e-poets Plain Text: Poetry across frontiers (14)

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artist Heather Haley
Vancouver, BC, Canada

Cinasphere
Vallejo, California, USA

Poet in Residence
Queensland, Australia

Farrago Poetry
London, England

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Poetry across frontiers (14)

response from Chicago, USA

Hello, all -

As Canada has tossed the thread back at Chicago, I feel compelled to reply. And before we start here, I'm also compelled to say I don't want to play the Chicago "hometown" card to the hilt just because slam started here. At this point in slam poetry's evolution, we have no more aesthetic influence over it than anybody else. (This is another signifier that slam is pop, or at least converging on it. Slam is in the broader culture and the progenitors are almost powerless to control it.) But there are historical aspects of slam which I think inform this conversation very, very well, and some of those do relate to my direct experience as a Chicagoan.

Jim Andrews (Victoria, BC) wrote in response to Heather Haley:

>>I agree with your objection to poetry as a contest that somebody wins. The few slams I've seen have been, um, winningly rhetorical and ever so slightly disengenuous but not fully in control of the bs irony bluffing poker game thang. But I haven't seen Chicago slams, either. I gather some of them are something else. <<

They can be, Jim. But it's a struggle sometimes to have them that way. Speaking as someone who loathes the disengenuous, slam in the general sense today can be repugnant in that it is rigged to synthesize controversy, and that it generates polemical effects in an apparently (but not actually) accidental way. At first, this wasn't a very conscious effect to anybody, and possibly not even to the people who cooked up the idea of a competition. We just thought it was cool to try.

When we started out with slams here in 1986, they were amusements, a way to fill a the third of three sets of a night at a bar, to keep the crowd entertained. They had the power to attract people and engage them in a more active way than sitting edified before a poet in a library. In short time, the conceit of the competition was commonly known among us here, and we tried to address it with humor, but such conceits don't necessarily telegraph to others intact outside the immediate circle.

After slam migrated to other towns, we began to see how others interpreted the notion of a performance poetry competition. More often than not, the poetry that other people used was more fierce, more didactic, and more plainly political than ours. This also coincided with the rise of talkshow "victimthink" in American popular culture. Victimthink poetry was more successful in winning slams, or so it was popularly thought. People elsewhere took the competition seriously and really wanted to win. Ever since, they've been also hawking the slogan, "The points (the score) are not the point." But the futility of this is measured by the frequency and permanence of the slogan in slam culture. The more you say it, the more you only emphasize the problem. My own feeling is more like, 'Why did we have to go there in the first place? Why is it so imperative to win, and to spin doctor the poetry to curry the maximum audience favor?'

It is very important to make this statement, because I feel it reveals an untaken but potentially fertile turn in slam's evolution: At the beginning in Chicago, we kept our sense of humor and were able to turn our rivalries to positive effect. And before the slam was even called that, there were such rivalries among poets in the city's various taverns and cafe's. You could go to one nightspot and see one group of poets do something new, and still say, "Hey, I bet I could do that better, or come up with something stronger altogether." So we would do just that... Go home, write in a fury, and come back in a few nights to prove ourselves in front of the other guys whom we saw before. It helped to be young then, as the discoveries you made were ones you could own from your own sweat. If you were older, you might not be able to approach the task with much innocense, earnestness, and idealism. But people came to this ad hoc dialectical process from all generations just the same.

The Boston national slams were, for me, the real turning point in losing such inocense. Boston was where the control of the slam was willingly turned over to the outside world. I was present in Boston early in 1992, and witnessed Michael Brown accept the phone call from Marc Smith that essentially passed the torch. This had the great effect of allowing slam to have a life of its own, and was a huge step in advancing it for the rest of the world, instead of it being something specific to Chicago. But it also meant that the aesthetic stewardship of the form was thenceforth no longer Chicago's, either. It was in the public domain. As it was interpreted in Boston (and possibly as Michael Brown specifically may have taken it), that meant the stewardship lived in Boston's hands. It seems funny to say this, as the key people who seeded Boston with slam were themselves Chicagoans. But I do remember consoling a few of my city's slam team after going to some blistering rounds at the Boston National Slams where our team took a dive, saying, "Oh, well... At least we still have our sense of humor." We were stunned from our humor losing out to dogma and didacticism. And slam has been dogmatic ever since.

Much of our humor endures to this day, however. We still compete among each other in Chicago. Some of that fierceness from the outside world has infiltrated our community of writers, and a number of people accede to it. There are local people in Chicago who need to slam, which is wrong; you may want it, but should not need it. No one should need validation for their art to aspire, and I see this as a fault of the competitors as much as any host who'd prey on the neediness of poets seeking such validation.

Rather, your poetry should have the power to speak for itself beyond its venue, whether that is a poetry slam in a bar, a stage with a spotlight, a paper-printed book, a phosphorescent web page, or a film in a moviehouse. The real test of your poetry will be in its endurance, its persistence beyond the moment when your words are hurled at the audience. Will people want to come back to it, or pass it along? Fuck the points, lest you fuck your own poetry. Give your poetry a life worth living and, in that, an idea worth living for.

It is a point of civic pride that people can and do compete on friendly terms here in Chicago. Most of the finalists here know each other very well. So for the welfare of many friendships, many Chicago slammers cannot afford to take the competition too seriously. If we did, we wouldn't have friends or poetic "family." This sense of humor is strong in places like Mad Bar and the Woodlawn Tap, and it does flicker to life at the Green Mill on some nights, too. It's painful to see two good friends, like Maria McCray and Kent Foreman, or Lucy Anderton and Jason Pettus, have to compete with each other. But it's a pain that evokes a wince of joy. There is pleasure in seeing that poetry is served so well by people who don't harbor hard competitive rivalries with each other, but who want to see just how far their language can aspire in each others' presence, in the moment.

Now I wouldn't go so far to generalize slam poetry as full of heart ONLY in Chicago. I see it in lots of places. But I think we need to get way past the conceit that it's the competition that brings out the best. That's a highly unqualified statement. Precisely: poetry slams have the potential to bring out the best in slam poetry. Simply that. And if we make the mistake of presenting slam as if it were the whole of performance poetry, we're really short-changing our audience.

Our obligations, should we choose to evolve performance poetry, would include discovering new kinds of poetry that succeed in performance but don't qualify as slam (the genre). Slam is mining only specific potentials of performance poetry. And as slam evolves, its specificity only increases. Owing to the dogmatic baggage that much slam poetry has chosen to acquire of its own free will since 1992, I'd say that a fresh break is pretty easy to undertake. Lose the baggage. Lose the rant. Lose the "I! I! I!" kind of breast-beating and melodramatic sympathy for whatever cause. (Not that many people believe you anyway.) Lose the charismatics in favor of the language. Lose the ten extra kilos of verbal shit you're trying to cram into a hundred gram poem. Lose the myth in favor of the fact. Lose the victimthink. And lose yourself in the process. Start clean, and see where the path takes you.

... Just one way of looking at it.

respects to all -
- Kurt Heintz

[End of correspondence.]

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Index of letters.