Words in action

The National Poetry Slam hits Providence

by Kathleen Hughes

In a day when most of our words travel from our fingertips to our keyboards, from our mouths to an automated voice service asking us our mother's maiden name, or from our throats to the air-conditioned interior of our car as we sing in traffic, the idea of a poetry slam can be downright terrifying. A poetry slam, afterall, affords you no "my server was down" excuses; a poetry slam cannot take place in your car or on the phone; a poetry slam does not give you the chance, even, to sidle up to the microphone with your head sunk below your collarbone, mumbling, "This is like, really bad, but here goes."

No, a poetry slam audience will not endure any ducking away. "Slam is real, it's live, it's happening right now, and the audience is obligated to respond," Worcester slam team member Sou MacMillan says. So if you want to slam, you better be ready. You better have words. You better have a voice. You better stand up straight. And you better be be able to make them laugh, cry, scream, or all of the above, in three minutes or less. Chances are -- you'd beat Emily Dickinson.

On Tuesday, August 8, the SlamAmerica tour bus will arrive in Providence, completing a cross-country poetry slam demonstration tour. These touring poets will join nearly 300 slam team members and individual competitors at dusk in Waterplace Park for the welcoming ceremonies of the 2000 National Poetry Slam (NPS). These poets, along with Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci Jr., the Providence Foundation, Projective Verse, other supporters, organizers, and fans, will enjoy a special edition of WaterFire, dubbed "PoetFire," in which spoken verse will be choreographed with fires lit on the Providence River. Who knows, maybe Cianci will even take a turn as bard and offer the audience "Operation Plunder Dome: A Haiku."

Slamming's trademark exuberance, showmanship, and good fun should not be mistaken for casual or shoddy poetry. Slamming is serious. To qualify for one of the 56 teams from Alaska, British Columbia, Vermont, and most places in between, poets competed in numerous rounds of well-organized local slams. Once the four-member teams were established, they practiced and competed together in preparation for nationals. As with any swim meet, debate championship, or high stakes poker game, there is as much serious preparation of a poem as there is fun in performing it. "There's a veritable quilt of stories to be heard," says Laura Moran, Projective vice-president, NPS organizer, and first Providence grand slam champion (1992). "People from all walks of life have found a way to transfer their experiences to art, like alchemy. Then they practice damn hard."

Next week, at nine venues throughout Downcity, poetry will come alive both in nighttime team and individual competition and daytime theme slams such as "Head 2 Head Haiku," "Improv Slam," "Latin American Slam," "African American Slam," and "Props Slam." There will be children's events and a benefit for Project AIDS. By Saturday, August 12, more than $5000 in prize money will have been awarded. And audiences will have observed some of the best slam in the country -- "poets who have the best words and the best performance," according to Boston slam master Mike Brown. As such, one may understand how and why slamming is fun, important, and accessible.

Poetry slamming in its current form is young and American, and its immediate roots can be seen in rap, hip-hop, Beat poetry, stand-up comedy, performance art, even 1920s Proletariat poetry. Beyond the 20th century, of course oral poetry predates all written texts. While slams are often dismissed for engendering "low-brow" poems as opposed to the formalistic "academic" poetry of The New Yorker, Poetry, and the Pulitzer Prize, the slam is one of the sole remaining bastions of unadulterated oral storytelling and performance.

"Before it was printed on the page, [poetry] was a spoken art," says Bill MacMillan, Worcester, Massachusetts slam master, member of the 1996 national champion Providence team. "Slams take poetry out of the schools, the academy, the anthology, and give it back to the people." And yet, MacMillan emphasizes, slam poetry does not oppose the poetry of the academy, but rather enlarges it. "Slams combine the learning of poetry in an academic way with practicing it in a rock 'n' roll mentality," he says.

As with any swim meet, debate championship, or high stakes poker game, there is as much serious preparation of a poem as there is fun in performing it. "There's a veritable quilt of stories to be heard," says Laura Moran, Projective Verse vice-president, NPS organizer, and first Providence grand slam champion (1992). "People from all walks of life have found a way to transfer their experiences to art, like alchemy. Then they practice damn hard."

Ray Davey, NPS organizer, Projective Verse president, and AS220 slam master, emphasizes that slam is a medium, not a genre. A slam, he says, is the performance of a poem that spent a long time on paper, like other poems. "Slam gets poets to bring to performing the same passion that they bring to the writing of it."

Marc Smith, a construction worker and poet in Chicago, is credited with starting the first poetry slam in 1984 at a jazz club, the Get Me High Lounge. In 1986, Smith moved his venue to the storied jazz club, the Green Mill Lounge, where Al Capone once drank, as did Meg Ryan in When a Man Loves a Woman. By 1987, the Nuyorican Café in New York City's East Village, perhaps the best-known slam venue, was launched. Outlets as far afoot as Fairbanks, Alaska and Ann Arbor, Michigan had slams that year. In 1990, the first NPS was held with two teams: Chicago and San Francisco.

In 1991, slam came to New England with National Slam champion Patricia Smith and husband Mike Brown. Smith moved from Chicago to Boston for a job at the Boston Globe. The husband and wife team began a regular slam at the Cantab Lounge. But Boston was not enough -- Smith and Brown spearheaded a New England slam movement from 1991-'93, offering numerous demonstration slams up and down the coast. The AS220 slam in Providence and the Java Hut slam in Worcester were both inspired by Smith/Brown visits. In 1992, the NPS was in Boston and Smith won her second individual title, while Boston captured the team prize.

Local slams have continued to proliferate around the country and abroad. NPS reflects this growth, with 17 cities competing in 1992, 33 teams in 1997, and 56 teams registered this year in Providence. There are teen slam tournaments, the much-acclaimed documentary film, Slam Nation, and 29,300 web citations returned by Google.com when searching for "poetry slam." As Sou MacMillan pointed out, poetry slams are now mainstream enough to get a mention on The Simpsons.

Why? In part because participating in a slam is so easy. Whereas one is just about as likely to win a million-dollar lottery as to have a poem published in a major magazine, the poetry slam microphone is available to anyone who can sign a name on a list, wait his or her turn, and read or say a poem aloud. "It's open to everybody regardless of race, creed, age, or walk of life," NPS organizer and '99 NPS Providence team member John Powers says. "If you sign up, people will say, `Go ahead.' That's the best part."

When a poem is finished, the audience's response is immediate, ranging from standing ovation and loud cheers, to polite clapping, to a few hesitant claps and people shifting in their seats. Scores from five randomly selected audience judges also frame the response. "If people get up and their poems aren't of a certain caliber, the audience won't respond and scores will be low," Powers says. A poet, in turn, will react to low scores either by improving his or her work, or by not slamming. There's something rather Darwinian about it.

Boos, however, are rare, according to Bill MacMillan, because of a certain assumption of trust and respect between performer and audience. Just getting on stage and sharing a poem is enough to be welcomed into a poetic community. "The community is protective of one another," MacMillan says. "It's hard to reveal your innermost thoughts -- and the poetry slam tends to create a safe space to do that."

Herein lies another reason for slamming's popularity: the safe, responsive space. Whether one is leaning on a crippled stool with a crackling microphone and a bottle of Bud in hand, performing for a crowd of 13 in Peoria, or standing on stage at the Finals at the VMA Arts & Cultural Center in Providence with four microphones and a few thousand people in front of you, the audience wants to listen. Brown points out that at the Cantab Lounge weekly slams in Cambridge, 50 percent of the attendees are not writers but listeners. "They come because they like poetry," Brown says. "There's absolute silence when an open mike slam is going on."

When you combine a captive audience, creativity, charisma, beer or coffee, nighttime, and competition, it is no surprise that slam poetry is so popular. But, perhaps because of this popularity and inclusivity, slams are not generally supported by an inherently exclusive academy. At prestigious writing programs and conferences such as the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Johns Hopkins, and Breadloaf, you will find no "slams," only "readings"; when Maya Angelou delivered her poem,"On the Pulse of the Morning," at Bill Clinton's 1992 inauguration, she is said to have "read" it, though Bill MacMillan says the performance would have received a 10 in a slam competition. Clearly slam, as its own quirky, performative poetic medium, is generative unto itself. But what does it do for the cause of poetry as a whole?

The accomplished Rhode Island state poet C.D. Wright, who could be considered part of a poetry "academy," thinks slamming is great. "I think it's vital. [Slam] has created a new different constituency, it has created a community and a night life, and it has created a different kind of attention to language," Wright says. "[Slam] is different than lyrics, where words are secondary. Words are primary in slam."

"Slam takes a lot of the mysticism out of being a poet," Bill MacMillan says. Davey, who acknowledges the sometimes "questionable literary merit" of slam poems, insists that slam "is getting people out of their houses, away from their TVs, to a place where they are listening to words."

If slam is vulnerable to accusations of encouraging "bad poetry," the vulnerability comes from slammers who champion unrevised, improvised poetry. "There are slammers who are resistant to editing and revision because they think it violates the spirit of the poem," Davey says, calling such resistance "laziness."

But, Powers insists, such slammers are rare. "It's extremely inaccurate that slam poetry is not well-crafted."

The non-revisers are perhaps distinct from the improvisers who may have highly revised pieces but might also improvise a piece on occasion. Powers says audiences will see "no more than a couple" improvisational slams at NSP.

No poet interviewed for this article ascribed to the no-revision view -- just the contrary. "I've never done less than a dozen edits on a poem I've slammed," Davey says.

By the time Sou MacMillan slams a poem, "The work should be done," she says. "This should be the part you enjoy."

According to Brown, the slam itself, even, can be a revision. "I'm a poet first, I put pen to paper first," Brown says. "Practicing or learning to perform a poem is like an act of revision -- once you hear it, the basic meaning of a poem probably won't change but a lot on the surface will."

Providence is an ideal city for NPS, Davey says, because it is "a beautiful city with great venues and a sophisticated audience for the arts." Slam has a good Providence tradition as shown by the triumph of the 1996 team at the NPS in Portland, Oregon, and by the continuous running of two slam series at AS220 (one of the nation's longest-running slams) and at Nick-a-Nee's. "It's the perfect moment in time to have the NPS in Providence," Moran says. "It's becoming a quintessential arts city."

Although much is made of craft, performance, scores, and winning, a slam, in the end, can be most appreciated in its essential parts: two or more tangible, live faces across a real, finite space; some light in between them; and one person speaking, words crossing, reaching out, maybe bouncing right off the other person, maybe prickling, maybe beckoning, maybe, hopefully, finding home.

"There's that moment of audience reaction -- of surprise, wonder. I made an audience cry once,"" Powers says. "If you get your point across, they're right there with you, and it's a rewarding feeling."

The National Poetry Slam takes place August 8 through 12 at various locations in downtown Providence. For a complete schedule, visit www.npsy2k.com.