Jack Foley, Slam (Part I)

Jack Foley

Look at me now and here I am.
--Gertrude Stein

My wife Adelle and I hosted the Seattle Teen Slam Team at our home recently. They were in town to compete in the National Teen Poetry Slam Championships, which were held at the Regency Theater on Earth Day--Saturday, April 22, 2000. The trip was arranged by Paul Nelson, who is a poetry dynamo in the Seattle area: hosting readings, putting poetry on the radio, getting poets paid for their efforts, writing excellent poetry of his own. Check out his web sites: http://www.inpeoria.org and http://www.splab.org. Joining Paul chez moi was the team: Nicole Bade, Angela Dy, Rafi Soifer, Ben Warden; the alternate, Nordica Friedrich; the team manager, Shea Kauffman; and the team's coaches, Paula Friedrich and Tim Sanders. We found beds for some, but many lay happily sleeping-bagged on our living room rug.

There were many events involved in this three-day "National Youth Poetry Festival." The organizers write,

Now in its third year, the National Youth Poetry Slam Festival first kicked off in Hartford, Connecticut as an off-shoot of the adult slam. But due to the rising number of poetry programs for youths nationwide, last year in Albuquerque, New Mexico, The Youth Slam became its own event. An entire festival that celebrates and embraces the creativity of today's teenagers, Brave New Voices 2000 has more young poets coming together from across the globe than ever before.

Adelle and I attended the "grand slam finals" at the Grand Ballroom at the Regency Building in San Francisco. It was an extraordinary event. I saw "slam queen" Ariana Waynes, a "National Poetry Slam Champ 1999," in the audience, though she didn't read or judge. (I keep thinking of her, unfairly no doubt, as "Buffy the Poetry Slayer.") The competitive aspects of the event were deliberately downplayed--the judges frequently acted more like a cheering section than like judges-- and the mood was enormously upbeat. It was "You'll shout when it hits you, yes indeed," as the old spiritual put it. And if you didn't shout, the mc complained that you were insufficiently responsive: "I can't heeear you!" The main mc for the event was Saul Williams, featured in Marc Levin's 1998 film, Slam. Standing ovations were frequent. You felt a little as though you were in church, a large church. And in fact a donation basket was passed through the audience at one point. (This despite the fact that people had paid to get in, as they do not in a church.) When the basket came round, Nelson nudged me and said, "If you didn't know you were in church before, you know it now."

The Seattle team did very well: everyone spoke effectively, and their material was thoughtful and well-written; Bade and Soifer performed a riveting multi-voiced piece dealing with what we in Berkeley call "the Battle of Seattle." But, as Nelson put it, "the hip-hop stylings of Berkeley/Oakland won over the capacity crowd at the Regency Theater."

There were many assertions of the superior virtues of youth and suggestions that youth would change the world. "Youth Speaks," read the logo, "...because the next generation can speak for itself." I couldn't help thinking of the "exclusiveness" of the old Pepsi Generation ad: "If you're living you belong." We don't want any dead ones! (Pushing sixty, I also remembered the aged Falstaff's inclusion of himself in the phrase "we youth.") The content of the poetry, usually memorized, was often reminiscent of high school assemblies--situations in which the point is to allow a young person to present him or herself to an audience but, at the same time, to quietly insist that what the person says must be "uplifting" or "inspiring" according to local conceptions of what is uplifting and inspiring: in short, make it dead. The poetry tended to be deeply involved with ego assertion--as in "I am Hamlet the Dane!"--rather than ego examination, though of course any writing involves some ego examination.

Among the non-teenagers reading at the Regency event was Beau Sia, whose presentation was one of the highlights of the evening. This is the poem he put on the cover of his book, a night without armor II: the revenge (for sale at the event). On the cover the poem looks like a piece of graffiti:

I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK
ABOUT THE WAY I WRITE
I DIE ON THE PAGE
EVERY TIME. WHAT
DO YOU KNOW
ABOUT PUSH-UPS?
TRUE LOVE?
PRESSURE?
AT NIGHT I LIE
IN MY QUEEN-SIZE
BED ALONE. DREAMING
ABOUT IGNOBLE
THINGS. I AM NOT
FANCY. I AM NOT SPECIAL
I AM BETTER THAN YOU.
I AM ALONE. I AM THE
PRODUCT.

The number of I's in that poem is characteristic of much of the emotional push of slam poetry. Gertrude Stein nailed it many years ago when she wrote, "Look at me now and here I am." Much of Sia's poem is a statement of pretty straight, not-too-thoughtful adolescent angst--or at least what our culture usually puts forth as adolescent angst. For males of my generation, such angst was embodied by writers like Thomas Wolfe and J.D. Salinger, movies like Rebel Without a Cause, and figures such as James Dean and Elvis Presley. It's easy enough to recognize: "I AM NOT / FANCY. I AM NOT SPECIAL / I AM BETTER THAN YOU. / I AM ALONE."

But if Sia gives us adolescence in a readily-packaged, easily-recognizable form, he also gives us little surprises which jolt us and force us to recognize that we are dealing with something far more genuine here. When he writes, "I DIE ON THE PAGE / EVERY TIME. WHAT / DO YOU KNOW ABOUT..." we expect the next word to be "ME," but in fact it's "PUSH-UPS." Similarly, the word "PRODUCT" at the end of the poem is completely unexpected. Sia is giving the adolescent audience what it believes it wants--a mirror of what it believes it's like--but, at the same time, he is ahead of the audience, moving it into a genuine experience of language.

It is perhaps too much to ask of real teenagers to display such consciousness. It's enough that they should enter into the rituals of poetry, enough that they should write verse that people can understand and care for, enough that they should learn to perform in ways that interest and captivate. And captivating they were. It was wonderful to hear the discussions in my living room--not discussions of TV or clothing but of poetry. It was also wonderful to see the performers in action--to see what they had learned about presenting a poem. As for the poetry, most of it was relatively conventional. Much involved popular political positions such as the difficulties of women in our society. Displays of "emotional honesty" were valued: one very young slammer shouted out to a girl who had ignored him, "You are my first love!" The crowd loved it. It was also a good idea to sound as African-American as possible, whether or not you actually were African-American. Sheer energy of sound (whether or not the words were intelligible) was also applauded--appropriately enough to a poetry gathering, where the sound of the poem is always a factor. Indeed, there were Bosnian teenagers reading in Bosnian, though they didn't compete. And a group of young women from London. The work I heard was obviously rooted in current musical forms--people danced to some of the poems--but it was also rooted in the poetries of many ancient cultures. Didn't the Homeric singers memorize their poems just like the slammers?

Jack Foley