New to Slam Poetry?

Learn what Slam really is from an excerpt from Take the Mic by Marc Kelly Smith and Joe Kraynak

The Big Definition of Slam Poetry
Stumble into any bar or coffee shop during a slam, and you’ll witness poets slinging words !Out Loud! to win the adulation of an animated audience and the high scores of randomly selected judges. You might think that’s all there is to it, but if you stick around and listen long and hard you’ll discover that a poetry slam isn’t just a high-energy 100+ decibel reading or a heated head-on competition.

Slam poetry (as the introduction warns) is a word circus, a school, a town meeting, a playground, a sports arena, a temple, a burlesque show, a revelation, a mass guffaw, holy ground, and possibly all of these mixed together. Slam poetry is performance poetry, the marriage of a text to the artful presentation of poetic words onstage to an audience that has permission to talk back and let the performer know whether he or she is communicating effectively.

What Slam Is and Isn’t
Some people think slam poetry is (merely) competitive verse performed in front of an interactive audience. For some it’s a way to bring classic poems back to life through passionate performance. For others, it’s a vehicle for creating a new community centered on the celebration and articulation of performance poetry. Five things are clear about slam poetry, no matter what hilltop you’re crying from:

• Slam is poetry. It’s not essays, novels, or short stories. At times it incorporates storytelling and rhetoric into
its mix of many forms, but the basis of its appeal (and its root) is poetry.
• Slam is performed. Poems are presented with as much precision and professionalism as can be found in any of the performing arts. This is slam’s primary distinction within the realm of Poetry (with a capital P—the merging of the art of performance with the art of writing poetry.
• Slam is competitive. Competition may not be the point, but it’s an essential ingredient. Poets have competed for bragging rights since the beginning of recorded history. What’s fresh about slam is that the audience (not your professor or the Council on Deciding What’s Art) has the biggest say about what’s deemed good or bad.
• Slam is interactive. It encourages audience feedback. Slam makes the audience an active partner in everything
it does.
• Slam is community. Sometimes it calls itself a family, albeit a dysfunctional one at times, but an international family of people who love to participate in and celebrate both poetry and the performance of it.

What slam isn’t may be just as important as what it is:
• Slam is not just text on a page.
• Slam is not a formalized poetry reading during which the audience listens passively and applauds politely regardless
of what they really feel and think.
• Slam is not an art form that lets an elite few decide what’s of value and what’s not.
• Slam is not a talent show or gimmick—it’s an experience that’s artistic, entertaining, educational, spiritual, reflective,
and above all life-changing.
• Slam is not meant to be a serious determination of who’s the mightiest poet. A slam competition is a theatrical
device for focusing an audience’s attention on the art form— performance poetry.