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1 august 2000

i'm counting down the the national poetry slam

So, what is Poetry Slamming, and why do I do it? Back in the mid-80's, a guy named Marc Smith created the monster that is now Slam. At the time, he was a construction worker (read: "regular guy"), who also happened to dig poetry. Not only was he a self-studied student in poetry, but also wrote some pretty good stuff himself. The problem was, poetry readings didn't suit him at all. Too stuffy, no good snacks, and no interactivity. They were boring.

So Marc started doing poetry in bars throughout Chicago, and to get people's attention, he turned the "readings" into competitions. He would choose three judges at random from the audience, and they would judge each poet from 0 to 10, like Olympic diving. Whoever had the highest score at the end of the night won.

There a few rules to Slam:
1. No props.
2. No costumes
3. No background music, though you may sing
4. Three-minute time limit

Years later, people are slamming in venues throughout the world, and I mean that literally. There are Slams in nearly every state in this country, most major American cities, Canada, Germany, Jerusalem, and Denmark. That's the short history.

Each year, the Slam Family gathers once a year for the National Poetry Slam, in which teams from around the world (this year, I think it's 56 or something) compete for some serious moolah (like a couple thousand dollars), bragging rights, and an ever-increasing amount of media attention. We've made the New York Times for the past two years, and 60 Minutes did a feature on Slam that aired last November. Whether people regard us as merely a blip on the pop-culture radar, or a serious artistic force with which to contend, Poetry Slam isn't going away anytime soon. Those of us who do it, do it with a vengeance. It's fun, and the coolest people in the world are par t of it.

Do a search on Yahoo! or your favorite search engine for Poetry Slam, and see for yourself. We're everywhere, baby.

So, where do I fit into this? Well, when I was but a sprite of twenty-one, I picked up the local free paper in Winston-Salem, NC. They had a cover story about this Slam thing, so I thought I'd check it out. I was fresh out of college (and a crappy two-year college relationship) with an English degree, and thought, "what the hell. I can do this." It turned out that I could not do this with any success, at least not for about six months. I began to travel to Slams throughout the Southeast to kind of get my chops, and before I knew it, I found myself under the tutelege of Danny Solis, and the once-thriving Slam community in Asheville, NC. Allan Wolf, the host of what is now the Asheville Poetry Show, is still regarded with immense respect for the grace and class he always brought to our art form.

Over the course of a year-and-a-half, I threw myself into Slam. I would drive hours to attend a venue, and then drive back home to go to work the next day. I didn't always compete, or even read. Sometimes, I just studied others. Their presence. Their cadence. Their words. I worked hard to find my own voice, the one that people might be interested in hearing. Because, let's face it, when you're twenty-two, I don't know that any of us have got volumes of earth-shattering things to say. But I did have a good start, excellent guidance from Danny Solis and Lee Lancaster, and was up for just about anything. If two words ever described me, they would be, "I'm game."

So I ended up earning a spot on the 1995 Asheville Team with Danny, Pat Storm, and Ted Vaca. Lee Lancaster was our coach, and the Green Door and Barley's Pizza Place generously sponsored us throughout that summer. You talk about a team effort. I felt like the entire artistic community of Asheville was behind us in this, because I think a lot of them knew how hard we worked. We spent every single weekend of that summer on someone's front stoop, practicing. For hours. And hours. And hours. We fought over words. We perfected the curl of our fingers during a phrase that might need it. We worked with one another on how to stand, how to plant our bodies so firmly into the stage, and our words, so that nothing could unbalance us. We learned to play our poetry like well-trained musicians, especially our team poems (as you can have multi-voice poems.)

In addition to perfecting our craft, we also polished up the idea of "team". We developed a sign language of sorts, so that we could tell one another how we were doing on time. If we approached the three-minute time limit, we had hand signals to let us know when we were at two minutes, two forty-five, and then three. At the '95 Nationals, we worked toward good sportsmanship, and always gave props to our fellow competitors after each bout. In a nutshell, we were Uber-Team. We did not undermine one another, or our competitors, nor did we ever underestimate other teams. We were confident, but not stupid.

After three days of competition, the Asheville team ended up in the finals, which were held in a beautiful theatre in Ann Arbor, Michigan. To be real honest with you, the finals-night audience is the prize. 1200 people, listening to us. Rock on! Let's win. I'm game.

We were up against some tough competition, though --- Boston, Providence ME, and Cleveland. And then there's little old Asheville, who lots of people (bless them) were cheering for just because we were from a small city and considered cute little underdog types.

Yeah, right.

The thing with finals is that your team really needs to win every round to win the whole bag of rocks. So that's what we set out to do. To the end, we were team all the way, and ended our evening with our big gun, Everyday. I still don't know how to describe that piece to anyone, except as a very tight piece of spoken word jazz. Asheville Fusion, if you will, in which all four of us took the stage together did our job for three minutes.

Immediately after that, Lee Lancaster was backstage adding up all of the evenings' scores. When she was sure of everything, she came to us and said,

You won.

And she was right. We did.