Admittedly, I don't know a lot about this group, other than I often see signs up in town announcing their events. But they are planning a big show at the Englert Theater next Wednesday, February 22 that seems interesting.
From their Web site: "This event will feature some of the best spoken word and musical talent around including Cynthia French from Minneapolis, Amy Steinberg from Florida, Jupiter Jazz from St. Louis, and Nikki Lunden and the Heinous Canis.... The proceeds from this show will benefit the Iowa City Poetry Slam team heading to the National Poetry Slam in Austin, TX this August."
I have to say it takes cheek, cajones, and chutzpah to charge folks $10 for anything in Iowa City, let alone a poetry reading. Hence, I'm truly intrigued and plan to go. The night before the Englert event, they're warming up at the Mill. They already rocked the Hancher last month. They seem to have their shit together, and I'll bet the Englert slam is going to be fun.
Here are the rules that will be in effect at the show. Anyone planning to sign up for the slam at The Mill next Tuesday? Has anyone here slammed with these cats?
9 comments:
I was way into slam in Knoxville. There was a truly vital scene for a few years that included my friend Julia Nance. I never slammed myself because: 1. I dislike public speaking and 2. I'm a wimp. Slamming takes cheek, cajones, and chutzpah, and I can only muster one of the above at any given time.
That said, when a slam is good, watching is a lot of fun. When slam is bad, it is not at all fun. The problem is that often the judges, who should be random members of the audience, end up not being random at all. When the fix is in, some bad "poetry" gets good scores, and that drives out the good poets. Suddenly the scene is invaded by bad poets spewing rhymes for the sake of rhyming.
If IC slam is good, then we need to go and keep going so that at least some of the crowd is cheering and jeering correctly. I’m willing to give it a try. See you at the Mill on Tuesday.
I use poetry slams in my cw classes at MXC because the students respond to it and enjoy it. Some of them are pretty good too, blurring a line between poetry and hip-hop in a way I very much encourage, if only because among the population I work with there, hip-hop is fucking golden, and if it can be an entre into a serious consideration of language and aesthetic, so be it.
That said, I agree whole-heartedly with the emperor on this even if I'm not sure it is a point about slam poetry so much as "experiment" and "avant-garde" in general. When novelty itself becomes the chief aim of an artist, he puts quite a millstone around his neck and it limits him more than it frees him. I think this is because novelty is an external and relational judgment. That's not to say I don't value novelty, because I absolutely do, but it's rarely something that can be achieved in a calculated manner. I believe that every artist has the idiosyncracy within themselves to be truly unique, but it isn't something you bring out by donning the leather jacket that is "experimentalism" or "avant-garde." It seems to me that novelty is something that comes out of you when you resist such external validations, not when you embrace them.
Maybe that's way some of the most novel writing in today's fiction is coming from sci-fi writers, a group who has been told over and over how unoriginal and cliched they are. I'm sure they understand novelty in a very different way than most of us here, and my hunch is that their attitude is more productive.
For me personally, all this means having the confidence and stubbornness to listen to myself rather than to others. That's not to say I don't value feedback on my writing, but I try to think of it as 95% beside the point. Sometimes it takes me several readers before I decide that the one thing they're all complaining about is worth changing. It's not efficient, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
Whether or not my writing is novel isn't really something I worry about anymore (just as how punk I am or am not is something I don't really worry about anymore). There's really only one question I ask myself now about what I write, two years out of the program: do I like it as much as I could?
I'd be interested to know what Mr. Cicero thinks of this argument, assuming he's still reading.
There is no avant-garde in America. Literature is no longer popular enough to rail against it. Excluding genre novelists. But literature's most popular writers Joan Didion or Dave Eggers still aren't famous enough to take time to rail against.
Literature or non-genre fiction as an art doesn't reach even three million people anymore in a country of 290 million. Looking at those numbers, even Joan Didion is underground. Considering probably NOFX outsells her. And they are underground.
Currently the way of the sales of fiction are, we are all underground writers. From a bennington writer, to a zinester, to a slam poet.
My favorite moments involving poetry were experiencing Talk Art performances by people I knew and loved. Isn't the source of poetry spoken word performance? Didn't Homer chant his incantations wild-eyed around a fire? I guess I don't care if it's called avant garde or whatever, just as long as it's sincere and intense. Maybe this slam will be that and maybe it won't, but it's just cool that people still bother to gather and hear poets at all, isn't it? And tsk tsk, knockin' the Beats, Your Highness! I would love to have been there at the first performance of "Howl," swigging off the wine bottle from Kerouac and passing it to Ferlinghetti, and so would you.
nofx is better than this blog
"There's something grand about being nothing / there's something lame about being grand."
Cool. I feel better about the Holy Roman Emperor now. I'm off to the Dean Young lecture, but won't be able to post from my notes till Saturday morning.
The avant guard though doesn't depend on popularity. It depends on norms, and we have more of those than ever. The avant guard has the pesky habit of becoming the norm though, no? That's why it is always dying but never gone. It seems more a state of mind, insofar as one tries to avoid the staid conventions of the day, which are very much worth railing against. A former poet laureate of ours is rather "famous" in poetry terms for his faux-profundity and observational humor (what's the deal with flowers, I mean have you seen these things?). Many a night has been spent discussing how terrible his poems are and why they are so well liked. Then the next day is spent trying to do precisely the opposite of him.
The slam poetry that I've seen has been unlikable because it was, at root, very conventional. I’ve been to a few and could never resist watching the lamentable Def Poetry Jam on HBO (was that show a fair representation? I don’t know.). They were basically rhymed platitudes exasperated by the insistence that they were deeply felt. And they may have been. But seeing the audience cheering their agreement was creepy and depressing. I’ll take the avant guard.
Hi Joe! Thanks for jumping in here. I for one am looking forward to the Mill and the Grand Cabaret the night after. It's terrific that you've organized this thing and kept it going for four years. Your eloquent description of your goals and process is inspiring. Good for you. I am embarrassed that I've never been to one of your slams before, but better late than never. I wish you luck in the national competition.
With all this talk about poetry slams, I wonder how much you have heard about story slams?
The 2007 St. Louis National Storytelling Conference will have a Story Slam that I will attend. You may want to check out my blog entry comparing these two different art styles.
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