PROVIDENCE, R.I.--Words echo off empty storefronts and green
courtyards, off New England air and way too many church steeples
for any one town. Poets stand on street corners, in alleys,
in the cracks of the city, during the day and at night, in
coffee shops and bars long after the evening's events conclude,
spitting rhymes and lines, eyes closed, hands flying to an
internal rhythm.
Providence, R.I., met an invading force this past week,
a force pushed by tongues and lungs of 238 poets from 56
different teams, a half-dozen countries and two continents
descending on the 11th National Poetry Slam Competition.
And I was one of them, a member of the Portland team--a
team that actually self-destructed two days before we were
supposed to leave. The three Portland poets left standing
broke up and competed as individuals instead of a team.
It was four days of straight, sheer, raw, competitive,
in-your-face-and-in-your-ear-poetry, with some of the best
and brightest and darkest (there were a whole lot of folks
of color up in there) poets on the scene today, drawn like
salmon to a place of birth they can't remember except by
instinct.
This national competition is the biggest breeding ground
of them all. Poets range in age from 13 to they-so-old-they-ain't-telling.
The performance, style, subject matter and intensity of
the poems are as diverse as this country's people, and you
can hear a beautifully scripted poem about a runaway slave
who kills himself rather than submit right after a poem
about sucking someone's...well, you know.
A number of poets talked about police brutality and the
shooting of Amadou Diallo by the NYPD--ironic, because Providence
has one of the highest per-capita police brutality rates
in the country, and just before the slam made its noisy
and joyous entrance, Providence cops gunned down one of
their own, a black cop, in the streets. The alleged gangster-boss
mayor of Providence, who was imprisoned for extortion and
then reelected from jail, hosted a reception for the poets,
and local activists protested with some powerful poetry
mixed with politics, setting up a portable generator outside
the hall.
On the nights of the slams, the scene was set: a smoky
bar with four teams going in rotation, each poet reading
one poem a night, the bar packed full (almost every night
and every venue), raucous and riotous crowds applauding
and screaming so loudly at times the poets had to wait to
finish. In slam, waiting is a liability, because we live
on borrowed time at that mic--we have three minutes, no
more without points being taken off.
Yes, there is a score, there is always a score, given by
five randomly picked judges in the crowd, everyday folks.
This is the populistization of poetry. Finally real folks
can interact with the poet--it's an instant review right
there, and when has poetry ever looked like this?
Is this "real" poetry?, folks have continued to ask.
Mainstream folks, especially in academia, say hell no--it
relies too much on performance and not enough on words,
it panders, it dumbs down to assuage the masses, it robs
the art form of the dignity it deserves. All I know is,
I can't remember the last time this many people showed up
to a reading by the poet laureate and afterwards bought
him a drink, saying, "Man, that poem...fucking slammed.
It touched me."
So 56 teams are narrowed down to 24 in the semi-finals,
down to four in the finals. This year's Final Four were
San Antonio and three New York teams: Urbana, Union Square
and the Nuyorican. With almost 2,000 folks crammed into
the Providence Memorial Auditorium, the noise was deafening
as the top teams (slam saying: the best poet/team never
wins--but that coulda just been written by some bitter last-place
folks) performed their hearts and their tongues out. The
audience shook the walls with its poetic fervor, as poets
waxed about the devil and hip-hop and love and life and
sex (of course). After an amazing poem, it's customary for
the audience to try to influence the judges by screaming
"10!", the highest score you can get. The last two rounds
of the evening, every poem was followed by riotous chants
of "10, 10, 10," but no one received a perfect score.
And when Urbana won, poets rushed the stage, hugging, crying,
lifting up their friends, spirits higher than heaven with
the sheer energy of the night.
But it ended, as all things do: The lights went out, the
poets left to party one last time together (and drink their
free booze, you better believe that) and get ready to return
to their lives--lives less filled with words and mics, egos
and adrenaline, competition and scores and judges who are
always wrong no matter what, lives less filled with the
pure stench of poetry, lives more sane and a helluva lot
less interesting.
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