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A Moment with the Slam Master

Kenny Mostern, Assistant Professor of English at UT, age 31.

On his poetry background:
"I wrote some poetry in high school and college, but I never thought of myself as a poet. And maybe at this very moment I don't. I wrote short stories and did creative journalism a lot more than I ever did poetry...from a disciplinary perspective, I am very eclectic, and quite intentionally so...There are people who want to say poetry is more important than other things, and I'm not one of those people. Poetry is among the arts that could potentially allow a wide variety of people to think. It was literally not until I moved to Knoxville [approximately four years ago from Queens, New York] that I was aware of slams. I became, quite by accident, involved with the poetry community through students.

On slams in general:
"I think the scores themselves are a lot of the appeal of the show and bring more people in to listen to the serious work...[scores] make it a game, like going to see the Smokies or football. And scores spur people on to do interesting kinds of things. Emotionally, what a slam can do, and especially what the collectivity of slam can do, is cause people to feel like they have some kind of common striving or struggle."

On being a slammer in Knoxville:
"I really am a weirdo. The number of academics in the slam nationally is minuscule, and I consider that a good thing. My experience is not a Knoxville experience. If I shout 'Oy, gevult!', I don't get a lot of laughs in the audience...But it's clearly the case that men feel more comfortable [slamming, here or elsewhere] than women. Men are conditioned toward roles of public confidence in ways that women are not in early childhood—it is obviously not true of everyone. In Knoxville, in any given slam, two-thirds of the poets are men, and at the last one all of them were men. If Metro Pulse wants to put a spin on all this, and I'm thinking about Jack Neely right now—Knoxville's greatest cheerleader—you could say, 'Look, there's art in Knoxville.' Budding artists and people who think and people who want to express themselves in the broadest possible way can take inspiration from the fact that we have a nationally competitive slam team. What that means for women? Good question, given that it's now four guys..."

On slams as a cultural force to be reckoned with:
"If culture's going to matter, it's not either because an English department or a history of Western thought tells you that it does matter. Which doesn't mean I have any objection to anyone's personal relationship to Mozart—that's not the point...For DIY culture, which emerges out of a particular moment in the punk movement, culture is what you do. It is going out and making the art yourself. And that is the fundamental thing that slam is for me. The slam is the show, the slam is the emotions I can express, the slam is the arguments I can make, the slam is the community I can have with friends, but finally, the slam is making culture instead of passively accepting it—either elite culture or corporate culture. The slam is a collective creation."

—H.J.

Knoxville hosts this year's Southern Fried Regional Poetry Slam

by Heather Joyner

It's a Friday evening in Autumn, 1995, and I'm ferrying fellow graduate writing students into Manhattan for something called a "poetry slam" at the Nuyorican Poets Café. As my Volvo sputters over the Triborough Bridge, the conversation becomes more animated—individuals describing slams they've participated in. I feel decidedly unhip. I've heard the term "poetry slam" and know it has something to do with performance, but while I've been reading Catullus and Dickinson, a spoken word revolution-of-sorts has been going on for nearly a decade...a phenomenon liberating poetry from the shackles of hoity-toity academia those of us bouncing along in the car are still supposedly bound by. I don't know it at this point, but tonight's slam will be the first of many I attend (particularly in Knoxville, a place I'm not yet planning to return to).

If you are new to the poetry slam concept, it's been described as everything from "language as a contact sport" to "a lyrical boxing match" in which poets take turns reciting or "performing" poems that are scored on a one-to-ten scale by randomly selected audience "judges" (or, as Nuyorican's famed Slam Granny has put it, "anyone sober enough to write scores on a 5x7 sheet of paper"). After a predetermined number of bouts in which no poem may exceed three minutes, individual or team scores are tallied—dropping the highest and lowest numbers—to produce winners. A process that might appear complicated is actually brilliantly simple, and it doesn't take long for audience members to be swept into the energy of the proceedings. Cash prizes exist, but competitors are also rewarded with goodies like a lifetime supply of RC Cola and Moonpies (as is the case with this weekend's regional festival), which attests to slammers' refusal to take themselves too seriously. In fact, there's usually a prize for the worst score, and this year's turkey gets to cart off a sizable moto-cross trophy.

The Nuyorican crowd is buzzing. Now here's someone on a mission, I think, as a woman dressed in red from head to toe (with a cape) declares that she's become a giant, walking clitoris. This, after an especially amusing soft-porn poem in which the speaker waxed rhapsodic over various famous women doing things to him and to each other. This is New York City where anything goes. I'm from Knoxville, where I've always felt I must watch what I say or how I say it. But the Nuyorican crowd has been buzzing all evening—and not over the outrageous stuff alone...

Marc Smith, a.k.a. "Slampapi", is credited with starting slams as we now know them at Chicago's Green Mill Bar in the mid-'80s—a format that the aforementioned Slam Granny has likened to "college professor poetry backed over a couple or three times with The Gong Show." According to Smith, slam structure was inspired by the Olympic Games, and slams revolve around "philosophies" he considers central to "the Slam Family." He says "[this] might sound a high note in your head and leave your cynical self muttering, 'What Bull!', [but] the purpose of poetry (and indeed all art) is not to glorify the poet but rather to celebrate the community to which the poet belongs..."

And Smith's conviction that shared poetry promotes community is echoed by numerous others. Michael Brown, editor of Spoken Word, the "International Performance Poetry Newsletter," has printed an essay that in part reads: "When we are taken in by aggrandizements, it is easy to lose focus on the true power of poetry: bringing people together, building dialogue. In Detroit, the first major American city to die, we understand the concept of community building. Poetry is a powerful healing tool...our strength is the diversity of our voices."

That diversity is perhaps the reason performance poetry is often referred to as the most accessible of the arts, and it might explain why entering "poetry slam" in an online search yields a mind-boggling variety of websites. There's something there for everyone. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Yusef Komunyakaa has called performance poetry "...a poetry of engagement and discourse—it celebrates and confronts." And its appeal is apparently universal. Slams have found venues as unlikely as a Black Sea cruise ship that's welcomed teams from Bulgaria, Sweden, Ukraine, Iceland, and Latvia.

Today's hip-hop and rap-influenced poetry slams seem very modern despite connections with late '50s Beat poetry performances. And slams' roots extend even further. For instance, Finland's epic poem "The Kalevala" describes a duel between two poets, and Romantics Leigh Hunt and John Keats are said to have challenged each other to duels in sonnet writing. In Medieval Japan, groups of poets held renga writing competitions. Says ex-slammer and self-proclaimed "itinerant educator" Leslie LaChance, "Rengas are poems that are a long series of what we now call haiku, interspersed with two-line verses...Japanese poets, before being invited to renga parties, would write a bunch of verses in hopes that their work would be included in the collaborative poem. Then, they'd get together and drink lots of sake and write and argue over which verses were better."

As for the history of slamming in Knoxville, LaChance says that slams were first held at Gryphon's in Fort Sanders in 1993, with applause determining winners. Two years later, our city had a team compete in the regional slam at Winston-Salem and ended up hosting that event in 1996 (an honor Knoxville is likely enjoying a second time because of its centralized location and outstanding team organization under the auspices of Slam Master Kenny Mostern). After the demise of Gryphon's, poets relocated to the 11th Street Expresso House, then to Sam 'n' Andy's. Following performances at those locations, slams were held at A-1 Art Space on Gay Street until it closed. Currently, they enliven the third Friday evening of every month at the Old City's Bird's Eye View Pub.

It's late March in 1998, and I've dragged my future boyfriend to Knoxville's A-1 Art Space for a slam. There are lots of teenagers in big pants, but there are also quite a few people who look thirty- something or older. We're both pleasantly surprised at the level of talent and energy...the diversity of issues addressed by individuals like '99 slam team members Kenny Mostern and Daniel Roop.

Unfortunately, this year's four-person team lacks female members despite a plethora of exciting women slammers in our midst. (Reenie Mooney was chosen for the team but had to step down due to her impending move to Los Angeles, and if you're eager to watch local gals strut their stuff, you can do so at Fairbanks Roasting Room at 2 p.m. on Friday, 6/25). The '99 team is not, however, without a variety of backgrounds and performance styles. In addition to New York-bred Mostern, the team includes occupational therapist Daniel Roop, student John Kilpatrick, and Fulbright Scholar Dagan Coppock (who will soon depart for a year in Nigeria). Mostern has an edgy and sometimes plaintive persona on-stage, whereas Roop employs an urgent yet mesmerizing rhythm—the speed and breathlessness of his delivery hearkening back to ancient Greek "pignos" or recitations without pause. Coppock's lines from "All White Men To The Back Of The Bus" revel in images of Ghana, and Kilpatrick's rhymes speak of life much closer to home.

Komunyakaa has asserted that "...ideological conceits and transparent rage are less on the surface of this poetry of the 1990s. The fighting dreams of the Civil Rights Movement are just below the surface of these voices that are educated and middle-class. And, in a sense, they are more complicated." Although slam performances are sometimes nothing more than a version of stand-up comedy, at their best they're like the blues, with the ritualistic call and response that that art form demands of the self (if not others). Slam performances can be a potent tool for political activism or as silly or sensational an act as a man stripping naked at one regional slam LaChance attended. They can be what Mooney has described as "testosterone-laced" or "bellyaching," but they're rarely dull. Most importantly, they exclude no one. Other excursions to the zoo, slams represent the only events in Knoxville where I've seen WASPy types mix regularly with people of color. That's not only refreshing, it's vital to a true sense of community. This weekend, you can build community and have a ferociously good time, to boot.

Note: For Southern Fried Regionals updates and sample poems, try visiting http://www.utk.edu/~kmostern/slam/regionals. For subscriptions to "Spoken Word, the International Performance Poetry Newsletter", fax (781) 488-3228 or send e-mail to [email protected]; for Marc Smith's "SLAM!", direct email to [email protected]. Chicago's National Poetry Slam is August 11th through 14th.