Thursday, July 21, 2011

A Reflection on My Twitter Account, McLuhan & the Art (?) of Poetry Slam

(as originally posted on my Facebook account)

Today at 11:42 a.m., @TOPoetrySlam tweeted: "Wow, just found out poetry slam as an art form turns 25 on July 30...the same night as our slam at The Drake. Kismet!"

That tweet got me thinking about the art that I have been practicing for the past eight years. You see, though I am heavily identified with the Canadian slam poetry community (likely due to my roles as a co-founder of Capital Slam and the Ottawa Youth Poetry Slam, and a representative for Ottawa in the national slam championships in 2004 and 2006), I personally don't identify with the "slammer" label others occasionally try to apply to my work. For me, slam is a means to an end, an entertaining side note in my quest to become a better writer, performer and presenter. I have never written with the end of winning a poetry slam in my mind.

Today at 12:06 p.m., @Ritallin tweeted: "Question for @missie_p @TOPoetrySlam & other poets: Is slam an art form or a form of an art? #slam25 #longlivespokenword"

Some of my poetry ends up being the proper length to perform at a poetry slam, and if I said that wasn't something I checked for once I felt I'd come to the natural ending point of poems I'd written, then I'd be misstating my case. But most of my poems are too short or too long for slam, and that's totally fine by me.

The rush of poetic competition no longer stokes my fire the way it once did. When I first got into poetry slam, I would write like a man possessed, determined to have enough material to share on stage. In those early days, much of what I wrote was straight imitation of what I saw on stage and my efforts to figure out how I could do that myself. And in retrospect, that was probably a good thing. I already had a voice I developed in my hip-hop past, but spoken word opened my eyes to a whole new set of possibilities. I was so eager to do well, I focused on the outcomes rather than the process. Therefore I was doing fairly well in competition, but my writing wasn't truly expanding.

All that changed after I went to the 2005 Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Vancouver. It was after that experience when I first fully began to understand the potential in what I was doing. Slamming at the Wordlympics in Ottawa the previous year had tuned my slam ear; watching the national slam finals and featuring in a showcase in Vancouver showed me how far my writing still had to go. And though I would go to slam at CFSW the following year in Toronto, never again did I choose to measure myself against the cliched and trite standards of the slam format.

After Vancouver I started to do more feature sets, write more free verse, experiment with different ways of writing, and produce merchandise. I folded my hip-hop background into my new ways of exploring words. I stopped being afraid to talk about personal experiences and wrote pieces that exposed my emotions and spirit in ways I previously could never have imagined. I started working my craft and organizing my output. In short, I matured as a spoken word artist. Today, I will not be called anything else in a poetic sense.

I am not a slam poet. Don't get it twisted.

Today at 12:07 p.m., @RustyPriske tweeted: "@Ritallin @missie_p @TOPoetrySlam Slam is the medium, and this is Marshall McLuhan's 100th birthday..."

Ah yes, slam is definitely a medium of expression that continues to grow in influence and popularity. Ever since Marc Smith got things going in Chicago a quarter-century ago, poetry slam has spread around the world. There are competitions in numerous languages on multiple continents. Some poets are now touring the world partly or mostly due to success in the poetry slam format, wherever they hail from originally. There is a World Poetry Slam Cup competition every year in France (where coincidentally Canadians have dominated for the last two years). And our national finals have grown from eight teams representing five cities in 2004 to eighteen teams representing fifteen communities in 2010. We even have a slam scene based in rural Lanark County, Ontario that regularly sends teams to compete in nationals.

Today at 12:12 p.m., @Ritallin tweeted: "@RustyPriske @missie_p @TOPoetrySlam @dwayne_morgan Slam might be the medium & the message, but it's only a form of the art #spokenword"

What is the message in all of this? Poetry slam is strong and vibrant, impacting and affecting poets and the people who come to witness the competitions no matter where in the world the competitions are taking place. I think that's why some have come to the conclusion that slam is what we should aspire to perfect -- that it is an end in and of itself. I'm sure some truly believe that, but I'm not in their number.

I see slam for the populist gimmickry it truly is -- a high-energy, often superficial, sometimes problematic, often predictably formulaic, usually entertaining method of putting bums in seats to support a poetic community. I love it as an incubator for fresh young (and older) writers getting their feet wet in literature and in performance. It's a great place to get started, but there's so much more to the oral literature we practice than hunting for 10s from random strangers.

Today at 12:17 p.m., @RustyPriske tweeted: "@Ritallin @missie_p @TOPoetrySlam @dwayne_morgan It isn't even a form. It is just a competition. The art is what happens DURING the Slam."

Exactly. And the art we practice is spoken word -- in all its forms.