A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE POETRY SLAM Marc Smith started a poetry reading at a Chicago jazz club IN 1984, the Get Me High Lounge, looking for a way to breathe life into boring poetry reading nights. His emphasis on poetry AND performance, laid the groundwork for the brand of poetry that would eventually become known as POETRY SLAM.
Since this time the world of SLAM poetry has EXPLODED with poets from all around the world hosting and competing in poetry slams on a weekly basis. The annual National Poetry Slam, staged in a different city each year is an annual slam championship tournament, where 4 person teams from all over North America and Europe gather to compete against each other for the national title. It has become part Super Bowl, part poetry summer camp, and part traveling exhibition. Starting out as a way to revive and bring life to the oral tradition of poetry, SLAM has now evolved into incorporating online and technological elements into the SLAM performance. Offline slams emphasize oral readings. The angle to SLAM I created and hosted in 2004 and now in 2008 emphasizes page performance and immediate improvisation of writing a poem to test your skills and wits. It’s not for everyone. Some people hate the idea of improvisation as they believe that good poetry takes time to write. But the motto of my poetry slam is this: first thought, best thought. I have read so many poems at All Poetry and elsewhere loaded down with so much poetry technique that they completely miss the point of what poetry is all about in the first place: to reach an audience. Poetry is NOT about impressing people. It’s about reaching people! And if technique does that so be it. But do not use it so much that it covers up your thoughts in the first place unless that is your intention. Poetry techniques should emphasis ‘first thought, best thought’.
WHAT IS A POETRY SLAM
Poetry SLAM is the competitive art of performance poetry, emphasizing writing and performance, encouraging poets to focus on what their poetry and their presentation of it.
Upon performing their work on stage they are judged by 5 members of the audience. Typically, the host or another organizer select the judges, who are instructed to give numerical scores based equally on the poet's content and on performance.
WHAT KIND OF POETRY IS READ AT A SLAM AND WHO CAN BE PART OF A SLAM ? It all depends on the type of poets who sign up. SLAM attracts emos to highbrows. There is no favoritism in SLAM. SLAM rounds cover everything- from free writes to structured poetry. SLAM tries to test skill, but ultimately the audience decides who wins each round, therefore there is a lot of luck involved. Poets are free in most rounds to write and perform any type of poetry, from comedy to confessional, from any style to any subject- with the ONLY limit being imposed on them the prompt for that round. Some rounds will set severe limits to test a particular aspect of poetry skill, but in all other aspects the slammer is free to ‘be me’ as they say. SLAM is open to anyone who wishes to sign up. Everyone who signs up has the opportunity to read in the first round, but subsequent rounds are determined by the judges' scores. The judges from the audience decide who they want to see more work from.
Usually there is an admission fee. But the Poetry SLAM I am hosting on All Poetry depends only on donations for prize money and to keep it advertising. How do you win a SLAM? There's no formula for winning a slam. You just gotta practice. But the fairness of the judges in their competency to detect skill, their tastes, the audience's reactions, all contribute to the scores, and who gets to go on to the next round.
WHAT ARE THE RULES?
Rules vary from slam to slam, but the basic rules are:
Each poem must be an original creation of the poet.
Each poet gets three minutes (plus a ten-second grace period) to create and perform poem. If they go over three minutes they are eliminated from the SLAM.
In an offline SLAM, the poet may not use props, costumes, or musical instruments. On an online SLAM they have an entire page at their disposal, various fonts, colors and backgrounds made available on All Poetry. Of course anyone who posts a poem at any given time has this available. But in a SLAM they must use these tools at their disposal under pressure and they must at all times keep the audience in mind while at the same time not betraying their own voice.
HOW IS A SLAM JUDGED? Each SLAM round is judged by 5 judges selected randomly from the audience. Of the scores the poet received from the five judges, the high and low scores are dropped, and the middle three are added together, giving the poet a total score. In the Poetry SLAM tonight their will be five judges preselected from the audience, but also the rest of the audience will judge as well as one collective voice. All their scores will be added and averaged together for one score to be added to the 5 other judges’ scores.
Adding your comment:
