ContraVerse

Slammed

I knew immediately I didn’t belong at the Poetry Slam: I had no nickname like Intensity, Phatmouth or Shakespeare. No tattoo or pierced body part. I wasn’t loud enough. I was a retired professor and published poet hoping to be part of a poetry performance that could pack a bar mid-week between the Superbowl and March Madness. But what I heard was not poetry. And by the end, I was happy not to fit in.

Perhaps slam recitation is called poetry because it is rhymed and rhythmic. You could argue the slammer’s memorized performance is homage to poetry’s oral origin, recapturing music lost to printed page and silent reading. But slam’s rapid-fire rap rhythms are tediously predictable, and the couplet rhyme scheme turns ideas into blunt greeting-card pronouncements. So, call it verse. Don’t call it poetry.

At the slam I heard none of the economical, thought-provoking ambiguity of written poetry, of a reading that invites slow, patient attention to artful use of individual words, original figures of speech and complex structures. Instead, the slammers’ words poured out like a flash flood sweeping the audience away before they could think.

In fact, except for its monotonous music, the language of the slammer was eclipsed by his performance. The posturing, grimacing, and finger pointing supplemented by the tattoos, body piercing and aggressive tone seemed like a verbal mugging. Perhaps slamming can be explained as a contemporary urban phenomenon, born of the need to talk louder and faster and more combatively in a crowd. Maybe slammers figure such acting out is the only way to rise above the competition, to get noticed in a celebrity culture. Consequently, slam poetry is to poetry as slam dancing is to dancing. So, call it a rant. Don’t call it poetry.

While I expected slamming to be more acting than reading and more sound than sense, I was not prepared for its poverty of expression and raw brutality. The vocabulary was unrelentingly obscene, the sentiments bitter, the persona angry. Listening, I began to sympathize with our home-grown protests against profane song lyrics, violent movies, and a crucifix in a jar of urine that calls itself art. Moreover, if slamming is one popular consequence of America’s freedom of expression, no wonder many foreigners are terrified of becoming like us. And vice versa: I wanted to hold my hands over the ears of the young slammers and usher them outside into the clear night air for a deep cleansing breath. I wanted to tell them, ”I don’t want to stifle your creativity, but you aren’t making art. And what you are doing will only create more Culture Nazis.” But I didn’t.

Instead, I took my turn on stage. I didn’t make it to the second round.