“My dearest mother: I’m going to kill you – I have to,” began Elliot Smith. “You eat Prozac instead of lasagna, you down happy with your wine.”
“Oh man!” yelled Jive Poetic, slam poet and resident heckler, while his fellow audience members snapped and whistled in approval.
The Urbana Poetry Slam, which takes place every Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Bowery Poetry Club, packed the tiny back-room performance space of the club with 40 or 50 people. The audience members cheer, boo or snap their fingers to give poets feedback as they perform, which gives the slam a more competitive (yet friendly) feel.
A crowd of 20- and 30-somethings, dressed in the requisite hipster uniform of tight jeans and collared, checked shirts, lounged in folding chairs and sipped their $3 cans of PBR. Sprinkled among them are a few elderly professorial types in their sixties, one mother and daughter pair, and a family of Hasidic Jews.
“Their brains are dying.
Their intellectual selves are lying in the gutters and pits of a school system run by a war loving government.
They’d rather buy bombs than books any day,” rapped Arianne Benford.
Poetry slams are competitive events in which poets perform their work and are judged by members of the audience. At Bowery’s slam, five audience members volunteer themselves as judges and score three rounds of performances. At the end of each round, the lowest scorers are eliminated, and the highest scorer of the third round is the winner.
English teacher and slam poet Nicole Homer explained why the audience component of slam poetry was so important. “It’s very immediate,” she said. “You get immediate feedback from the audience, and you immediately have a relationship with the audience.”
Nine poets took the stage for the slam. They performed in every style and on every topic under the sun, from commercialism to zombies to heartbreak. Some poets chanted in rap rhythms and waved their arms, while others spoke slowly, deliberately, hauntingly.
Slam poet Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz founded the Urbana slam in 1998 at the age of 19, and the Urbana team has attended the National Poetry Slam every year since. The National Poetry Slam is an annual team poetry competition held in a different city every year, attended by 300-400 poets.
Arianne Benford, a member of the Urbana Poetry team at the National Poetry Slam, rapped about racism and the school system. Right after her, Jive Poetic rapped in his sing-songy style about American commercialism, citing Mr. Huxtable, Virginia ham, Macy’s, Richard Simmons, and so many other pop culture clichés.
“It was a revelation when I realized that poetry didn’t have to be written down! It can be a live, interactive dialogue between the poet and the audience,” explained Simone Beaubien, the featured poet at this week’s slam.
Beaubien, who hosts the weekly slam at Boston’s Cantab Lounge and will host the National Poetry Slam this August, performed poems on her job as a paramedic, American polyamory, and growing old.
On being a paramedic: “The junkies will tell you where the good veins are… The junkies, who have been here before, don’t try to tell me how to do my job, even though they could do it better – left-handed, speeding in the dark, in a moving vehicle at 40 miles an hour.”
Jeanann Verlee, who has been involved in Urbana for nearly a decade, performed “Brawler,” a poem about her Irish upbringing, and “Lessons for Loving a Prophet.”
As slam master, Verlee has helped run the Urbana slam every week for five years, in addition to co-editing the literary magazine Union Station Magazine. She said she wants to preserve the craft of poetry in slam competitions, to make sure slam poetry does not become too performance-oriented.
“I really believe any kind of poetry can be slam poetry,” she said. “We have people who get up and perform form poems. The slam is the game, not the style.”
Audience member Jon Berger, a customer service consultant from the Upper West Side, rediscovered poetry slams a month ago after attending the Intangible Slam at Sidewalk Café (6th St and Ave A).
“I’m a little ambivalent about the slam culture,” he said. “But the style presented here – the energetic, visceral feeling – is what I like. So I might not like the competitive element, but the presentation is great.”
The Bowery Poetry Club is located at Bowery and 2nd Streets. They hold poetry and music events nearly every night of the week.
A few other poetry clubs in the NYC area host regular weekly slams – the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe (3rd St and Ave C), LouderARTS (35 E 13th St), and the Intangible Slam at the Sidewalk Café (6th St and Ave A).
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