June 9th Slam -- And What My Relationship to Slam Poetry Is, Again

You know what's cool in Pittsburgh? The Slam Poetry community... Specifically known as: The Pittsburgh Poetry Collective. They run weekly slams and monthly workshops... I have to get these on my calendar.

I've attended only one other slam event before, and it was in the same format as this one: up to eight poets read poems in three rounds; each poem is judged by random audience members using a rating between zero and ten. The winner receives a $25 prize. The event this week was enthusiastically hosted by Slammaster Lori Beth Jones.

I was one of the randomly selected audience members to judge. I gave both high and low scores; in the first round I thought I was only going to give everyone 5's and 7.5's, but by the end I had handed out at least one 9. Slam poetry is unignorable. The poets put a lot of emotion and energy and preparation into their performance; and being able to deliver a good performance is one of the essential bases of the art, unlike in (for lack of a better term) "literary" poetry. There were several gripping performances the night I attended-- the highlight goes to the contest winner, Rhetorical Arts, who was able to deliver an intense & loud anger without ever losing the pace or clarity of their poems, covering topics including their own chidhood autism diagnosis ("they said autistic, when they should have said artistic") and troubles with depression (central metaphor: sharing a [relation-]ship with their disease, understanding that they have to live with it... but if it won't cooperate, they will starve it).

I'm at odds with the social justice and positivity that slam promotes. The emotional reality of what is being said comes through to me, but there's always a righteous moral positioning that I do not vibe with. At the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange workshop earlier this month, Joseph Karas discussed how he always looked for poetry "which does not spare the writer." In that vein, I don't think the slam I've heard was composed with that kind of self-destructive tendency that I appreciate. This may be from the genre expectations: slam is still considered to be a community-building resource, a venue for positive social messages, while "literary" poetry has the benefit of being a mostly defunct mode of art. --poetryburgh@gmail.com