Boomcrash

George Carlin on Michael Jackson

and that’s all i’m gonna say here.

Slamundrum

A reply to “Is Slam in Danger of Going Soft?”

I became reluctant of slamming – but not performance poetry, that’s in the mix to this day – when I realized how adept I was at pandering to the audience. As in slam-winning, audience in my palm adept – but I was risking sacrificing the poetry in my work for crowd-pleasing, which after spending decades honing craft and voice alike, is a form of creative soul death that I’d rather not have to live with. So I shifted gears into smaller, more open venues, which is where things remain. Now when I read my work, the message gets heard loud and clear (which is more than I can say for some of my less fortunate slam gigs) and more often than not, that message is understood with an equal clarity. Not that smaller venues are a letdown – at core, I’m a poet who spent years cutting her teeth in the sorts of postage stamp-sized dive bars that Marc Smith talks about, starting back in the mid-1970s. While I miss hitting up larger joints on a regular basis, it’s more important to have an impact as well as a crowd.

The challenge is how to hold forth in this size and sort of venue while not becoming obscure. This more than anything is the cross-generational curse of “serious poetry” – many a decent poet gets overlooked (or is completely off the cultural map) due to the semantic opaqueness of their work, not to mention their rather stunning ability to not be able to read in front of an audience. (While I love many modernist poets, I am completely with Marc here when it comes to Ezra Pound, and the failing of many poets when it comes to oration of their work in an approachable manner speaks for itself.) When you consider this in light of the reality that most beginning practitioners of any art form are lacking in polish, if not possessing a truncated relationship with their creative voice as well, it becomes very clear why slam arose – it was out of necessity as well as desire, as well as a wholesale need to break free of the constraints of overly academicized forms of poetic expression, which are notorious for being both obtuse and lacking in a requisite degree of performativity when misfortune strikes and well-heeled practitioners dare to foist said work on the public. In short: poetry had to break itself free if it was not to risk a tragic demise at the perennially dull and the as-yet inexperienced.

Despite my decision to shy away a bit from more mainstream audiences, when I do venture forth into larger venues, there are slights-of-hand that can be enacted to get the message into the mix, although I do tend to shy away from this approach whenever possible. One of the things that I learned from my bordering-on-pandering days is that it is possible to slip in a social change message into an otherwise standard “love is bullshit” slam poem. This approach requires playing a bit of poetic trickery, such as inserting an overtly political declaration mid-line well after the audience thinks all you’re doing carrying on in a fit of laugh-grabbing frustration about dating snafus and drunken one night stands – an admittedly devious (or at least somewhat awkward) form of cultural detournément. As such, I prefer the more direct approach mentioned above, even if it costs me some in terms of audience size.

It’s important to note that my present body of work came galloping forth not from continuing on with my poetic journey throughout the 1990s, but following years of neglect during that period, which thankfully wound to a grinding halt at the century’s close. In specific, the re-emergence of my poetic stride was conjured forth after seeing Saul Williams perform in the film Slam. (My sistas and brothas, that scene in the jail courtyard? Oh my god.) As such, it’s hard at times for me to wrap my mind around the seeming conflict here within the slam community between old and new – and let’s say it, post-beat and hip-hop – which while not racial per se in this case, is most definitely cultural, if not generational as well – while at other times, said conflict becomes painfully clear, in which case it’s ALL about race, don’t listen to anybody who tells you otherwise. Don’t even get me started on the relationship of queers within slam to slam itself.

That being stated, I will fight to the death for slam to be taken seriously as art, when in fact it is such a beast. The problem however is reflected quite succinctly by Marc Smith – the popularity of slam is turning it, at least in a noticeable number of cases, into a homogenized if not pandering form of expression. While some slam poems are amazing, life-transforming embodiments of personal expression that do, in fact, deserved to be called art – others are not quite the cat’s gravy. While the commercialization of slam has given rise to poets who juggle both art and popularity with amazing finesse – Talaam Acey, Patricia Smith, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Saul Williams – others compromise and settle for self-indulgent or simply mundane forms of audience ass-shout-kissing to get more points, which really serves nobody, including the poets themselves. It is simply not that case though that all slam poems are solipsistic drivel – I know, I’ve seen otherwise many a time. What slam’s critics (and in particular, slam’s culturally conservative critics) need to realize is simple: life did not stop after 1947, and neither did poetry. Furthermore, this kind of struggle has been going on for as long as there have been sanctioned (or archaic) schools of artistic thought and discourse; as such, it is somewhat disingenuous to act as if slam is the first movement to rebel against such constraints.

Nevertheless, it is true that there is a sort of watering down of intention in the transition from old school to new, at least in some cases. For example, regardless of all that I have been through in this life (quite a lot), I don’t fit neatly into some audience member’s predetermined entry price for authenticity – which is the lifeblood of being successful at slamming, if you’re not going to settle for being the popular kid with a mic in her hand. Everything I have ever heard about old school slams flies in the face of this sort of gatekeeping, which also happens to map to the experiences I had when I was a teenager. (While the venues I read at were not officially slam ones, they nevertheless were part of the rise in performance poetry’s popularity at the time, and any poet who actually gave a damn about the form – and in particular, about contemporary poetry of the past 30 years or so – was welcome.) Consider this: when I performed as a feature act at The Green Mill a few years back, I brought down the house – a very jaded, poetry-savvy Chicago audience at that – for keeping things real while being completely myself, warts and all, and as always, with the poetry first and foremost. But when I performed at a certain not-to-be-named popular venue that is more representative of many mainstream slam audiences these days? I could not get a chunk of them to stop laughing – and by this, I unfortunately do not mean “laughing with”. Intersexed queerdyke autonomist mixed-race latina experimental poets aren’t supposed to slam? I guess I didn’t get the officially sanctioned cultural inclusivity memo on that one. It’s their loss, but there you have it.

What remains to be seen though is if slam can continue to flourish creatively despite its popularity, or if it will gradually become a cultural footnote, as with many art movements that eventually became rote as they grew in scope. If that turns out to be the case, it will be poetry’s loss – but it most assuredly will not be poetry’s death, either. I for one will welcome the return of our beer-stained intimate venue overlords if that turns out to be the case, and will happily perform my work for whomever happens to show up, until a new generation of poets begin to wonder why everything sounds the same, and seek refuge within the underground hideaways yet again.