Around 2001 I found myself falling, entirely by accident, into the bizarre and wonderful world of Poetry Slam. To describe what Slam is, exactly, is always difficult, and is something that all slam poets are forced to do on a regular basis. The thriving community, which spans most of the United States and several different countries, still remains a relatively unknown phenomenon. At its core is a poetry competition with varying rules, but the constants of each competition are usually as such: 1) Poems must be 3 minutes in length, with a ten second grace period. Any poem that goes over 3 minutes and 10 seconds incurs a time penalty of .5 points for every ten seconds the poem goes over. 2) Judges are chosen at random from the slam audience and must judge on a scale of 0 to 10 with one decimal point. Five judges are usually chosen, the high and low scores are dropped, and the remaining three scores are added up for the poet’s score. 3) Poets are not allowed to use props, costumes, or musical accompaniment, only their words and their performance. Yet, to boil it down to simply a competition with scores fails to describe the thriving community that has grown out of it, a community that has a love/hate relationship with fame and public exposure.
Many of us involved in Poetry Slam are well aware that the idea of a poetry competition looks as silly to some outside observers as the concept of National Air Guitar Championships or the National Rock, Paper, Scissor Championship. Still, for most of us, it’s more than just a hobby, it’s a lifestyle. Slam scenes around the country have built up dedicated social circles, and many poets build their social lives around poetry. In the last apartment I lived in I had three roommates, two of which were from the local poetry scene. My last relationship was with a girl in the Worcester Poetry Slam scene, and she lived in a house where every person living there was a slam poet with the exception of the 11 year old boy living upstairs who was the son of two slam poets. Beyond the local scenes, there is also a national scene that breeds social relationships through the several festivals held every year.
These festivals allow poets from different scenes to come together and compete against each other. There are three festivals held by the “official” slam organization, Poetry Slam Incorporated. These include the National Poetry Slam, in which as many as 80 venues around the country send teams of around 4 or 5 poets to compete with each other, the Individual World Poetry Slam, which is essentially the National Poetry Slam with individuals representing each venue instead of teams, and the Women of the World Poetry Slam, which is essentially the Individual World Poetry Slam but for women only. In addition to these festivals, there are also two festivals held by separate organizations: the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational or CUPSI, a national slam for teams representing different colleges across the country, and Brave New Voices, a version of the National Poetry Slam that is specifically for teenagers.
The slam community has always had two minds about national exposure. Some wish to get the word about slam out to as many people as possible, while some are weary of the compromises with corporate interests that would be required for such exposure. The slam community is generally made up of artists who lean far to the left and would like to see as little corporate involvement as possible in their community. The problem becomes that large festivals require corporate sponsors and, when the organizers pick the wrong sponsor, tensions flare up. The organizers of the 2009 National Poetry Slam recently learned this the hard way when the entire festival was nearly shut down over an argument about a sponsorship from Hustler magazine.
One of the first times that the media took an interest in our community was in 1996, when documentary filmmaker Paul Devlin filmed the 1996 National Poetry Slam in Portland, Oregon and created the documentary SlamNation. The documentary has garnered mixed reviews from the community. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, reknowned New York slam poet, said of the film:
[SlamNation] showcased the best poetry and performances from the best poets across the country, and all within the anxiety-provoking context of the National Poetry Slam. One viewing of the movie could inspire a dozen new poems, and the seamless perfection of the group pieces found in the movie would forever change the number of and quality of the group work presented at the Nationals. It was also the perfect poetry slam propaganda for starting and encouraging new poetry slam venues.1
Others have complained that the representation of the slam community is largely inaccurate. Whether or not it was accurate for the time, in the 13 years since the films release, the National Poetry Slam has more than doubled in size, and the style of poetry has greatly changed from that featured in the film.
Then came Def Poetry Jam. The HBO television series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam, a spin off of Simmons’s Def Comedy Jam, was a series which put spoken word poetry on television for, as far as I know, the first time. The show featured a combination of prominent slam poets and non-slam related celebrities reciting poems. Some of the most reknowned poets in the scene have appeared on the show, including Big Poppa E, Taylor Mali, and even some of my own friends in the scene such as Eamon Mahoney, Paul Graham, and the late Shannon Leigh. Russell Simmons also took the Def Poetry brand one step further and created a version of the show for Broadway in 2002. Some in the slam community have been happy to see their art form showcased on HBO, while some complained that the show cheapened the entire art form, and told stories of the show handpicking poets with the most attractive, mainstream look and poetic style.
The series is, at this point, said to be done, but that hasn’t stopped Russell Simmons from taking one more step in commercializing the slam culture. Starting this April, HBO will be airing a new miniseries: Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices. The series, narrated by Queen Latifah, follows seven teams from different cities on their way to the Brave New Voices festival in 2008. Rather than just showcasing poems, this series intends to tell the stories of the performers as well.2
I think that this newest show is the most problematic representation of the slam culture that we’ve seen so far. The documentary, SlamNation, for all of its faults, only sought to document an existing festival and culture for an audience. Def Poetry Jam, while it did feature many slam poets, also featured celebrities such as Lou Reed or Cedric the Entertainer reciting poetry. Thus, Russell Simmons branding the show with his own name wasn’t exactly a way of co-opting the culture. Nobody holds a copyright on spoken word and what he did, while it did pull heavily from slam, was a separate entity from Slam Poetry.
What becomes problematic about Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices is that Russell Simmons is taking a pre-existing festival and culture and putting his own name on it to brand it as his own. As someone who was a competitor in The Brave New Voices festival back in 2003, I can tell you that it did not just spring up in 2008 because Russell Simmons decided to put a camera in front of it.
I am not opposed to the slam scene getting more national exposure. I worry about how the exposure will cause the scene to grow larger than it already has, making it even more difficult to manage in the coming years, but I do believe that people in the community should try to bring more people into the fold in any way possible. My problem is not even with HBO or Russell Simmons choosing to broadcast the festival on national television. My problem is specifically with the words “Russell Simmons Presents” being in the title. Russell Simmons, an outsider to slam, has no right to claim ownership over a community that has been growing since long before he decided to capitalize on it. If the festival is going to be broadcast on HBO, credit should be given to those who worked so hard to build it into what it is now. Branding does not give one the right to take credit for someone else’s hard work.
Furthermore, he is also branding a community that has become a part of so many of our lives. While Def Poetry Jam was, as I said, a different beast than slam itself, this new series crosses the line and is actually depicting our slam culture. To give a rather extreme example, if Rupert Murdoch presented a series of specials for Black History Month and branded them as Rupert Murdoch Presents Black History Month or even Fox Presents Black History Month, there would be an instant uproar. Rupert Murdoch, not being black, does not have the right to brand Black History Month as his own. This is not to say that the Slam Poetry community is tantamount to an actual race, but it is a community that is special to a great many people.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen more Slam Poets expressing outrage over this co-opting of our culture. Perhaps they’ve grown so used to Russell Simmons using our art form for his own commercial gain that they’ve simply decided to give up the fight. However, what Russell Simmons is doing here is much more of an affront to the community than anything he did with Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam. He isn’t simply using our artists for his show, he’s claiming our entire culture as his own. I worry that, when we someday look back on the history of Slam Poetry, Russell Simmons’s name will be covering up the names of those who actually did work to put the scene together.
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