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.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I remember Buddy Wakefield giving me advice about a deeply personal poem. I asked him if I should slam with it and he said, “Is it true?”
It was.
And he followed it with, “Then go ahead.”
I’m sort of mixed on this one Marc. As an audience member, I hate being manipulated and these poems certainly do that in spades. But the poetry slam is one of the few public spaces where you can experience this…and I think that’s a positive because sometimes there’s a cathartic release in performing it well. Shades of 12 steps programs?
On my personal piece, I always asked, “Am I doing this for the score?” If so, then I wouldn’t perform it. Its a good poem, so I also want to honor the poem and sometimes a slam is the biggest audience a poet is likely to get so what better way to honor the poem then by presenting it in a venue where a lot of people will really hear it?
I’m also not sure we hold other artists up to the same standard. Shakespeare wasn’t a moor, yet we celebrate Othello and are moved to tears. Where’s the line?
I agree, Don. Emotional work demands more skill to provide a genuine experience. I don’t ask Coleridge to be the Ancient Mariner, I don’t insist that EA Robinson knew a guy named Richard Cory… I DO demand that, if you present emotion-stirring work, that you write it and deliver it well, provide a genuine-feeling experience rather than a half-assed ploy to get a high score based not on the poem but on the judges and audience feeling bullied into responding more positively or else they’ll be viewed as someone who doesn’t care if your grandma died/dog spontaneously combusted/etc. A stirring poem should make the audience cry, not the poet.
ahhh the FALSE CONFESSION of a poem. I never understood the deep feeling of discuss and betrayal I would own listening to a poet pour his/her heart out, until after I wrote an “emotional” poem and realized the audience really wasn’t with me. A poet would confess a heartfelt experience, but in the end I, as the listener would sit there thinking “so what”. Normally when that feeling would arise, I was on the hunch of “this is not a true story” or “the poet really is not moved by this experience, thus all shown is an act”…usually it is one or the other.
To discover that it is not true is to lie to our subconscious mind; a mind that just traveled into a depressed state and a heart that yanked on emotions that fell for the reader. Once the performance is over or even half way through it the unconscious mind starts to realize things not making sense, body language being the biggest. Unjustified gestures are discovered and NOW to the conscious mind I think betrayal, we feel betrayed, I have been lied to.
My False Confessional poem I wrote about was a lady debating on having an abortion. Nothing true to my experience, but at that time I figured it is true to someone if not a few people. Well, I learned the moment I got home that night why I will never perform a poem that is not of my own experience, or become an actor!