"Poetry does not just muse upon a sunset or ponder on a sigh
It also runs the oceans red and batters down the sky.”
– Ode to the Publisher
In February of this year I became Ireland’s first ever competitor in the Individual World Poetry Slam Championships in Charlotte, North Carolina. I came last, seventy-second out of seventy-two – but, hey, this was George Bush country and these people have a history of getting their voting catastrophically wrong!
Three hours after the conclusion of the event I was being thrown around my hotel room by a beautiful, right wing, southern belle whispering, “What d’ya wanna do to me…. Loser?”
Everything my dear, everything!
Poetry slam as an art form was created by construction worker Marc Kelly Smith at The Green Mill Jazz Club, Chicago in the mid-'80s. Since its emergence poetry slam has spread across America, Asia and Northern Europe. But as slam has grown, so has malcontent. Metaphors are being sharpened; abstract negotiations have broken down; war is brewing; librarians everywhere are shitting themselves.
The thing is, poets can be a fickle and a spiteful bunch, and the chin-stroking ‘serious’ poets have not taken too kindly to the emergence of poetry slam as an art form. A line has been drawn. On one side the tea-sipping, tweed coat clad, cravat-wearing ‘serious’ poets, applauding politely at each other’s work. On the other, the scruffily dressed, hard drinking, sexual deviants of slam, cheering like hooligans at the unbridled rhetoric of street talking slammers.
Slamming is the performing of poetry, the transmutation of monologue and verse from the page to the stage. A slam is an event where poets have three minutes in which to perform an original poem to an audience and five judges, picked at random from the crowd. The first poet takes to the stage, and performs his or her poem, the audience claps, and then the poet departs. Marks out of 10 are displayed to the audience on scorecards. The next poet takes a turn, the process is repeated and a winner is chosen. Think figure skating, minus the physical beauty, add poetry and booze, and you’re close.
At a slam you can expect to hear anything from the most embarrassingly awful open-mic therapy, through riot-inciting political rants to heart-breaking ballads of unrequited love for a heifer.
In the U.S.A, Canada, Germany, Singapore, Denmark, Britain, and Sweden, poetry slams attract audiences of anything from one hundred people at a monthly event to one thousand at a national championship final.
The biggest poetry slam scene in Ireland is in Galway. It is not surprising then that after years of harmony on this island (between ‘serious’ poets and slammers), the chin strokers have attacked in an article titled ‘art attack’ in the Galway Advertiser. The column, written by poet Maureen Gallagher, described poetry slam as ‘a tired art form’ and ‘the last resort of the failed comedian’.
The main sources for her argument were quotes from the ‘American Daddy of Slam’, Todd Swift. But the poor old dear got her facts wrong, misquoting the poet (in fact, a Canadian, who had never claimed to be the ‘Daddy of slam’). A disgusted Todd Swift rushed to the defence of slam in an article published in the same paper a week later. There was talk of solicitors, so, the Advertiser offered performance poet Trish Casey the chance to respond in the following months art attack. And she did, with a thoughtful, well-balanced article: unfortunately the paper chopped it, publishing the entertainment editors ‘directors cut’ instead. It really was quite the Slamgate.
Ms Gallagher is a reasonably well known and very accomplished, award-winning poet ,who was three times a finalist in the Cúirt Festival’s Poetry Grand Slam and RTE’s Rattlebag Slam – so why the unprovoked attack?
Well, here’s one possible reason: poetry slams are fun because poetry slams are cruel. You get on stage, you bare your soul, and then you lose. ‘Serious’ poets take this extremely seriously; that’s why they are ‘serious’ poets.
As Steve Marsh, Chief Executive of Poetry Slam International put it, “We have a saying in slam; the best poet never wins.”
So what is the point of Poetry Slam? Well I found out when I visited The Green Mill, in October 2005.
The Green Mill was a speakeasy frequented by none other than Al Capone himself: it featured in the Kevin Costner film The Untouchables and also (oddly enough) on the holodeck of Star Trek. I went there for the ‘Uptown Slam’, the slam that started it all. There was a jazz band on stage, while Marc Kelly Smith played the crowd with the invisible puppet strings of verse. There were veins bulging in his forehead, sinew stretching in his neck, and fireworks of saliva exploding from his mouth with every passionate syllable delivered in his husky baritone Chicago drawl.
There were about 250 people jam-packed into the sleazily decadent, dimly lit, Green Mill Jazz Club. They were black, white, red and yellow disciples of the spoken word; even the chin strokers were here, hanging on every word, stamping feet, clapping hands, clicking fingers, shouting, cheering, and singing their appreciation for the spoken word. It was a menagerie of deformity and genius; it was beautiful.
Despite the war brewing between the ‘serious’ chin stroking poets and the up and coming slammers, there has been some good publicity for Poetry Slam recently. The English Independent published an article last December crediting poetry slam with being responsible for poetry losing its elitist image and New York’s highbrow Poets and Writers Magazine recently reported on the shift of poetry from typewriter to the microphone.
But the chins strokers, or some of them at least, continue to dismiss poetry slam – in part at least because essentially poetry slam dismisses them. It puts an unfair mark out of ten on some very good writers, but here’s the deal: a poetry slam is a bit of fun that brings a diverse variety of voices together (in verse) to entertain.
Not all ‘serious’ poets dismiss poetry slam. In Galway, and Ireland in general, poetry slam enjoys the support of some of its highest profile poets. But poetry by its very nature will always have the chin strokers, because poetry has a history of dismissing its own evolution, from Rimbaud and Baudelaire to Dylan Thomas and the Beats of the late '50s and early ‘60s. The chin strokers have, and will always be intent on keeping poetry as their own obtuse literary fetish.
Ultimately, poetry slam brings poetry to a wider, younger audience than its chin stroking counterpart. Poetry slam rarely judges poetry on the literary merit or worthiness of its content. It judges poetry on its general, popular appeal; ironically, book sales do the same. That is why poetry has for too long been a dirty word amongst publishers and young people, and why poetry slam, might just be its salvation.

There are poetry slams held regularly across Ireland in Galway, Belfast and Dublin for more information visit www.poetryireland.ie/readings/otherreadings.asp