Thankfully none of my slam visits (so far) have been marred by excessive screaming. As I’ve preached in the past to many slammers, young and old, volume is an element of performance that should be used judiciously and with restraint.

Screaming is not the equivalent of passion. Many audiences stop hearing and believing the words when the poet is screaming at levels inappropriate to the text. Why judges don’t chastise the screamers with minus tens and twenties is beyond me. Maybe they’re afraid that the screaming poets might follow them home and scream outside their windows all night.

Staged teardrops are another performance question mark. I’m not referring to those transcendent theatrical moments when actors or performers become so deeply committed to their roles or poems that they unwilling transport themselves back to a vulnerable space and time and present to their audiences an authentic dramatic experience and shared catharsis.

No the tears I’m questioning are the conjured up crocodile tears calculated to gain sympathy from judges and audiences with a maudlin mediocre text. How many convulses sobs are needed to score a perfect 10? Is the breakdown timed precisely to fall within the three minute limit? Are coaches and captains managing these emotional strategies to gain ultimate victory? Be sure to cry a little, you’ll gain an extra point or two.

When I teach performance I challenge students to become vulnerable by exploring and exposing remembrances and emotions they may have kept buried for years, decades, even a lifetime. Sometimes they are moved to tears when they do so. Tears they fight back trying to regain composure. Such emotional and psychological exploration has its basis in the Stanislavski and Mesmer methods, technique that leads to more authentic portrayals of a character or text.

I’ve been told that at some slam competitions large numbers of participants are sobbing out their words. That seems odd to me. In twenty-five years of hosting the show at the Green Mill I can think of no more than a couple dozen occasions (hardly ever more than one in a night) when poets have broke down into tears.

One night a woman well past her forties made all of us cry with a tale of her recently deceased son. Her mascara ran dark down her puffed cheeks. Her chest heaved. The next week her mascara ran again as she read a poem about her dying husband. On week three her uncle died, and after that I dubbed her the Grand Dame of Doom.

Turns out none of these personal tragedies were true. It wasn’t her son who died; it was a friend of a friend’s son. Her husband wasn’t on his deathbed, a neighbor’s was. And the uncle was a distant one she hadn’t seen since childhood.

Fakers in all categories of tragically confessional verbiage (often passed off as poetry) insult and diminish the tragedies of those who have truly suffered great misery and sorrow. I think that when we sense a con job we should muster up the courage to question it. And if there’s a bandwagon of sobbing slammers on stage dominating a night, I think maybe … maybe it might be a bandwagon filled with bullshit.

April 14, 2011 12:04 PM
To: slampapi@slampapi.com
Subject: Enjoyed Meeting You

Hello-

Again, I really had a great time at the slam Sunday night. I was only able to catch the last half the evening because of other commitments. I just wanted to let you know what I’ve been working on in my small town to get people more energized about poetry and how you were key to my own interest in poetry.

I read the book The Spoken Word Revolution when I was in college and loved it! I finally found poetry that I felt like I could connect to, that I wanted to savor. Being introduced to poetry that seemed alive shaped my direction as I continued into my graduate work in English. One of my professors had monthly slams in Laramie (where I was at school) and even challenged me to write a little too.

When I moved back to Nebraska (and small town Nebraska at that), I really missed the atmosphere. I refocused my Intro to Poetry class around poetic movements so that we could end with the spoken word movement and our class project – putting on a poetry slam. My students arrange the whole thing: location, featured artists, advertising, etc. It has taken a couple of years to get people really on board, but this year, I really think they nailed it! I felt like I was back in grad. school at our slams.

We have a new space being renovated with plans to incorporate a monthly poetry slam.

I can’t wait to get back to Chicago and be able to come back to the Green Mill Lounge. It was very revitalizing for me to be there, and it was great to finally meet you!

Megan Friesen

English Instructor
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McCook Community College of
Mid-Plains Community College

After years of distancing themselves from the term “poetry slam” in the hopes of gaining  mainstream “street cred” in the music industry or access to prestigious MFA programs, it looks like some former “spoken word artists” and proper poets are back to branding themselves as slammers.  Does this have something to do with a second round HBO productions focusing attention on a few lucky teens emerging from Youth Speaks Brave New Voices competition or could it be the dream (lust, desire, ambition) of performing at the White House for the Obama crew that has inspired a number of performance poets to re-embrace the moniker they once shunned as beneath their artistic and commercial stature. The P word is not known to boost recording sales and the S word is poison in the fine arts academies.

The chaff goes where the wind blows. One thing that will be interesting to witness and record in the upcoming months is whether the Chicago nurtured Obama adminstration recruits any Chicago based performance poets and organizers to program and stage their “edgy” White House poetry slams. (There’s a bit of history that indicates they should.) Or will former coastal slammers turned spoken word artists turned back into slammers get all the kuddos? Stayed tuned.