete for the Grand Prize title of Glam Slam Champion. The annual competition was first held in New York City and then London until 2010.Similar to the House of Xavier's Glam Slam, a "Theme Slam" was one in which all performances must conform to a specified theme, genre, or formal constraint. Themes may include Nerd, Erotica, Queer, Improv, or other conceptual limitations. In theme slams, poets can sometimes be allowed to break "traditional" slam rules. For instance, they sometimes allow performance of work by another poet. They can also allow changes on the restrictions on costumes or props, changing the judging structure, or changing the time limits.
Theme slams are frequently used to advocate participation by particular and perhaps underrepresented demographics, like younger poets and women.
Performative aspects
Poetry slams can feature a broad range of voices, styles, cultural traditions, and approaches to writing and performance. The originator of performance poetry, Hedwig Gorski, credits slam poetry for carrying on the poetics of ancient oral poetry designed to grab attention in barrooms and public squares.Some poets are closely associated with the vocal delivery style found in hip-hop music and draw heavily on the tradition of dub poetry, a rhythmic and politicized genre belonging to black and particularly West Indian culture. Others employ an unrhyming narrative formula. Some use traditional theatrical devices including shifting voices and tones, while others may recite an entire poem in ironic monotone. Some poets use nothing but their words to deliver a poem, while others stretch the boundaries of the format, tap-dancing or beatboxing or using highly choreographed movements.
What is a dominant/successful style one year may not be passed to the next. Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, slam poet and author of Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, was quoted in an interview on the Best American Poetry blog as saying:
One of the more interesting end products of this constant shifting is that poets in the slam always worry that something—a style, a project, a poet—will become so dominant that it will kill the scene, but it never does. Ranting hipsters, freestyle rappers, bohemian drifters, proto-comedians, mystical shamans and gothy punks have all had their time at the top of the slam food chain, but in the end, something different always comes along and challenges the poets to try something new.
Bob Holman, a poetry activist and former MC of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, once called the movement "the democratization of verse". In 2005, Holman was also quoted as saying: "The spoken word revolution is led a lot by women and by poets of color. It gives a depth to the nation's dialogue that you don't hear on the floor of Congress. I want a floor of Congress to look more like a National Poetry Slam. That would make me happy."
Criticism
At the 1993 National Poetry Slam in San Francisco, a participating team from Canada wrote, printed and circulated an instant broadside titled Like Lambs to the Slammer, that criticized what they perceived as the complacency, conformity, and calculated tear-jerking endemic to the poetry slam scene. Over time, slam poetry has been criticized for lacking depth and for its features, e.g., "slam voice," which may limit the range of emotion it can express.In an interview in the Paris Review, literary critic Harold Bloom wrote
I can't bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn't even silly; it is the death of art.
Poet and lead singer of King Missile, John S. Hall, has also long been a vocal opponent, taking issue with such factors as its inherently competitive nature and what he considers its lack of stylistic diversity. He recalls seeing his first slam, at the Nuyorican Poets Café: "I hated it. And it made me really uncomfortable and... it was very much like a sport, and I was interested in poetry in large part because it was like the antithesis of sports.... t seemed to me like a very macho, masculine form of poetry and not at all what I was interested in."
The poet Tim Clare offers a "for and against" account of the phenomenon in Slam: A Poetic Dialogue.
Ironically, slam poetry movement founder Marc Smith has been critical of the commercially successful Def Poetry television and Broadway live stage shows produced by Russell Simmons, decrying it as "an exploitive entertainment diminished the value and aesthetic of performance poetry".
Slam poetry as a youth movement
Slam poetry has found popularity as a form of self-expression among many teenagers. Young Chicago Authors provides workshops, mentoring, and competition opportunities to youth in the Chicago area. Every year YCA presents The Rooted & Radical Youth Poetry Festival, the world's largest team-based youth slam. San Francisco based non-profit organization Youth Speaks Inc. has also been running the Brave New Voices poetry festival since 1998. The youth poetry slam movement was the focus of a documentary film series produced by HBO and released in 2009. It featured poets from Youth Speaks, Urban Word, Louder than a Bomb and other related youth poetry slam organizations.In a 2005 interview, one of slam's best known poets Saul Williams praised the youth poetry slam movement, explaining:
In 2012, more than 12,000 young people took part in an England-wide youth slam Shake the Dust, organized by Apples and Snakes as part of the London 2012 Festival. An Open Letter to Honey Singh, a rap video featuring Rene Sharanya Verma performing at Delhi Poetry Slam, went viral on YouTube receiving over 1.5 million hits.
International events
At the European level, the European Poetry Slam Championship takes place every year.The Poetry Slam World Cup also takes place every year.