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on bigger prizes offered for slamming -
one MC's view

filed 15 October 2004 | Chicago
an interview of Charles Ellik
by Kurt Heintz

When clouds finally part
A poet's Hell is revealed:
landscape defies words.

The above haiku by Charles Ellik was written earlier this year on a trip to the Denali Range, Alaska. It's his appreciation of the vast landscape the Alaska presents any visitor. However, while it suggests his awe of the land, it is also open to interpretation apart from that. One might be that kind of epiphany when a force to be reckoned with, perhaps one even encouraged by the poet, finally comes into sharp focus.

Money and poetry are two awesome manmade forces, but they rarely mix at "street level." Ellik is working to change that. He wants to sharpen the poets' focus at his Berkeley venue by offering a relatively substantial prize for his October poetry slam. I wondered, would casting such money between poets create a kind of Hell? Or would it indeed reveal a landscape defying words, or perhaps encouraging words, to signify their best in verse? The interview follows...

Your $1000 Slam is a considerable prize. Even though it's divided among the top three winners, that's still a good amount of money for each artist performing three or four poems. Isn't it?

Honestly, $1000 is a pittance. You can win more money in an Elvis impersonating contest. Kids in skateboard contests win many times that amount. You can't even pay one month's rent in San Francisco for $1000, and we only hold one of these a year! Poetry is a subtle and challenging art. Why shouldn't top performers win prizes that reflect their hard work and the world-wide popularity of poetry?

What was your incentive to up the ante this way?

I remember my first encounters with slam, back in the early 90's. Often, there were no prizes, or just token prizes. In many places, that is still the case.

As Cervantes said: "When a poet is poor, half his daily fruits and fancies miscarry by reason of his anxious cares to win his daily bread."

But I looked at the audiences, and the money. Even then, some poetry slams had huge audiences. The only people getting paid were the producers and a small number of featured poets. This was no different than any other poetry format. The people who make the money are the producers, and/or a favored group of features who perpetuate their values.

There is always one of two problems with this old model:

1. One: The "Ass-Kissing" syndrome: In most scenes, at most readings, you have to kiss someone's ass to get the feature. Often, this process takes years. And the person who controls the show doesn't always have the best taste. They are merely in control. It is easy to recognize a Ass-Kissing environment: the same people get featured over and over.
    
   This is true of many magazines and academic environments as well, not just "street" scenes. Such a system is not based on quality OR quantity. It is based on control by a select few looking to gratify their sense of self-worth. Such scenes tends to grow stale quickly, as a select group of people on the inside tract protect their position in relation to control, fame, and funding. Sometimes, it's just laziness: the organizers create their little kingdom, then have no desire to do the hard work of finding or developing new talent. It is a closed system. There is little connection with reality to force the organizers and talent to innovate and grow.
2. The "Broke Poet" syndrome. By "Broke" I mean both emotionally and financially broke. How can we expect talented, ambitious, intelligent people to invest years of hard labor and research into becoming great poets and performers with absolutely no return? I mean, what do you get out of it? Three minutes of glory? How do we recruit creative talent away from advertising, theater, dance, pop music, Hollywood, etc?

In a best-case scenario, we have enthusiastic amateurs. Yet they have day jobs that prohibit them from working full-time on their art. Often, we have poetry teachers, who have a secure job but are tied to a location and whose rewards are based mostly on pleasing a small group of cultural despots. Otherwise, we are left with the broke poets. These are the people who couldn't hack it in any other more competitive and lucrative field. Or the people who use poetry as personal therapy and "have to" write to survive, or must struggle so hard just to eat, it colors everything they actually find time to produce.

Charles Ellik, MC and poet, seen here performing at the Starry Plough, Oakland, CA (photo by Nathan Henderson-James)

This is not an efficient way to create great art. As Cervantes said: "When a poet is poor, half his daily fruits and fancies miscarry by reason of his anxious cares to win his daily bread."

I've always seen slams as a way of generating money for poetry. Public funds and grants are a limited resource. Audiences are not. Slams are a way to generate audiences, and contests with big prizes draw bigger audiences, if promoted properly. Big prizes and big audiences draw talent, and encourage that talent to work hard to win the money and attention. It is a system that feeds itself. Unlike a system based on the politics of public money and grants, a successful slam is very sensitive to the community and the organizers have strong incentive to seek new audiences and new poets.

I've always given the biggest prizes I could reasonable sustain, and tried to encourage other producers to pay poets well and give monetary prizes. Too many slam producers think "If you build it, they will come." That's BS. The only people who will come are the broke poets. After you've built it, you must fill the ballpark with fans. After you fill the ballpark, you need to pay your players so they will stay in the game, and give new talent something worth working toward. Then create a farm system to generate that new talent. Big prizes are only a small part of a complete system.

What you can't see is how hard I work and creating a fun environment, a cool scene for the poets to be part of. This is a reward that can't be quantified, but which is as powerful than any cash prize. It is the social scene that keeps the poets in the game until that day when we have a way to make a living writing poetry. And keeps the audiences coming week after week. Keep in mind I produce at least 52 slams per year. Only one of them gives away $1000.

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