slam

[arguchik]

went to my first poetry slam ever last night, with glaucon. i'm still thinking about it. several of the performances were fabulous--interesting poetry well performed--but there were a couple that made me want to throw knives at the stage.

i used to go to a lot of different poetry readings around town--at Open Books or Elliot Bay Book Co, for example. i also used to attend Castalia on a regular basis (that's the monthly poetry and fiction reading given by UW's MFA students). i miss that; i really enjoy hearing people read aloud.

slam is a different animal altogether, of course. i knew that before attending last night's event, but now i really get it. the whole process of writing a slam poem is about the performance. as glaucon pointed out, if i were to read most of these poems in print, i would probably think they were bad poems. maybe; i wonder if i would think that about the best poems i heard last night. but i get that a good slam performer could make a crap poem sound great, and could probably even win with it.

anyway, it's an interesting creative form, an amalgam of poetry, acting, storytelling, and preaching...and competitive sport...yet it somehow extends beyond all of these. last night the announcer billed slam as a democratic art form...i'm not sure exactly what she meant by that, so i'm not sure whether or not i agree.

Comments

[arguchik.livejournal.com]

i can see why. it seems like an interesting, supportive community, overall. a couple of things intrigued me, primarily the ways in which race and gender seemed to operate in the crowd and on the stage, but that's based on a single experience, thus not really worth discussing at this point (i want to emphasize that intriguing doesn't mean problematic). i'm not sure i'd really "get it" unless/until i actually participated and got more familiar with the various participants and their interrelationships and modes of interaction, etc.

the feeling was not dissimilar to my first experiences with the seattle goth community, and the seattle burningman community.