Festivals, Slams, and This Long Conversation

May 28

I've got lots to say tonight, so:

I went to the Lake Eden Arts Festival (or LEAF) this weekend, from early Saturday morning to just a few hours ago, Sunday evening. There was canoeing, and swimming, and music, and lots of food, and gypsy dancing (whoo!) and a kid's art market, and many other Glorious Things, but most especially there was a Poetry Slam, the best I've ever been privileged to witness.

You don't know what a slam is? (Those who do, feel free to skip this paragraph, or read it for my peculiar and pithy take on the form). Poetry Slams are a relatively recent phenomenon, a shot of adrenaline to the laboring heart of poetry, an attempt to re-establish poetry as the voice of the people, the voice of revolution, an alternative to top-down entertainment dispensed by that warehouse of wild imaginings, Hollywood; Slams are competitions, complete with rounds and arbitrarily-chosen judges and time limits; Slams are mediums of instant and sometimes brutal feedback; Slams are a combination of writing and acting, the re-emergence of the dramatic monologue; Slams are sometimes-tedious affairs full of pretension; Slams are life-altering glimpses into smoking personal hells and sunlight-on-the-water brief utopias; Slams are foot-stomping-hand-clapping-tomato-throwing-bread-and-circuses with a heart and a noble purpose.

I've seen a few slams. They aren't to be confused with simple poetry readings (a major distinction being that, while I'm good at plain old readings, I'm nothing special in a slam) though they have similarities. The best slam poets use every dramatic technique in the book (except according to national rules, you can't have props) in addition to the full arsenal of the language. They have big voices, big presences, engaging things to say, and they can think on their feet. They involve the audience; they inflame the audience; they speak to the audience, not the literary award committees or future English majors.

43 poets took part in the first round of the LEAF slam, a large number that might owe something to the $1,000 first prize (and the not-inconsiderable lower-place prizes). Those 43 read, one poem apiece, with a 3-minute time limit (you get penalized for going over). They were scored instantly by 5 arbitrarily chosen judges on a scale of 1.0-10.0, the lowest and the highest score were dropped to get rid of crazy outliers, and the remaining points added together. The top 12 (actually 13) got into the finals.

I read, of course, though I didn't expect to get in. I'm not a slam poet. I read pretty straight, and my poetry doesn't tend to be about sex or politics (the definite favored topics in slams; they're the most dramatic and stirring). I read one of the poems I sold to Asimov's, about a rain of fish. I didn't do too badly, considering that my dramatic toolbox consists mostly of enunciating clearly; I got high 8's and low 9's. If there had been a few more unimpressive poets I might've made it to the first round of the finals.

But there were good poets. Marti in her black boots, her rage bleeding into weariness and then flaring up again, her sadness broken by rays of remembered joy. Roger, with his dreadlocks, his absolutely unfeigned seriousness, his Caribbean accent, his commanding stage presence, the captivating stories of his superhuman grandmother. Seed, who reinvented himself as a poet, who blew the improv round away, who bubbled with fun and fury, and who incidentally took the grand prize home. Peter of the Earth, so quiet and yet so arresting. Carrie, who combined lunacy and eloquence and insight, who seemed to become a totally different person when she stepped to the microphone. Odeli, who had a grin you could see all the way in the back, who spoke with the same spontaneous grace of a jazz solo played by a master. Others, but those struck me the most (and were the finalists, natch). Those people flamed and burned. They lit me up. They absolutely commanded a packed house.

Poetry can do that. I'm not a slam poet, but they made me wish I was. Made me think about becoming one, though the approach is completely different; what works on stage is different from what works on the page (though the best poems work on both, I think).

But my own dreams of slamtime glory (and it's not the money, which is sometimes good and sometimes negligible and sometimes nonexistent) that matters. What matters is the reminder they gave me about (all embarrassment and eye-rolling and mumbling aside) Art. What I'm trying to do with my own writing. What many of you reading this page are trying to do, are doing. That big magic that works transforming changes on the world and the people in it; that big magic that gets so often degraded and swept aside and swallowed in the workaday and eaten up by the trivial insistent details of life.

The impulse that makes me want to write, to tell stories and poems. The impulse that I sometimes forget in the heat of the business end, the necessary attention to marketing, which is necessary because without communication Art is masturbatory. As a sometime performance artists, I've questioned the necessity of audience, of whether a poem spoken aloud in a soundproof room and never heard by anyone besides the author has value. Well, sure, if it does something good for the author; not everything needs to be shared. But I think the essence of great Art (something I don't think I've achieved; something I'm unashamed to say I aspire to) lies in communication.

It's often been said that all artistic endeavor is part of an ongoing conversation, a dialogue with the world. It took me a long time to really understand that, to know how it applied to me. That my work doesn't take place in a vacuum, that if it did I might despair and not do it anymore. I'm trying to get things across. Great fun stories, sure, but more than that. The big things. The things that consume all of us, the things so overarching I don't need to number them. What Shakespeare wrote about, what Homer wrote about, what Balzac and Baraka and Charles de Lint and Billy Collins and Seed and Marti and Roger and Odeli and you and me have written about.

About Life, in all its subdivisions.

And of course we disagree on things. That's why it's a discussion, and not a preacher chosen at random from a world-sized amen corner.

Slam poetry appeals to me because you can see the effects instantly. You can hear the whistles, the shouts, see mouths opening and feet stomping. It's instant feedback, you know if you've touched someone. The kind of writing I do, I work at one remove; I don't often hear what people think of my work. I send it out, sometimes it gets published, it sinks without a trace. That bums me out, a little. But as my work matures, as I publish more and reach a wider audience, I'll feel better about that. For now, it's enough to be reminded that I am contributing to a conversation, a perpetual dialogue. I'm not alone. There are other voices shouting into the silence.

Part of it is that I don't have much opportunity to do readings in Boone. Part of it is the lack of a writing group (I didn't know how much those guys meant to me until they were gone!). Part of it is that the true devoted artists I know and love (real artists; not bullshit artists; people who do it because they wouldn't know what to do with themselves if they didn't), are such sadly minimal parts of my life now, due to distance and other sad factors. I forget, sometimes, that I'm not alone. But I remember now. Maybe that present awareness, and the fact that I'm writing about it, will hold me for a while, until I can enter a community again...

So go! Take part in the conversation! Read to a loved one! See a great movie and argue about it afterward in a bar! Play some music in the street! Write! Sculpt! Paint! Perform! Go see a performance, if you're not an artist support some, see if they have anything to offer you! Go! Go! Go!

Go on, now. I posted this here, tonight. This is my contribution to the conversation for the evening.

Because I can't believe I'm the only one who's forgotten that it is a conversation.