“Day-by-Day National Poetry Slam”
FRIDAY I was scheduled to work the door for the Mad Bar bout at a place called The Met Café, so I took off in search of registration information and where to find my pass. Alas, this year’s Nationals is just as chaotic as every other year’s has been, and no one seemed to be able to find the information I needed. Finally someone wrangled a temporary press pass for me (which, actually, I think I’ll keep -- it makes me look so official!) and someone else managed to get the door gear for me -- stamps, wristbands, some change, etc.
The Met is a cool, dilapidated punk rock club, and the staff there actually came out and helped me all night, which was very much appreciated. The first bout of the evening was between Hollywood, Birmingham, Pittsburgh and New Jersey. It was… hmm… a little lackluster, to say the least. The host was having a pretty hard time trying to whip the crowd into excitement, which then sucked the energy from most of the performers, producing an even more lethargic audience, etc. I, however, got to be a badass and hold people at the door while the poets were performing. All right!
Mad Bar was in the 2nd round, along with San Antonio, Missouri Ozarks and Ann Arbor. Danny Solis hosted the bout this time, and he wasn’t about to let the crowd simply sit there. He was continually getting the audience to perform callbacks with him between the poets, which kept them on their toes, and the bout itself was a pretty rowdy affair in general. Mad Bar ended up with a high second, which when added to their first place the night before gave them a pretty good chance of making the semifinals.
Afterwards was an open mic called “Drivin’ and Cryin’,” which was supposed to be all poems about road trips and sex. Unfortunately the bars are required to close in Providence at one in the morning, and the bouts ran so late that the open mic didn’t even start until 12:20, so only a handful of poets got to perform before the whole thing got shut down. We all stood outside for awhile, like the bored poets we are, and then decided to head back to the dorms.
The dorm we’re staying in (thank you, John Davis!) is completely filled with poets from top to bottom, and the ruckus going on outside the building last night looked like a Doors concert gone horribly wrong -- giant drum circle in the front quad, hundreds of black-clad hipsters milling about, people dancing and singing and making out. The interesting part was that the police were there and they were loving it -- one of them even got up and did a little dance with the drums before having to shut it all down around 2 in the morning.
A bunch of us Chicago people headed over to the Holiday Inn for an Austin party. The party had gotten too big for their room by the time we got there, so with the hotel’s gracious permission we were all allowed to move into the first floor lobby. A good 150 people showed up, most of them jealous of the few who had remembered to buy beer before 10:00, when all the liquor stores in town are forced to close. I was really exhausted from my previous 24 hours in NYC and the subsequent transit chaos, so I sat on the couch and let everyone else do the talking. About three in the morning, I headed back to the dorms with the other Chicago people, bought and ate a quick cheeseburger, watched the cops bust a whole fuckin’ crowd of drug dealers on a side street, and then went to bed.
And today we haven’t done too much yet. Mad Bar indeed made the semis, and are up against San Antonio again tonight along with Austin and the other Chicago team from the Green Mill. (How’s that for poetic irony?) A church here downtown has been feeding brunch for all the poets for free all week (and it’s really good, too), so we went there this morning. Is there not one place in this city where you can get away from the hippie drum circle? Yeesh. And now I’m about to fire this off to the Web site (thank you again, John Davis, for the in-dorm computer and modem system!), then off to the Hiphop open mic in about an hour. See you all tomorrow!
SATURDAY Not surprisingly, things got off to a slow start yesterday. The “Chicago Geek Clique” comprised of myself, John, Marlon and Shappy, all took turns throughout the morning on John’s Internet-enabled laptop, checking our email and updating our sites and posting news about the competition to places near and far. Ann got in around noon and I was able to finally stop being homeless and get checked into the dorm room where I’d be staying the rest of the weekend.
After our one millionth joke about how the Internet runs our lives, we finally got going over to AS220, a cool artist-run café, where both the hiphop open mic and group piece open mic were being held. Unfortunately AS220 is bereft of air conditioning, and the hundred or so people packed into the small space pushed the thermometer to an unseasonable 110 degrees. We ended up hanging outside the café all afternoon, which was the more interesting space anyway. Had an extended conversation with “Tribes”’s Amy Ouzoonian, whose Woodstock slam team has officially come in last place at this year’s competition (much to their amusement). Then had another long conversation with Mindy, a poet from Orange, California whom I originally met at the Tempe Poetry Festival in February. Hung out with the Green Mill people for awhile (by the way, Bob Chico, it’s nice to see you around this year!), then hung around Ben Ortiz, whose first-ever San Antonio team has been kicking asses and taking names all week.
Ann and I headed to the semifinals at 6:30, an hour and half before the show, and it’s a good thing we did -- there were nearly 20 people there already, in a club that seats maybe 200 if you’re lucky. Every year at Nationals there is one semifinal bout that is the “must see,” the one competition that everyone knows will be the most exciting of the night. In this case it was the 8:00 show at the Met Café -- Chicago Mad Bar versus Chicago Green Mill, versus audience darlings San Antonio, versus Austin, Texas. Man oh man, what a show! Nerves were at an all-time high, as people just kept pushing and pushing and pushing their way in the door. Mad Bar and Green Mill were the always great teams I already knew them to be. Austin were their usual badass selves. And I have to admit (sorry, Mad Bar) that San Antonio easily turned out to be my favorite team all week long. Sexy, sincere, emotional, unpretentious -- what more could one want from a team of poets?
I was pretty drunk and a little sick of poetry by the end of the first bout, so I spent the second bout wandering around the venue next door, the Lupos Heartbreak Hotel (in actuality a rock club), chatting with people in the back and reading through “The Tattler,” a one-sheet gossip column that a group of anonymous poets have taken to publishing every day here. Then it was finally time for the individual semifinals, in which my Chicago friend Shappy was competing. It was… hmm… well, let’s say this: No matter how big a fan of poetry you are, eight hours in a row is just a little too much. By the time two in the morning rolled around, people were dropping off like flies (not to mention that any score below a 9.9 was getting booed). Wandered back to the dorms before the bout was over, got sick of waiting for everyone to get done and come back, and eventually fell asleep in the dorm. Sigh.
Today? Well, a bunch of my friends just got back from the “Slam Family Meeting,” an annual bitchfest where the members of Slam Inc. (the national organization that runs the National Poetry Slam) attempt to hammer out new rules changes and budget proposals. The Meeting is infamous in poetry circles for always breaking down into chaos and shouting matches by the end, and apparently this year was no exception. In a move that can only be described as ludicrous, the executive committee attempted to propose a “Slam Hall of Fame” (with the first 18 inductees being former executive committee members, of course). This was the issue that apparently drove the meeting into its usual chaos and shouting, and eventually was voted down altogether.
Tonight’s the finals. So who made it out of the 50-odd teams that competed this year? Get this: Boston, New York Urbana, New York Union Square, and New York Nuyorican. Yes, that’s right, it’s a New York lovefest, a fact that has everyone but New Yorkers yawning in their seats. Should be an… interesting show. See you tomorrow.
SUNDAY Minutes before the finals of this year’s competition were to start, a charge surfaced accusing the Boston team of planting friends in the audience all week be judges and rig the bouts. A hasty meeting was called backstage in the Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium in Providence, where it eventually came out that the Boston team was guilty as charged. (A dispute still exists as to whether the team was rigging the bouts all week or just during the semi-finals.) Almost immediately another controversy broke out over which team would replace Boston in the final round -- San Antonio, who were currently in fifth place in cumulative points, or Oakland, who filed the original rigging charges and claimed that they would have been in fifth place themselves if not for the tainted semis scores.
Meanwhile, news of the charges filtered out to the 1,200 or so audience members in attendance last night, and the ensuing conversations in the theatre lobby nicely illustrated some of the growing problems within the organization. Judge selection at the NPS, like everything else associated with slam, has mostly been based on a loose code of honor over the years. For those who don’t know, poetry slams are judged by five (three on the local level) randomly chosen members of the audience. Audience members are asked beforehand if they know any of the competing poets, before they’re allowed to serve as judges; even if the audience member is drunk (which they usually are) and decides to sneak in a little help for their favorite team, the ethics code in place has usually dictated that the team itself rat out its well-meaning but rule-breaking friend in the audience.
Now, the system isn’t perfect -- at many of the first-round bouts over the years, five completely random, independent audience members literally could not be found, and all kinds of allowances have been made over the last decade, including using bartenders as judges and substituting a member of the festival staff who has promised to remain objective throughout the bout. But still, everyone involved knew that the judge selection process, like many of the regulations in poetry slam, could be corrupted with a bare minimum of effort and in an almost indetectable manner, and most have just chosen to voluntarily comply for no other reason than to respect the community-building spirit the NPS has been trying to foster in recent years.
The evolution of the NPS rules system over the years can be compared to the process of teaching a five-year-old to take a bath. One starts with a simple, inclusive rule which should be obvious to everyone involved (“Get in the tub”), followed by violation of the rule justified by a feigned ignorance (“But you didn’t say I had to run the water”), followed by a hasty amendment based on that specific violation (“Get in the tub and run the water”), followed by another violation (“Yeah, but at no point did you say that I had to get my skin wet”), another amendment, another violation, on and on to the point (now) that the reading of the rules at the beginning of a bout is a 10-minute process in its own right.
There’s a reason for all this mess, of course, which is that the slam format was originally invented as a fun bar gimmick to get people to go to poetry shows. Rules didn’t have to be rigid because the only thing at stake was a ten dollar prize and bragging rights for the night. Now of course a trip to the finals can result in a successful national tour for a poet, publishing contracts, appearances on MTV -- but slams are still run the same way as at a local dive bar on a Sunday evening. Most agree that this year’s stunning violation is going to have serious ramifications within the slam community, and may finally be the catalyst to a complete overhaul of the NPS rules system, a long-needed attempt to make the national competition a more objective, legitimate event instead of what it’s currently become -- an extended popularity contest over who can shout the loudest and fastest over a three-minute time period.
For what it’s worth, the theatre where the finals were held was absolutely beautiful, and the festival’s organizing committee made the best of a bad situation, pushing the individuals finals to the start of the evening and keeping a lively pace throughout. It was truly a tough situation, but the Providence staff handled it with a lot of charm and grace.
To be truthful, I was pretty damn sick of poetry by the time the finals rolled around, so I ended up spending most of my time outside of the theatre, smoking cigarettes and talking to San Antonio coach Ben Ortiz, who needless to say was a little stressed out over the whole situation. San Antonio was indeed chosen to replace Boston in the finals, and the second-place finish by the first-year team was a heartening rallying point for most in the audience. (The NPS was won this year by New York Urbana, which had most people shrugging their shoulders in resignation -- “A team Taylor Mali is on won the finals? There’s a surprise.”)
The post-show party was held at a frat bar on the edge of the water, which would have been lovely if not for the fact that we didn’t realize it was a two and a half mile walk from the theatre. The party was sponsored by Grand Marnier, and they swanked it up in their usual way -- live swing band, free food, free liquor all night. Now, I got involved in poetry in the first place because I’m lousy in social situations like parties, so it was stunning to me to see how many other poets actually thrive in that environment. Where were all the painfully shy introverts in black clothes leaning against the back wall? Certainly not at this party!
Made it back to the dorms around 3 am, where my public pleas for pot all week finally came to fruition. Thank you, Kalamazoo! And also thank you for the microbrews, the champage, and the reminder that not every poet in America has yet become a married teetotaler. Walked around the quad in a THC haze for awhile, having little conversations with people and saying goodbye to all the poets with 6 am flights. Loose lips started divulging a secret about me, to the point where I might as well admit that, yes, it is Shappy and I who have been writing the “Tattler” gossip column all week. Please don’t kick our asses!
And now it’s two in the afternoon and Ann and I are killing time in the bar, waiting for our flights. Ah, the tenth and final day of my East coast tour. You wanna know something? Ten days is a long fucking time to be on the road. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had an absolutely amazing time and I’m really pleased I made the trip. But I’m looking forward to getting home, sleeping in my own bed, wearing some clothes that aren’t in my suitcase, and just… unwinding. My thanks to About Poetry, who have been reprinting my journal this week; the Providence staff of this year’s NPS, who were continually polite and helpful to me no matter how badly their own day was going; Cat and Kristina, my charming hosts in New York; and the hundreds of people I’ve met over the last week and a half, for buying my books, supporting my performances, and just generally being fun, lively, intelligent people. I’ll talk to you all again soon.
--Jason Pettus Back to front page, Notes from the Scene at the 11th National Poetry Slam
Providence! Ah, finally here, after a grueling ten hours yesterday of wrong subways, blocked traffic and missed Amtraks. The train ride into Rhode Island was really lovely -- a picturesque stroll through various seaport towns on the East coast, riding with all my fellow commuters. Got into Providence about 6:30 pm on Thursday, and… wow. No one ever bothered to tell me what an absolutely gorgeous city this is. Downtown Providence is filled with grand old Colonial buildings -- churches, commercial spaces, homes, campus buildings. They are all in pristine condition, and the narrow brick-lined streets wind their way through them like dried-up canals in Venice. It’s a stunning sight.
Alas. . . just as chaotic as every other
a cool, dilapidated punk rock club
he wasn't about to let the crowd simply sit there
like the bored poets we are
the police were there and they were loving it
with the hotel's gracious permission
get away from the hippie drum circle?
Providence, Rhode Island is a place of many paradoxes. It is a pristine, beautiful city that nonetheless becomes a ghost town every day at 5 pm. The citizens of Providence are for the most part rich, happy and beautiful, yet I’m twice as scared to be alone here at night than I’ve ever been in Chicago. The cops have been friendlier to the poets than just about any other city in the history of the Nationals, yet I’ve watched these same cops scooping up and harassing large groups of black and latino men for no other reason apparently than that they “look suspicious.” And in the greatest paradox this week, those citizens of Providence who embrace poetry have also embraced us, welcoming us with open arms and making us feel at home; but those citizens who don’t embrace poetry have been not just ambivalent towards us but outright hostile, giving purposefully wrong directions and wondering out loud when they will be “getting their town back.” None of this has anything to do with the Providence Nationals staff, of course, who have been working their asses off to make sure the events keep running smoothly. But still, it’s the totality of a city that determines one’s experience at a National Poetry Slam, not just the bouts. And this year has definitely been paradoxical.
wondering out loud when they will be “getting their town back”
outside the café. . . was the more interesting space
Every year. . . there is one semifinal bout that is the “must see”
Sexy, sincere, emotional, unpretentious. . .
. . . what more could one want from a team of poets?
it’s a New York lovefest
Scandal! And not just the usual petty “I’m filing this obscure, hard-to-prove protest because I’m mad I lost” kind of scandal.
Scandal! And not just the usual petty kind
mostly based on a loose code of honor
most have chosen to voluntarily comply
to respect the community-building spirit
rules didn't have to be rigid. . .
because the only thing at stake. . . .
. . . was a ten dollar prize and bragging rights for the night
Where were all the painfully shy introverts. .
. . . in black clothes leaning against the back wall?
Certainly not at this party!
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