|
|
| |||||||||||||||
 | |||||||||||||||
by Benjamin Ortiz
11.15.1998
—pulsing with breath as if to match the steadily roaring grumble of a capacity crowd at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas. Showers of raucous catcalls pour from all walls in rivulets of rage, furor, and nail-biting tension. This 1,324-seater is sold out, and people are looking for blood like sharks who have inhaled fear, or thundering like sports fans who taste a touchdown. The auditorium could almost crack open and swallow itself from stage to balcony.
The audience is not worked up over a football game or wrestling match; they're here for a verbose brawl, a battle of wits, metaphorical bloodsport, an endurance contest fought, won, and lost with the travel of words from mind to mouth to mic to the mob.
Believe it or not, they're here for poetry.
The ringmaster has no clothes, so to speak, except for a porkpie hat and scrubby facial growth. He's the zookeeper, word pusher, the Ayatollah of Slam-ola, guardian of the poetry-temple exchange rates. New York City poetry impresario Bob Holman speaks: "Hey hey hey! Everyone wants to know how come when you get these poems up here, these THINGS of beauty, which we have asked the whimsically selected judges to adjudicate for us, that these THINGS of beauty can become their numerological equivalents—doesn't that mean that the life gets kicked out of it? Absolutely! It's a poetry slam!"
JUDGES: DO YOU SOLEMNLY SWEAR THAT YOUR SCORES WILL BE BASED SOLELY ON YOUR OBJECTIVE EVALUATION OF THE POETRY AND PERFORMANCE, AND NOT HOW MUCH BEER YOU HAVE BEEN BRIBED WITH?
I arrive at Austin's Ruta Maya cafe on Thursday, August 20, for a preliminary bout in the 9th annual National Poetry Slam. It's the biggest such event yet, with 45 teams (of four people each) competing for the grand prize of $2,000, plus 14 additional individual competitors going separately for $500. Poets from across the U.S. and Canada arrive here upon qualifying in local and regional competitions held throughout the year at home-based reading series. For many, the national slam is a pilgrimage that draws repeat contenders, but for others it's a brave new world, as with the New York City team based out of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which generates new teammates every year.
Arguably, the slam's origins are co-terminous with poetry itself, but the slam as a distinctly US phenomenon goes back to the '70s and '80s when hard-nosed midwestern poets experimented with taking poetry from salons to saloons. Former Chicago construction worker Marc Smith was one of those poets who helped breathe new life into poetry after experiencing stale literary and academic gatherings where the spoken word was treated reverentially, like the word of God. In dada-esque reaction, Smith and others organized events in which poets donned boxing gear and sparred in wrestling rings where they honed the art of verbal one-upsmanship. Smith encouraged the crowd to voice consent or dissent with the poet's vision, or to just howl drunkenly if the mood struck them.
By the mid-'80s, Smith had launched a regular weekly slam that eventually found a home at the Green Mill (once Al Capone's hangout). From there, it spread to the coasts, and the Chicago style of performance poetry was cross-pollinated at newly christened slam cafes and bars across the country. It wasn't long before the first national slam competition convened in San Francisco in 1990.
I think about the slam's humble beginnings when I elbow my way into Ruta Maya's packed environs full of young scribes-wanting-to-be-oracles chomping at the bit for a piece of the action when all of a sudden, I'm asked to be a judge for this bout between San Francisco, Roanoke, and Seattle. Should I remain "objective" or dive in head first? As the constant refrain, mantra, and all-purpose disclaimer goes: it's a fucking slam!
Five judges are chosen randomly from the audience to give an Olympic-style score of 0 to 10 for each three-minute reading in four rounds, where each team member gets a reading slot. The high and low scores are dropped, and the remaining three judges' scores are added. Poems over three-minutes long are penalized, and group performances are allowed in place of an individual reading. Props, costumes, and music are against the rules. Reading from memory is the norm, but scripts are allowed. The team with the highest cumulative score wins. Sounds simple, right? Before the weekend is over, these basic rules will serve as the nexus of debate, division, and unbridled animosity. Protest is as much the rule as the rules themselves.
The heat is on. Literally. Poems spit forth like steaming asphalt, fast and furious, increasing the Texas humidity with lip friction. Four-time individual slam champion Patricia Smith serves as emcee and introduces the judges: "This might be the only time you'll want to applaud them" I get used to the booing and hissing as if this article has already been released to a room full of poets.
The standout poem in this round is "Fallen Catholic Fix," by SF's Russell Gonzaga, a 29-year-old Filipino whose excitement at attending his third national slam matches his energy to win this year. We talk after the round and manage to sweat out the heat that will make poets faint throughout this weekend's tournament.
Gonzaga teaches in an after-school program for mostly at-risk youth, a background he himself shares. The slam seems to be both a channel for and target of the rage he has worked through since his gangbanging days. He talks specifically about poetry readings for the slam versus poetry readings in communities of color: "I have slam work, and I have work that I do for the community, people of color, and I keep the two fairly separate. With a slam poem, I don't get too spiritual. If I do, it's interwoven with something that's more mainstreamish, and that's the one thing that's strange about the slam: it's defining a mainstream poetry, which is kind of odd."
Addressing racial issues and other topics of importance to communities of color is a difficult if not self-defeating undertaking at the slam, says Gonzaga. "Subjecting oneself to the scrutiny of the dominant culture is one thing," Gonzaga points out, "and not only that, they're giving you number scores, which is even more problematic." Paul Devlin's excellent movie, Slam Nation: The Sport of the Spoken Word, documents the claim at the 1996 national slam that poems on race from people of color score low. But then again, conventional wisdom says that the judges always suck, and the argument goes that the best teams are the ones who can win despite and because of this fact.
In fairness, Gonzaga admits that folks of color participate widely in the slam, and winners of the individual competition were exclusively female until last year, when Cleveland's Da Boogie Man, a young black male, won the title. But the question remains: Why divide oneself between work devoted to home community versus this relatively new community called the national slam? "I'll describe it in terms of experience," says Gonzaga, "my first national slam at Ann Arbor, Michigan, walking into an auditorium filled with like 1,000 people, to see poetry! I had never experienced that in my life" Ultimately, he feels that he must support the slam's popularizing and democratizing effects for poetry.
Devlin's film vividly captures the glory of poetry elevated by spectator flash, as the documentary follows Team New York City on its trip to the 1996 nationals in Portland, Oregon. The film's subtitle underscores the "sport" aspect of the slam (Devlin is an award-winning sports documentarian). But the film also does a good job of kicking different opinions around; some see the slam as a vehicle to advance literature, others see it as a poetry and performance hybrid art form unto itself, while others thrive on the slam as pure, no-holds-barred competition. Slam Nation also puts Marc Smith on camera, sagely suggesting that the slam works if it creates a community of poets.
But to get to the nationals, a year's worth of local competition is required, with poets keeping stats on themselves and others like running backs. Poets sometimes "riff" on each others' works, voicing criticism often to the point of pissing each other off, and all the while provoking each other to perform in top form like a race horse pushed to the limit, requiring some element of strategy and even more stamina. Ultimately, the slam is a community created by local and regional winners, who further put the national gathering to the test of what community means and how it can survive the contentious head butting that competition breeds.
