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PrintMy problem with poetry slams
It calls for more than fevered egos, comic angst, raw emoting, anger, confusion and stabs at profundity.
As a poet, I’m for anything that advances the art form. So I was a cautious admirer of poetry slams, which seemed like a populist expression of the people, especially youth.
I managed to mostly avoid slams in California, where I lived most of the last 20 years. But over the last three years, I’ve gone to more than a dozen slams in Columbus and I’ve hit the open mic with some of my poems and was even featured one night at a nonslam event. I’ve sat through competitions that determined who from Columbus would represent the city in an annual national poetry slam competition.
Through all this, I fidgeted in my seat.
The reason? Poetry slams are not really about poetry. In fact, they’re more like dramatic monologues or stand-up comedy routines than anything else. Self-conscious, frequently bombastic and often self-aggrandizing, they’re like old-time carneys—traveling amusement shows.
Poetry is something else altogether. It calls for more than fevered egos, comic angst, raw emoting, anger, confusion and stabs at profundity. It calls for the kind of soaring, surreal wordplay and verbal splendor that lifted, say, Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca into the poetic stratospheres and won them worldwide followings. It calls for ingenious metaphors, radiant images and sly similes that have the power to lift us up and out of ourselves.
Instead, slam poems are typically a one-note riff, thick with attitude, often meant to put someone in their place or be outrageous or confront a wound or get something off one’s chest. But true poems? They tend to conjure the roots of sorrow, open the gates of grief or stir up a sense of wonder.
There are exceptions. I’ve seen some good poetry at Writer’s Block, held at Kafé Kerouac, some of it even during the open mic events. But slams have lost sight of the lyrical and the subtle. Instead, each poet seems to be on the same page, making the same pitch. At one slam, I watched a large poet knowingly riff on her weight in a way that would make Oprah crow. The piece was poised and self-deprecating. I wanted to love it. But it had the confessional quality one associates with a support group or a motivational speaker. She needed to find the poetry in her largeness.
Others have no poetic mandate. I’ve watched one slam poet repeatedly launch snarky diatribes against dubious celebrities. If there’s anything worse than dubious celebrity, it’s reciting a poem about it. And then there was the porn poet, reading bawdy trash off his cellphone.
The poet Amiri Baraka once said, “I don’t have much use for [slam poets] because they make the poetry a carnival” and “elevate it to commercial showiness, emphasizing the most backward elements.” I’ve heard a slam poet dismiss “page” poets as “academics,” anemic vestiges of a bygone era. Maybe some are. But name one slam poet who has come up with anything resembling Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu. Or quote me a slam poet who reaches the mystical intensity of William Blake, the profundity of T.S. Eliot or the passion of Luis Rodriguez and Langston Hughes.
The slam movement was fueled by the contempt for conventional poetry readings, admittedly often brittle affairs saturated with academics at a lectern reciting ponderous odes. We don’t need that. But surely there’s some middle ground. Budding poets—and who isn’t budding?—should study the masters who achieved greatness through ingenious streams of words and ideas. They should go back in time and read César Vallejo, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson and Sharon Olds, just to name a few. It’s not enough to package a three- or four-minute cocktail of words, spray it into the mic and pass it off as a poem.
Poetry comes from deep waters. It comes from the land of origins, the root of the word original. Poetry is not about impressing anyone, an unfortunate aspect of the slam world. It’s about reaching for soul and moving with beauty. Or as Rumi wrote in the 13th century:
Keep walking,
though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings.
Move within, but don’t move
the way fear makes you move.
Jory Farr can be reached at joryfarr@gmail.com.
