Poetry Slam

4 Key excerpts on "Poetry Slam"

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  Anarchism and Art

  Democracy in the Cracks and on the Margins

  • Mark Mattern(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  4 Poetry Slam

  Stripped to its bare essentials, slam poetry is poetry that is performed in a competitive environment before a live audience. Judges, usually five, are chosen randomly from the audience with no attempt to first ascertain their ability to judge good from bad poetry. They rate the poets on a scale of zero to ten, with high and low scores tossed and the remaining three averaged. Generally, poems must be three minutes or less with points deducted for going over the time limit, though this can vary significantly across local slams. Poets are judged on the poem itself and its performance. A slam master emcees the show, and also does much of the organizing and preparation.

  The roots of slam are traced back several millennia to ancient oral traditions found in the Homeric epic, African griots, Zuni priests, Japanese Kojiki poets, and Greek bards who related communal stories via song, poetry, and narrative. According to one source, slam as a competition goes back at least to the first century B.C. when the Greek lyric poet Pindar was bested five times by a lesser-known poet, Korinna, and Pindar went on to ridicule her as a sow. Others note that the ancient Olympics included poetry competitions, with winners receiving laurel crowns. Other competitive roots include Japanese haiku contests and African word battles called “signifying.”

  Twentieth-century roots and influences include Dadaism, emphasizing childlike spontaneity, intellectual nihilism, and moving art outside the museum and concert hall. The 1950s and 1960s beat poets, who sought to transform poetry from a sedate, genteel diversion enjoyed by elites into something more immediate and accessible, are also cited as influences on slam poetry. Beat poets read in coffeehouses, bars, lofts, and cellars. They broke other rules of academic poetry by inviting audience participation, adding music, and injecting elements that sometimes made the readings appear like drunken chaos. Beat poets also began hosting open mic readings. Many of the same dynamics occurred in the Black Arts movement of the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Affiliated with Black Nationalism, this movement primarily sought to address black audiences, celebrate black culture, and increase black cultural autonomy. Black Arts poets anticipated slam in treating the poem as a performance script rather than simply a written text. They drew from various African and African American cultural elements including street vocabulary and cadence, West African vocabulary, percussion and other musical elements, call-and-response, African spirituality, and the speech cadences of black preachers. Their use of live performance, nontraditional performance venues, an attitude of political resistance, democratic ideals, and a conscious stance of marginality from dominant and official verse cultures would eventually be found in slam poetry as well. Performance art and hip-hop culture of the 1970s and 1980s also laid the foundations for slam. The genesis of slam can also be found in a reaction against the mid-twentieth-century literary world’s “New Criticism,” with its focus on structure and content of literary texts in isolation from both audience response and social context. Finally, slam poets would react against the perceived poverty of the traditional poetry scene of the 1970s and 80s; and against the elitism of traditional poetry and literary worlds.1

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  Poetry For Dummies

  • John Timpane, Maureen Watts(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • For Dummies

    (Publisher)

  Striking, often outrageous or violent stories with interesting characters. We’ve heard poems about suicide, illness, drugs, crime, childhood abuse, discrimination, poverty, sex (there is a great deal of sex in slam poetry), and mental illness at Poetry Slams. But you’ll find that different venues are associated with particular kinds of poetry — which is something to pay attention to as you shop for slams.

  A strong, assertive first-person narrator (an I ).

  Immediately striking language — often ribald, vulgar, hip, or slang.

  Lots of jokes and other humor.

  Constant allusions to contemporary popular culture (movies, TV, music), social history, politics, and poetry.

  An ending that leaves the audience with a concluding shock or joke.

  Figure 12-1: San Jose/Silicon Valley Team 1999 competing at the National Poetry Slam in Chicago.

  © David Huang

  Slams are slams. If you’re going to do them, you have to:

  Like the rough-and-tumble of it, the theater, the zaniness.

  Embrace the need to be a real actor, a ham if necessary.

  Grow the triple-thick, titanium-coated rhinoceros skin you’re going to need if response to your work is less than, shall we say, wonderful.

  Learn to be a good sport, to congratulate your conquerors, to be gracious and full of good humor if an audience or panel lets you have it. Conversely, if you win, you should be just as gracious.

  Promise yourself you won’t go to only one slam. Experience is everything, especially in this world halfway between fine arts and the World Wrestling Federation. Become part of the regular audience, get to know the poets and their entourages, and enjoy yourself.

  Keep reading your poetry in public. Each chance to perform will teach you about yourself and your poetry. Many are the times that we’ve discovered — in mid-reading! — a flaw or problem we needed to fix in a poem. But that sort of discovery makes a reading worthwhile.

  It’s the human connection that’s most important when it comes to poetry readings. Folks get to hear your poetry. What could be better than that? What more direct way of sharing your poetry could there be than delivering your own words your own way? What’s more, readings can be your introduction to a community of poets you may want to join. By organizing poetry circles or reading groups of your own, you can create your own community. However you go, keep your focus on poetry and on its power to touch people.

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  A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015

  • Wolfgang Gortschacher, David Malcolm, Wolfgang Gortschacher, David Malcolm(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  1971 , 86).

  Performance poetry, the rise of which coincided in Britain with the processes of devolution and the emergence of multicultural society, made extensive use of regional dialects, slang, and other “substandard” varieties of English, the characteristic features of which it would be impossible to record in writing. Among the various movements within performance poetry in the United Kingdom one can mention the Liverpool Poets (Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten), the Ranters associated with the punk explosion of the mid‐1970s (John Cooper Clarke, Joolz, Attila the Stockbroker), the new cabaret and music hall scene, with one of its centers in the Apples and Snakes venue in London (John Hegley, Liz Lochhead), or black rappers, such as Benjamin Zephaniah and Linton Kwesi Johnson (see: Hamilton 1994 , 414). More recent poets include Patience Agbabi, who has produced a rap version of The Canterbury Tales (Agbabi 2015 ).

  One of the movements that emerged from performance poetry was slam. Marc Smith, who organized the first slam event in Chicago in 1984, is considered to be the originator of the movement. Slam is more an entertainment, as performers are engaged in a competition, struggling to get the highest score from the audience or the judges. As in all contests, poets taking part in slam have to stick to rules, keeping within a strict time limit of 3 minutes. In effect, slam offers a homogenized variety of poetry that should have immediate appeal, being a product of an age of instant gratification. It offers no opportunity to re‐experience the poem, relate its parts to the whole, go back to previous parts, or make it reverberate with other texts. The competitive side of slam locates it closer to a boxing match, where the other poet is not a partner in a dialogue, but an opponent to be eliminated in the nearest round. Nevertheless, slam has developed dynamically, gaining huge popularity worldwide, creating its stars and its audiences (cf. Woods 2008

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  The New Art of Old Public Science Communication

  The Science Slam

  • Miira B. Hill(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Anders’ (2008 ) studies on Poetry Slams indicate that Poetry Slam performances are often characterised by a connection to the daily news and daily activities. In the Poetry Slam, communication often includes interaction with the audience, while the rules include a focus on melody, on keeping it brief and on a certain play with alliteration. As we will later explore, Science Slam events are more based on visuals than Poetry Slams and they fit into a slightly different template. Yet, even if the Science Slam is typically described in relation to the Poetry Slam (‘it’s like the Poetry Slam, but with science’), Poetry Slams and Science Slams clearly distance themselves from each other. Science Slam organisers claim that Poetry Slammers reacted negatively to the Science Slam due to their belief that the Science Slam ‘stole the format’. Poetry Slammers, meanwhile, contend that the Science Slam is the bourgeois version of their original, anti-establishment event.

  As many of the aforementioned works have demonstrated, genre varies according to the conventions of different socially situated groups. For this reason, I believe that we should analyse the Science Slam as a form of communicative innovation and explore how the genre’s expectations and communicative actions have changed over time. I see the Science Slam as communicative innovation because it has changed traditional public science communication immensely and has had both situated and interpersonal success.

  This project seeks to answer how contemporary challenges in communicating and legitimising science are handled in the Science Slam. In previous chapters, I have principally characterised science communication as the communication of scientific knowledge. More specifically, for me at least, science communication occurs when scholars or scientists talk to each other, or even to non-scientists, and refer to their scientific expertise. To come to this assessment, I have looked at the communication and intersubjective validation of knowledge in Science Slams. My understanding is that trust in institutions and society is key. In previous chapters, I have presented the theoretical basis for my research, and there are theoretical pre-assumptions in my argumentation that I will not bring into question. I prefer, instead, to closely investigate how systems of expectation about communicative change come about. I have principally argued that we should take a triadic perspective towards knowledge and science communication, which involves subjective knowledge, the relations between people, and the objectivated world. Therefore, these are the three relevant points of analysis to use when studying science communication and focusing on the social construction of reality.

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