Democracy and judging poetry
Now Playing: absolutely nuthin
Topic: slam
So as you may likely already know, the Slam Team for this year was chosen last Friday at the Velvet Room, and I'm pretty happy with the results (although I might have issues with the judging.) I suppose that the format of slam necessitates the sort of judging you get.... but before I get into that whole discussion, here's the team roster:
Jim Thomas
Kevin MatthewsDJ MoralesRitallinand, because Jim's not going to be able to make it to Toronto for the Nationals:
FestrellI like this team. I like the diversity of it and I like the personalities of the poets, and I'm glad they're representing Ottawa.
What we're bringing to TO (in my humble opinion):
- Kevin Matthews's fast and virtuoso wordplay, his love of play and nonsense combined with his painfully well-put political clarity;
- Ritallin's rhythm (ever powerful) and solid rap grounding, not to mention his stage presence and passion for the spoken word community;
- DJ Morales' rapid-fire, never-stumble flights of fancy and the way she literally dances her poems;
- Festrell's uniqueness: no one else that I've heard in spoken word is anything like her, and her passionate poems are capable of silencing a room to listen to her whisper.
And Jim: sorry he can't be in the nationals, because I decided I liked him as soon as I heard him: metaphor and language nicely married up in a really engaging performance - and that cool English accent doesn't hurt either. Catch him at "Britpoets" - seriously, don't miss this - on July 13th, 8:00 at the Gap of Dunloe.
That said... the judging. The way poetry's judged at a poetry slam is one of the things I'm pretty much of two minds about. One the one hand, I'm happy with the democracy of a poetry slam. I'm glad that it takes the appreciation of poetry off the pedestal your high school teacher put it on, back when you learned to hate it. It says, poetry talks to your guts, first and foremost. And poetry slams have allowed people who would normally have said, "You're going to a poetry show tonight? Wouldn't you rather have a nice root canal or spinal tap?" to suddenly say, "Wait, I
get it! This is
fun!"
The mantra I learned at the first Spoken WordLympics, when I discovered slam poetry, was "the points are not the point, the poetry is the point!" Which took me up
entirely. I loved the energy in the room, the way a lecture theatre full of people could surge to their feet, screaming and cheering, for freakin'
poetry. And I've heard many times that people think appreciating poetry is an acquired taste, something only for the specially privileged and properly educated, something for those who know the difference between iambic and trochaic meter. And I always rebelled against that. I thought, poetry
should be accessible to people whether or not they've studied scansion. So part of the appeal of slams for me was watching all the people who'd never written poetry before, or even liked it, being granted access to this art form for the first time in their lives, and suddenly going from "I don't get poetry" to "I can write poetry."
Here's where it gets tricky though... when you choose five random judges from the audience, assign points, and then assign real values to those points, like a monthly Slam Champion cash prize, or the chance to go compete at the Nationals, it gets prickly. At the Slam semifinals, and again at the slam finals, I found myself frustrated by the judges. In the semifinals, I found them erratic and irrational, swinging from damningly low marks to incomprehensibly high marks from poem to poem - for the same poet. In the finals, I found them timid, marking everyone laughably high, regardless of the value of their performance. It reminded me a little of the Olympic example: after Nadja got the first perfect 10, suddenly
everyone was scoring 10s. And when there is something as valuable as the Slam Championship and a chance to compete at the Nationals at stake, that becomes more than just an annoyance. It's a lot harder to say, "The points are not the point, the poetry is the point."
I guess I always want the poetry to be the point. And the fact stands that I'm very happy with the team chosen by the judges, even though at the time I was iffy about their criteria. Maybe it's just that I'm feeling the uneasy coexistence of art and competition, and that has always existed in some form or other. As it is, I am still happy with the fact that Capital Slam and other slam organizations are out there turning so many people on to poetry who might otherwise have thought it was all about memorizing what Frost might really have meant when he included that hemlock tree, or being able to recite "I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud."
Posted by Kathryn Hunt
at 1:10 AM EDT
Yesterday was the launch for Jennifer Whiteford's first novel Grrrl, which I've been looking forward to since I heard her read at Dusty Owl last fall. I liked what I heard of it then, and now that I've had a chance to read the whole thing (between last night and this morning - it was a compulsive read and I'm a compulsive reader) I like it even more. There's something about the voice of the novel - told through the diary of a teenaged girl - that rings a few bells of memory with me, especially the hugely capitalized emphasis, the conversational sound of it, and the convincing blindness of the character to whatever's really going on - the diary format lets you watch her being sure of something one day, and two days later have turned around entirely. 
As a memoir of a love affair with music, too, it reminded me of a really fine zine I picked up at a Bywords reading this spring - Puget Sound by David Emery. It's a really cleanly written series of short pieces about grunge, Cobain and the convergence of music and the craziness of being a teenager. I don't know if there are any more around, but if there are, you might be able to get hold of one through him: he's on myspace 
I also got a copy of Apt. 5 (2) from my friend Sean Zio - I've been collecting his zines for the last year or so. He makes the art of cut-paste-and-photocopy collage look so damn easy...