Poetry slams are often exciting and entertaining events that provide a great
opportunity for audiences to experience poetry and prose in their most natural medium, that of the human voice. Slam poets orate in an upbeat manner, often giving electrifying performances of easy to understand compositions that are sometimes quite creatively written1. Such events have the potential to expose poetry to a much larger audience than would be drawn to it in its textual manifestation. However, there are snakes in the garden of slam poetry. Slams encourage writers to compose for entertainment purposes, thereby causing the art form to deteriorate and the poet to write with less honesty2. A limited range of poetic genres are represented in poetry slams, which causes important forms to fall by the wayside. The idea of poets competing against one another for a prize causes them to write according to what they think will win the contest. Finally, in one aspect of slam competition, the genre of haiku is severely misrepresented and even insulted in the way it is used. Slam poetry is written for an audience. More specifically, it is written to produce an audience reaction. This wouldn’t be so bad if the response hoped for by the slam writer wasn’t always an agreeable one. What poets are supposed to do is to write on what they think or feel about what they have experienced. If they do it well they may generate those same thoughts or feelings in a reader or listener. But a poet should not write in anticipation of a desired reaction. A poet is an explorer, a pioneer and a mapmaker of the psyche. A poet should be creating material that has been mined from the full spectrum of their experience. It should not be the poet’s mission to excite or entertain an audience. There is nothing wrong with such positive reactions, but poets should also be making audiences experience everything else a person can feel, such as terror, depression, numbness or even feelings of suicide.
Slam poets step onto the stage wearing emotional prostheses and an invented self. While all styles of poetry could potentially be represented in poetry slams, the prominent ones tend to have either an agenda or populist humour or both in their content. The longer slam pieces are usually written and delivered in a staccato rhythm and propelled by indignation. The poet inside of the spoken word artist freezes in the headlights of the enthusiasm of the audience as the performer rises to power. The slam poet becomes addicted to getting a reaction out of the audience. Many slam poets are good writers, but their best work tends to be created when they step back from the audience and write on deeply personal subjects. As slams become their preferred medium of expression though, the spoken word artist loses touch with who they are and the great writing they might have composed will be swept away by the hope of future audience approval. They begin to define themselves by what they said in the past that was received enthusiastically by the audience. They become surfers on waves of applause and the winds of approving exclamation. They are not allowed to bring their inner pain to the stage because that will cause members of the audience to feel their own pain as well. This will disconnect them from the rest of the herd whose function is to manufacture enthusiasm for an agenda that the lowest common denominator of the group can understand. For the slam poet, a poem cannot fly unless it stimulates the crowd. For such an elevation to occur, the poem must register for the audience as funny, exciting, moving or sympathetic. The best way to achieve this reaction is to single out a group that represents authority or create animagined common enemy for the audience to consider themselves adamantly separate from and above, and then attack or make fun of that adversary. This allows the audience to share the feigned anger, antagonism or ridicule of the performer towards that group or authority. If the slam poet is of a group against which there is a commonly recognized prejudice in society at large, the material writes itself3. If one can write about one’s race or gender, or write about why one is not writing about one’s race or gender, which of course is the same thing, the effect upon the audience can be magical. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, to think of oneself as an oppressed minority is an intoxicating feeling4, and if one can skillfully push an agenda that will sow seeds of sympathetic anger in an audience the result can be akin to them having been also swept up in that same high5.
It is very important though for slam poets not to be boring because the whole purpose of a slam poem is to counteract the ennui of the audience. Serious word artists however, do not care if the audience is bored. Good poems are written by individuals and therefore their secondary purpose is to be heard and understood by other individuals. The odds are that within an audience there are only a handful of such people listening. Poems written by slam poets are meant to be understood right away, whereas the best poetry enters one’s head sideways, or is raveled up or layered in such a way as to take time to fully comprehend.
The chances are that no one is going to either win a slam or enthuse a slam audience by reading sonnets, romantic poetry, or haiku, although the poems presented may very well sometimes take the shape of these genres6. Such poems would, however, have the distinctive content and style of slam poetry.
Slam poets learn to practice crowd control, and in this sense they are very similar to drug dealers. The drugs they deal though tend to be the exciting ones rather than the interesting ones. The slam audience will not experience, for instance, the poetic equivalent to an acid trip that would come from hearing a surrealist poem, unless it is done as a parody.
There is a difference between reading an unfinished poem in public to test how it resonates from other points of view and writing a poem specifically for an audience. Ultimately the poet’s work is none of the audience’s business in terms of like or dislike. What the poet should be using the audience for is to spark interest. When a poem is finished or has reached a plateau in the writing process it can and should be shared with an audience. Poetry is, at its roots, a spoken or sung medium. It is best to speak it even while writing it in order to achieve a rhythm that works, but it must come from one’s creative core. If it is written for someone else it is at best creative in the same way that a good commercial can be, but will be missing something at its center. To write with an audience in mind one might just as well write one’s best ad for Coca Cola.
Another questionable aspect of poetry slams is the element of competition. Of course, everyone is to some extent competitive, but for those spoken word artists whose poet has been undermined by their performer, hearing how to please the audience compels them to alter their own style to a more crowd friendly form. Is the turning of poetry into sport really an honourable direction for an art form to go? Should there be American Expressionist painting races or competitive surrealist Pictionary as well?
There is often part of a poetry slam known as the “Haiku Death Match”. The poems used in these sections are rarely, if ever, actually haiku, but to call it a “short poem death match” does not have much of a ring to it. The poems are given a name that the slam audience recognizes to be too sophisticated to relate to in its traditional form, but which they feel satisfyingly on top of when it is made to look ridiculous in a slam. In these contests, an attempt is made to legitimize their use of the name “haiku” by requiring that the poems be written in the traditional three line format with the accompanying five, seven, five syllable count. This merely cosmetic version of haiku, gutted and replaced with mostly a content of humorous punch lines is the poetic equivalent of the segments of 19th Century minstrel shows in which blackface performances occurred. White performers pretended to be black performers because it was both a way of being close to something exotic yet rendering it ridiculous at the same time, thereby maintaining their sense of superiority over it7. Short poems in slams are dressed up as haiku for the same reason. Just as African Americans were generally insulted by being parodied in blackface, the culture and genre of haiku is also being insulted by the way it is misrepresented in poetry slams. The audience reaction to both of these events can also fit into this analogy. Most poetry readers and listeners feel distanced from haiku in the same way that white audiences, although on a much larger scale, felt apart from black people. As was true for the minstrel show attendants, there is also generally no awareness among slam audiences that any insult is taking place. We now recognize that blackface was insulting to African Americans and yet slam poets have yet to realize that representing three line jokes as haiku is also insulting to those who work seriously in the haiku genre.
It is surprising that so many slam poets are indignant in response to the suggestion that they shouldn’t use the word haiku to name the short poems they write for slams. Their responses are often comparable to those of descendants of European colonists when they hear Native Americans suggest they should go back to Europe. Some may counter that this argument is nit picking with language and that one might as well say that the short poem contest shouldn't be called a death match, since no one dies as a result of the competition. Death matches, however, are not the genre of an art form and there is no culture built up around them.
Slam poets are satisfied that if they stick to the 5-7-5 syllable count they are following the criteria of writing a haiku, yet they throw the more important elements of such a poem out the window. One wouldn't claim that every poem made up of fourteen lines was a sonnet, so why call every 5-7-5 poem a haiku? The irony here is that serious western haiku poets use the 5-7-5 syllable count less than slam poets do. Some don't confine themselves to the three lines, the season reference, or the change of direction, but at its very essence a haiku has to capture a moment or else it isn't a haiku8.
Some argue that the short poems in slams are the slang of haiku. But if that’s true, then they should have derivative yet separate names as is the case in other slang. Others claim that the slam poem is a revolution against the formal institutions of poetic meter, which may be true, yet in the imitation of haiku the slam poet is required to follow the five seven five rule, which is the most anal aspect of haiku. If the slam movement is so inclined to wash away convention in poetry, they should not throw the present moment out and then go through the process of squeezing syllables into a count that, outside of the Japanese language, does nothing to enhance the poem whatsoever. Others insist that these poems are an evolution of haiku of equal merit to deviations from tradition practiced by other western haiku poets. This, however, would only be true if the poets who wrote them were well practiced in the writing of traditional haiku and had gradually felt the need to change the form over a long relationship with the genre. In any study of art, the student is expected to learn the rules so they know how to break them. Salvador Dali, for example, would not have been so artful in his rule breaking if he hadn't studied the old masters first. In most cases though, the first experience that slam poets have with writing haiku is their having to compose a 5-7-5 poem for a slam death match. Haiku poets know how to break the rules of haiku without losing its essential elements. Slam poets though, in their bastardization of the genre, do not give the impression that they even like haiku. The short poems referred to as haiku in slams are not the next step in the advancement of the haiku genre. They lack the depth provided by the essential elements without which a poem is not a haiku at all9.
Some may argue that labels are unimportant, and that it doesn’t matter if one refers to, for instance, a symbolist poem as a surrealist poem as long as one enjoys the writing. But if an event was advertised that featured, for example, surrealist poetry, shouldn’t one go there expecting to hear surrealist poetry being read, rather than someone saying “It’s just a label, man!”? Why do slam poets bother to put short poems under the umbrella of the haiku genre? There’s something ironic about defending the use of a label by arguing that labels are unimportant. It is true that some art falls outside of genres, defying description and definition. But if one wants to label something that one has done as being part of a genre, the piece should contain more than just a superficial element of that genre. Haiku as a genre, and every other literary species, requires more than a syllable count for a work to be part of it10. Others may argue that to call the short poems in slam competitions “haiku” can be seen as a tribute, but this brings us back to the analogy of slam "haiku" as compared to blackface in minstrel shows. It was argued by some blackface performers that their portrayals of Black people were homage to African American culture. The minstrel shows played to audiences in the northern states of America and in the British Isles where people had no real experience of African American culture, just as most slam audiences have no real experience of haiku11.
Some might argue that the use of blackface as a comparison to haiku death matches is out of line. If this analogy for some reason offends sensibilities, I will offer an alternative. Slam poets occupying the genre of haiku and claiming a piece of it as theirs can be compared to all forms of colonization.
There is nothing wrong necessarily with the short poems that slam poets write. The slam poem is a unique genre and its short form is also unique to that genre. The poems are often funny, clever, and even sometimes creative, so there is no reason why slam poets are not capable of coming up with a word that represents the kind of short poems they write, and that doesn't both steal from and insult a genre that a culture is built around. It would not be inappropriate for slams to call the poems something that pays tribute to the fact that they were inspired by the shape of haiku. One possibility is “slyku”, or another is “lieku”.
While many poets bring various derivative forms of writing into poetry slams, slam poetry has a distinctive style that dominates these competitions in the same sense that haiku is distinctive. Undoubtedly as the years progress the genre of slam poetry will become more and more defined. There is a culture built around poetry slams and the writing represented there, and the slam poets take their work very seriously. Because of this they should understand the seriousness other types of poets feel towards their respective genres. If slam poets use only the skeletal form of haiku, leaving out the essential elements, and yet claim that it is haiku, it gives the audience the wrong impression of what haiku is. This could potentially cause the haiku genre to decay as the derived form is perpetuated.
Poetry slams could go a long way towards removing several of their flaws by not allowing performance to be one of the criteria in the judgment of the contest. This could be achieved by not selecting judges at random from the audience, but rather inviting experienced poets in advance to come and assess the quality only of the writing being presented. Objective criticism is more easily accomplished when the critic is prepared for the responsibility. Also the engagement of the audience in the judgment process by displaying numbered score cards should be eliminated. Judges should choose the poets they think are the best or consult one another in their moments of indecision, but audiences, who have come mostly to be entertained, can not be objective. Spoken word events are entertaining enough in themselves without having to place an emphasis on performance.
1. Wikipedia. American poetry. American poetry today. “Poetry slams emphasize a style of writing that is topical, provocative and easily understood.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_poetry
2. Timpane, John. What to Expect at a Poetry Slam. Poetry For Dummies. “A certain kind of poet, and a
certain kind of poetry, goes over well at slams. Self-indulgence is expected.
Performers will do just about anything in a poem (or a performance!) to win the
audience.” http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/what-to-expect-at-a-poetry-slam.html
3. Grambo, Isaac. Contemporary Critique. Legend Myth
and Street Cred in the Image of the Artist. “I am
not saying that coming from poverty, racial discrimination, domestic violence
or homophobia are advantages in life. I am saying that plumbing the
depths of those experiences in writing and performing slam poetry can bring
high scores from judges”. http://contemporarycritique.wordpress.com/2012/06/02/legend-myth-and-street-cred-in-the-image-of-the-artist/
4. Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful
Losers. New York. Bantam Books. (1970). 149-150.
“We walked along Sherbrooke Street, west toward the English
section of the city. We felt the tension immediately. At Parc Lafontaine Park
we heard the shouted slogans of a demonstration.
-Québec Libre!
-Québec Oui, Ottawa Non!
-Merde à la reine d’anglaterre!
-Elizabeth Go Home!
The newspapers had just announced the intention of Queen Elizabeth to
visit Canada, a state visit planned for October.
-This is an ugly crowd, F. Let’s walk faster.
-No, it is a beautiful crowd.
-Why ?
-Because they think they are Negroes, and that is the best feeling a
man can have in this century.”
5. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World
Revisited. New York. HarperCollins. (2006). 41. “ … a man in a crowd
behaves as though he had swallowed a dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a
victim of what I have called ‘herd poisoning’.” 6. Singler, Fluffy.
The Politics of Poetry Slam. Fluffy’s World. Jan 3, 2008.
http://fluffysingler.blogspot.ca/2008/01/sentiment-and-memory-politics-of-poetry.html
“poems dealing with race,
ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or angry politics in general will do
better in poetry slams than a piece of surrealism”
7. Abolition.
History of Minstrelsy from “Jump Jim Crow” to The
Jazz Singer. 2012. http://exhibits.lib.usf.edu/exhibits/show/minstrelsy/jimcrow-to-jolson/abolition.
“ Part of the draw of minstrel shows was
the opportunity for white urban audiences to get a glimpse of purportedly
genuine African American life, behavior, singing and dancing that took place on
rural plantations. Songs supporting abolition emphasized the suffering of
slaves rather than contentment on the plantation. However, there was a
condescending edge to the abolitionists’ call to pity slaves.”
8. Kacian, Jim. Haiku Content. New Zealand Poetry Society.
http://www.poetrysociety.org.nz/node/193. “Essential to haiku is “presentness.”
The moment of insight in haiku exists, as we have
said, outside of time. And because of this experience of timelessness, we do
not conceive of things happening during such a realisation in the past or
future, but only in an eternal present. The practical effect of such a
sensation is that we write haiku in the present tense. This is more than simply
an affectation or aesthetic decision: this is the poetic analogue to the
ongoingness of our revelation. It has the further effect of allowing the reader
to enter more directly into the poem: it is seen as vital and current, rather
than reportage of an event once glorious but now gone… Another effect of
locating haiku in the present is that this provides every poem with a sense of
endlessness — it is the psychological truth that, given literary form, we can
experience only the present moment.
9. Swede, George. Towards a Definition of the
English Haiku. the haikai.info| haikai.org (hiho) project.
http://www.haijinx.com/originals/haikai/articles/swede.definition.html. “Most English-language haiku poets have long
recognized that the seventeen-syllable length was designed for the
characteristics of the Japanese language, not the English... 80% of the haiku
published in the best anthologies and periodicals have fewer than seventeen
syllables… breath-length has become the sole measure of brevity for the vast
majority of English-language poets… for the haiku to be effective, it must
capture the essence of an experience... this essence is best expressed in one
breath length”
10. Wappner,
Bette Norcross, editor. Definitions. United Haiku and Tanka Society News
Bulletin. March, 2014.
http://www.unitedhaikuandtankasociety.com/definitionsuhts141.html. “Haiku is a
succinct write equal to 3 lines (it doesn't matter how that equal is arranged,
1 line, 2 lines, or in 3 lines), but what does matter are the rest of the
requirements, which are: that it captures a sensory perceived moment, and
contains either a kigo (season word) that directly indicates a season,
or other words that indirectly evoke a feeling of the natural world we live in.
It has a 2-punch juxtaposition that equals a kireji (cutting word) which
creates a conscious pause. Haiku no longer must always conform to the 5,7,5
syllable count; rather it should be close to a short, long, short rhythm. The
correctly written haiku contains a setting, subject, verb, plus an “aha”
moment, which can compare to the sound of the “pop” of that very first “kernel”
when you make popcorn.”
11.
Wikipedia. Blackface. “Stereotypes embodied in the stock characters of
blackface minstrels not only played a significant role in cementing and
proliferating racist images, attitudes and perceptions worldwide, but also in
popularizing black culture… ”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackface.
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