Special Mother's Day Sunday Post--- I'm going to keep it short...
I went to exactly one Steel City Slam event, over at the now-defunct AVA Lounge over on N Craig. I competed and came in dead last, during my set I accidentally made what ended up sounding like a racist joke. The guy who won had prepared three 3-minute long pieces which he had memorized and delivered in a dramatic musical style; I was reading off a sheet of paper and did like a monotone thing. Plus my stuff wasn't very cogent, comparatively.
Topics among the contestants ranged from the connections between linguistics and feces to long comedic stories about social interactions with strangers in bathrooms. The form: basically slam, with its punctuated reading, consistent meter, assonance. The event, which had a cash prize, was judged by participating audience members, who gave each piece a numerical score. I've written off slam poetry mostly because it doesn't fit with the idea of poetry that I like to write, the sentiments are pretty easy and not so postmodern and self-doubting, not complex all the way down. Slam is popular though and what people often think of when they think of "poetry."
After I read, one of the judges approached me and talked about "literary" poetry... Like he wanted my more "literary" stuff to be allowed at the event but it wasn't flying with the crowd. There's a great big weird gap of understanding between form, content, and audience, it's hard to understand how they fit together. So it seems to me if you wanna become a "poet", to explore that, you might want to get good at slam... The next event is May 12th, at Capri Bar. I'm probably going to Hem's Summer Reading instead though.
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