Chapter 3: Slam Competition—Rules, Regulations, and Other Formalities

In This Chapter

• Understanding the rationale behind slam competition
• Revisiting the first slam event—where it all began
• Boning up on the four main rules that govern traditional poetry slams
• Undercutting the seriousness of it all with slam disclaimers
• Examining some interesting deviations from traditional poetry slams

When you witness your first poetry slam, you might begin to wonder, "What the heck is going on here?" There's a carnival barker onstage who revs up the audience and introduces the performers; a bunch of poets, some of whom act as though they ought to be gagged and chained up somewhere; an audience that's way out of hand; and a few knuckleheads scattered among them who score the performances but apparently adhere to no clear set of criteria. Does anybody in the room know what's going on?

This chapter explains the basic structure of slam poetry competitions and analyzes the rules and regulations that govern the various types of slams. Of course, you don't need to be a certified slam judge to enjoy a poetry slam (assuming there is such a thing as a certified slam judge), but knowing what's going on helps you get more out of the show. Besides, if you decide to compete or to host your own shows, you'll need to know this stuff.

It's a Game, Stupid!

Whereas the competition didn't begin the slam movement, competition surely has been a major factor in its spread. That's easy to explain. Competition is basic to the human spirit and an integral part of the human experience. It identifies ability and celebrates achievement. And it's fun to watch. Who doesn't enjoy booing a judge, cheering a victorious hero, or sympathizing with an unjustly defeated friend?

However, the competition is only a means to an end—a way to get people excited about poetry, encourage poet/performers to write well and perform brilliantly, and foster a community of people who love performance poetry.

Many slam poets forget, in fervor of competition that the slam is not a serious determination of who's the best poet or performer. When they react furiously to a low score or bask too long in the glory of a perfect 10, they forget that most of a slam competition is arbitrary—a subjective concoction with unavoidable biases. By what objective criteria can you compare a sonnet to a rant or a seventeen-syllables haiku to a full three minutes of rap laced with pop images and slick jokes? How can judges, picked randomly from a rowdy unlettered crowd, be seen as an authentic testimony to a poet's value?

The competition is a theatrical device; it's not meant to be the litmus test of a performance or text. It's a natural drama. Everybody in the moment of the drama wonders who will win, who will get the high score, and who will walk away ten bucks richer. A half hour later, most have forgotten the numbers, but hopefully not the words.

People listen more intently during a slam competition because it follows a format everyone recognizes—the slammer's up, the pitch comes, a swing, a strike, a stolen simile, a homerun, a diving metaphor that saves the game. When a slammer steps up to the microphone, it's batter up. When he speaks, it's the pitch and swing. When the scores go up, it's the formal acknowledgement of what the audience might have already decided. "This dude didn't know what he was saying or how to say it." Strike 3. Or "She was sensational! I wanna buy her book." Grand slam! Like most sporting events, everybody has an opinion about what should have happened and who should have done what when. That keeps them involved up until the last syllable is uttered.

The First Slam Competition

The very first slam competition occurred at the Green Mill on the third (or was it the fourth?) week of the Uptown Poetry Slam's opening run. (No one can remember for sure.) It was an afterthought, a secondary element of the show, filler for the final act.

Al MacDougal, a merchant marine working on the ore boats that navigate the Great Lakes was the first slam champion. Mary Shen Barnidge, a freelance theater critic, was his last challenger in a king-of-the-hill contest that lasted (I think) nine rounds. Al had successfully defended the hill from eight other opponents, but Mary knocked him off his pile of eight wins with her Dionysus poem.

Slam Speak

Dionysia
The refrigerator chilled twelve bottles of wine,
And four bottles of poppers lined up neatly in the egg tray.
The music thundered, making the walls shiver deliciously.
The main hall was a sea of masks:
Gold masks, emerald and sapphire masks, black dominos,
Masks with refraction-lenses that shot prismatic darts
into every corner,
Skeleton masks, wolf masks, unicorn masks, android masks,
False eyelashes like cilia, burnished wigs like gorgon's hair,
Masks with mirrors into which one looked to see himself reflected back.
It was the kind of party where Dionysus would be welcome.

—excerpt from "Dionysia" by Mary Shen Barnidge (CD track #3, Mary Shen Barnidge performing)

But the audience raged against the imbalance of awarding Mary the $10 prize for a single winning poem when Al had won the first eight. In the end, Al got the money and bought Mary's drinks for the rest of the evening.

Whoa!
Mary doesn't remember it that way. She swears she wasn't slated to take on Al until weeks after his first slam victory, and then he didn't show up to defend his title. If we knew back then that we were making history, we might have downed less beer and recorded the details of these early events. Ah well.

That competition was determined by audience applause. It took a few months of haphazard experimentation—slams judged by holding up hands, by screaming and not clapping, by clapping without screaming, by stomping of feet—to arrive at the general rule that competitions should be judged on a point system by judges selected randomly from the audience. It's still an arbitrary system, but this method elicits less commotion and focuses the boos on the hapless judges rather than on the emcee and organizers.

Following the Rules

Rules are important to the structure of any competition. Baseball has nine innings; basketball, two timed halves; and yachting, one long sail. Regulations on structure and procedure frame an event into a digestible dramatic experience. Individual behavior is controlled by parameters set for the benefit of those who play and those who watch the play—no spitballs, no cork bats, no clipping, and no plagiarism. They promote sportsmanlike behavior, keep down the fistfights, and give everybody something to complain about. Rules are meant to create a fair playing field for all who participate. And in the slam the rules are also created to be questioned; after all, it's a passionate arena of free speech.

Rules vary from slam to slam, and they should. Each locale needs to adopt the regulations that are most agreeable and entertaining for their specific audience. It's art, not robotics. Be creative. Following are some basic rules to get you started. Feel free to modify or scrap whatever doesn't work for your particular show.

• Perform your own work.
• Perform in three minutes or less.
• No props or costumes.
• Scores range from 0 to 10 or down to minus infinity.

The following sections examine each of these rules in agonizing detail.

Dig This!
When you play on someone else's field you have to play according to the home team's program. That's just common courtesy. Don't try imposing your rules on someone else's show, and don't let anybody do it to you.

Perform Your Own Work

Most slams encourage and require poets to perform their own work. The rule's intent is obvious: to discourage plagiarism and maintain a level playing field. It simply wouldn't be fair for a novice to pit her first poetic creation against someone reading the great works of Gwendolyn Brooks or Langston Hughes. This rule also encourages young writers to test their ideas and writing skills, opens the doors for poetic innovation, and gives each performer a sounding board for his or her free voice and unfettered emotions. Performers break this rule all the time—sometimes deceitfully, sometimes with the permission of the audience, and sometimes because a particular poetry slam focuses on the works of famous poets.

Three Minutes Is All We Can Stand

Prior to the slam it was not unusual for a poet to tax an audience's patience with a fifteen-minute poem of questionable aesthetic value. Stage hogs who cared little about the people they inflicted their words upon, or the other poets lined up waiting to read, would drain every ounce of patience from an audience and kill any chance for those who followed to succeed. The Three-Minute rule put a limit on how much bad verse a poet could spew before the hook appeared in the wings to yank him out of the spotlight. It also became the basic time unit of the competition itself. It's the "at bat"—you get three minutes to make your hit happen. And for most poets that's more than enough time to score big or crawl back to the dugout.

No Props, Costumes, Trombones, or Other Carry-on Luggage

Here's another rule that is often broken for the sheer fun of breaking it. The No Props rule originally was initiated during the planning of the 1990 National Poetry Slam. Most of the shows mounted at the Green Mill by the Chicago Poetry Ensemble employed props, music, and costumes. The Uptown Poetry Slam gained a reputation as a cabaret of multi-media poetic arts that stretched the boundaries of the acceptable at a poetry event. But when discussing what might happen at our first major national competition, we decided to rule out the use of props and music. I remember saying, "What if someone brings a ten-piece orchestra onstage? Or poodles? How will we get them on and off stage without messing up the rhythm of the show? How can you judge an orchestra against a solo poet reciting a villanelle?" It was somewhat of a tourniquet on the creative juices but it has saved many an organizer the nightmare of exploding cabbages, bath tubs, and six-foot submarine sandwiches, all of which have found their way into poetry performances at special slam competitions staged for the pure joy of breaking the rules.

Scoring: 0 to 10 (or Down to Minus Infinity)

Few slams play by the "mean" Chicago rules that allow the judges to score into the minus numbers. That's a shame, because the audience loves it when "bad" gets its due and good gets a 10. The 0 to 10 scoring system is fairly universal. At the National Poetry Slam, five judges score each performance, the top and bottom scores are dropped, and the sum of the remaining three scores represents the "score." In other words, a perfect score would be 30 points.

Audience score card for 2003 NPS.

Some slams require the judges to score the poetry and the performance separately: 1 to 5 for performance and 1 to 5 for text. Some score by holding up roses. Some determine the winner by audience applause, which can sound different depending on where you sit. Some have secret ballots. The more involved an audience is in the judging the more entertaining the show.

Famous Slam Disclaimers

Slam organizers from early on have tried to express to newcomers that "all's not fair" at the slam—that it's entertainment. Trying to determine whose poem and performance is truly the best through a slam competition is absurd. Remember, "points are not the point." To drive this point about points home, many slammasters have created rituals and liturgies that announce these facts of life at the beginning of their shows. This ensures that the audience approaches the event with the proper perspective. The following sections demonstrate some sample opening comments. Note how they succeed in presenting the slam as a competition and then undercut the importance of the competition.

We Begin Each Slam with a Disclaimer—Bob Holman at the Nuyorican Café

Bob Holman introduces every slam competition at the Nuyorican Café with the following preamble, versified, of course:

As Dr. Willie used to say,
We are gathered here today
because we are not gathered
somewhere else today, and
we don't know what we're doing
so you do—the Purpose of SLAM!
being to fill your hungry ears
with Nutritious Sound/Meaning Constructs,
Space Shots into Consciousness
known hereafter as Poems, and
not to provide a Last Toehold
for Dying Free Enterprise Fuck 'em
for a Buck'em Capitalism'em. We disdain
competition and its ally war
and are fighting for our lives
and the spinning
of poetry cocoon of action
in your dailiness. We refuse
to meld the contradictions but
will always walk the razor
for your love. "The best poet
always loses" is no truism of SLAM!
but is something for you
to take home with you like an image
of a giant condor leering over
a salty rock. Yes, we must destroy
ourselves in the constant
reformation that is this very moment,
and propel you to write the poems
as poets read them, urge you
to rate the judges as they trudge
to their solitary and lonely numbers,
and bid you dance or die between sets.
(CD track #2, Bob Holman's "Disclaimer")

The Mean Chicago Rules—Marc (So What!) Smith

At the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in Chicago, I begin every Sunday night slam with the following disclaimer:

At the slam you, the audience, are always in control. If you like something cheer madly. [The audience cheers.] But if you don't like what you hear you may also express yourselves in one of several manners. If you don't like it a little bit, you snap your fingers. [The audience snaps.] That's not dig-me-daddy-o, those guys are dead and gone. This is a new regime. If you don't like it a little bit more, stomp your feet. [They stomp.] If it's god awful bad, you groan. [Grooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!] There's also the feminist hiss. [Hissssssssssssssssssss] It used to be for when a man got sexist in his poem, but now it's for just about anything as soon as he steps up onto the stage. [They cheer.] After years of being hissed at, the men finally came up with the masculine grunt. [a whimper] That says it all about the masculine grunt. There's also Guess the Rhyme: If there should happen to be a rhyming poet up here on the stage and you, the audience, can guess the rhyming word before it arrives, you may in unison with the poet say the word and watch his or her face—it's great fun. Finally we have instituted the Amen. [Amen!] Because a lot of this slam poetry has gotten very rhetorical over the years, and sometimes we like that rhetoric and sometimes we don't, we say Amen to both. [Amen!] What's great about the Amen [Amen!] is that the poet doesn't know for sure whether it's a positive Amen or a negative Amen. Could I have an Amen please? [AMEN!]

And just before the competition begins, I review the rules, as follows:

Here are the rules. Rule number one: No poem may go over three minutes. You are all timers. If it even feels like three minutes start snapping. Rule number two: Listen to the poem. Then, judges, rate the poem 1 to 10, 10 being high. However, you may go into the minus numbers, but you can only tie the lowest score ever scored at a poetry slam which is [everyone together] MINUS INFINITY!

The Official Emcee Spiel Used at the National Poetry Slams

The official emcee spiel used at the nationals is much more succinct and sounds much more... official. Before the start of any national slam competition, this is what you hear:

"The [National] Slam is a performed poetry competition judged by five members of the audience. Poets have three minutes to present their original work and may choose to do so accompanied by members of their team. The judges will then score the piece anywhere from 0 to 10, evaluating both the poet's performance and the contents of the poem. Points will be deducted for violating the time limit. The highest combined team score wins the bout. We encourage the audience to let the judges know how you feel about the job that they are doing. We exhort the judges to remain unswayed by crowd pressure. We are sure that the poetry will be worth your attention."

The Many Flavors of Slam

Slam was meant to be a liberating experience, a creative mix, a door opening to new ways of presenting poetry onstage. Challenging and reformulating the rules has become almost as important as creating them. The most accepted way of challenging how things are done is to create alternative competitions. They keep the doors open and the slam minds fresh, and provide models for a new approach. The following sections describe some of the more interesting spin-offs.

Unseen Slam

In the UK, slammers have created an event they call the Unseen Slam. It consists of three rounds, or "heats" as they call them over there. The first takes place before anybody sits down, while people are still milling about in the lobby or on the street. A hat filled with the first lines of well-known and not-so well-known poems is passed around. Those poets who want to jump into the fray, pull out a line, and spend the next half hour scribbling away creating a new work inspired by the words drawn from the hat. At the end of that half hour the audience sits down and the show begins. The contestants perform their freshly written treasures on stage. When all have been heard, the judges present their scores by holding up cards with numbers on them. Low scores get dropped, and the lucky performers move onto the second heat, which is another impromptu writing exercise.

This time the audience shouts out suggestions of words that all the remaining poets have to use in a poem they create over the next fifteen minutes. And once again, at the end of the writing time, the audience listens to the contestants present their poems, witnesses the scoring, and consoles those low scoring poets who get knocked out.

In the final heat, two poets remain onstage, each having to write yet another poem with the whole audience looking on ... in just fifteen minutes! Talk about pressure! This time, the host or audience provides a theme that the poets must address. The poet who turns out the best poem and best performance (in the eyes of the audience) is declared the winner.

A similar type of impromptu slam occurs in the states: The Dumb Rhyming Word Game. The audience is asked to shout out three words that the poet contestants must employ in a text they write during the early portion of the show. The catch is they must not only use the words but also rhyme them in the context of the poem.

Theme Slams

A theme slam is a wonderful way to get poets off of the same old topics. How many times does an audience want to hear "war is bad" or "love is good"? A theme slam can take the slammers to new places and challenge and expose new beliefs. "The Ad Man Slam," "The Topless Slam," "The Dog Walk Slam," and "The What Santa Didn't Bring Me For Xmas Slam" have inspired some far-out poetic creations. It's important not to interpret the theme too narrowly. It's meant to inspire, not restrict. So when a poet barely mentions toothpaste in the "Brush Your Teeth Slam" don't disqualify him. On the other hand, if someone performs their experimental verse about modern dance motifs at the "Mother's Day Slam" they might deserve to be booed off stage.

Slam Speak

Adman
[In a fast conspiratorial semi-whisper, artificially modulated:]

We're at the Get Me High in Chicago, Illinois tonight
The audience doesn't know it,
But I concealed a microphone in my liver,
An organ Not Even Bleach Can Reach! Let's listen!

[Loud, fast, and even more artificial than before]
The man of the minute, the 30 second spot!
A man who beleeeeeves in the gorgeous package And what's inside!
If I sound excited it's because I AM EXCITED!
I was born to play this instrument!

And yet, at the end of purchase time and provided script,
I can't turn it off.
Phrases of excitement, amazement and pleasure,
Are the only sounds I've got to deal with the world!
And it doesn't feel good.

—excerpt from Ron Gillette's "Adman" (CD Track #4 Ron Gillette performing)

Cover Slam

To celebrate all the great poems of the past and present, many slams hold "cover" slams. The rule requiring original work is discarded, and performers pay a nod to their favorite poets or poems, performing works that are not their own. The authors they cover can be from centuries ago such as Rumi or Petrarch, or contemporaries such as former poet laureate Billy Collins or Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver. Many times slammers pay tribute to their heroes in the slam community and to each other. The Cover Slam is another way of reminding slammers that slamming is not suppose to be about "I ... I ... I ... I." It's about a "we" that goes back to the dawn of the word.

Relay Slam

Another format from the UK is a freestyle event called the "relay" slam. Groups of poets take the stage and the audience calls out words. A poet grabs one of those words like it's a jump ball in basketball and begins to dribble, creating poetic lines for as long as he can. When he's empty he passes it onto another poet. The host monitors the event, keeping the action going by prompting the audience to chime in with new words, themes, and ideas until the poets start to sputter. Often music is added to keep a pulse going while the verses are being invented. At the end of the relay, the audience decides by applause who was their favorite Slam Relay word dribbler.

Prop Slam

As a reaction to the "no prop rule," and to have some outrageous fun, most NPS tournaments include a Prop Slam as a side event to the official proceedings. The most memorable of these can't be described herein because they stepped far beyond the PG rating. But other spectacles have included wheeling performers in on hospital gurneys to accentuate a poem about sloth, a six-foot submarine sandwich torn apart onstage to emphasis gluttony, and a mesmerizing performance by a man and woman duet using heavy chains and garbage can lids to create a jangling rhythm behind a multi-voiced poem about roaming the alleys of Chicago.

Pong Jam Slam—Music to the Poetic Ear

Every first Sunday of the month at the Green Mill, poets are invited to perform to the musical accompaniment of the Pong Unit Band. It can be magical. The poets ask for any type of music they wish—"Super Comic Hero Music," "Russian Folk mixed with Salsa," "Low Down Muddy Water Blues"—and the band provides it. If the poet finds the groove, a whole new level of experience enriches the night.

This is ancient history. Poetry and musical instrumentation have been partners since Pan tooted his flute and Homer plucked the lyre. Our most recent poetic ancestors did the same. Carl Sandburg traveled throughout the Midwest reciting poems to the strums of his guitar, usually out of tune. Jack Kerouac's spontaneous style of writing was deeply influenced by the phrasings of bebop he performed them to. And in the slam world this tradition continues. Former slam champion Cin Salach combines her poems with the music of Ten Tongues. Vancouver slammer CR Avery is his own one-poet band, creating complimentary rhythms on harmonica and piano to meld with his words.

What's on the CD

CD Track #6 Performance poet C.R. Avery

CD Track #7 Cin Salach and Ten Tongues performing "Blind Spots"

Throughout the slam community you can find evenings similar to the Pong Jam Slam. Musicians find it to be a refreshing alternative to their pure musical commitments—surely better than their wedding gigs.

Local Slams—Laws and Bye-Laws

The organizer at the local level who takes on the burden of creating a slam has every right to construct that show in a manner that best suits the community it serves. The time, the energy, and don't forget the dough organizers expend to achieve liftoff deserves devotion and respect. They will initially wonder if the payoff is worth the effort. All of them encounter resistance and criticism from friends and foes alike. At this very moment there are slammasters sitting in the darkest corners of bedrooms with their hands gripping their heads mumbling "Why, why, why?"

So if you've started a slam, keep in mind that it's your show. If folks think it's bogus, let 'em start their own. If they start one and begin drawing audience away from yours, maybe it's time for a little slam examination. If not, you're on the right track. Oftentimes two competing slams in the same area or city both thrive. After all, poetry is a big house with many rooms.

However, slam does have a handful of sacred traditions that define the essential nature of slam. Slams that break with these traditions usually become something other than slams. Here are the main traditions that define a slam:

• Slams are open to all. Slam was a reaction against elitism and exclusivity and therefore is open to any and all who walk through the doors. Of course, nobody welcomes a jerk who's bent on using the stage to impose wickedness on the audience. Slam provides everyone with an equal first chance (and often a second, third, and fourth chance) to find a place in the community and on a slam stage. If a particular slam works for you, great. If it doesn't, try some place else, even another slam, or create your own slam. Slams can be as different as night and day, but all slams should be open to all poet performers.
• All styles, forms, and subject matter are welcome. Sonnets, haiku, pantoums, villanelles, raps, rants, ballads, limericks ... you name it, and it's been performed on a slam stage. Love, religion, politics, body odors, taxes, dog poo—it's been done. Anything and everything is game, but remember, the audience can give it right back. And there are more of them than there are of you.
• The all-important audience should always be in control. Let them actively express themselves, not abusively but honestly. Announce the ground rules, and they'll do the rest. If you give them a say, they'll be back to listen again and again. At the first printing of this book, the Green Mill Uptown Poetry Slam was in its seventeenth year playing to standing room only crowds. Over fifty thousand different people have seen that show. That should be proof enough.

Heading for the Nationals—Get Serious!

Every year, slam teams and individual performers from across the United States and even outside the United States gather to perform and celebrate at the National Poetry Slam. In 2003, poets representing 60 cities in the United States and three cities in Canada descended on my hood, Chicago, to join in the extravaganza, and many more wanted to come. To give the National Poetry Slam some semblance of order and prevent it from becoming a logistic nightmare, the Nationals have set some criteria that teams and individuals must meet in order to be selected:

• Only certified slam teams may compete. The national tournaments were created to encourage the development of local slams. To support that end, all the teams and individuals competing at national events must come from certified local slams, shows that are ongoing and serving a specific community.
• Each local slam must conduct an open competition to select its team members. This policy prevents some unscrupulous person from recruiting the top performance poets from around the country and engineering a team of ringers. Don't laugh; it's been done.
• Individuals may qualify. In some cases it's possible to compete at NPS as an individual. If no regular slam is in your area or if the local slam just started and can't get it together to send a team, you may qualify. And even if you don't get into the official competition, you can participate in the many fringe events at the nationals.
• Participants must be members of PSI. Poetry Slam, Inc. (PSI) manages the national tournament and requires that all competitors be members of its non-profit association. Membership levels range from $15 per year to $1000 for the big shot donors.

Chapter 22 fully explains National Poetry Slam competitions. Skip ahead if you want and get all the dope.

Dig This!

If you and/or your team are selected to perform at the nationals, be prepared to raise some money for travel, lodging, and entry fees. It's well worth the costs and the hassles. The national events are attended each year by hundreds of poets who praise it as the best experience they've ever had, inside and outside of poetry.

The Least You Need to Know

• The competitive component of slam poetry is a theatrical tool intended to liven up the show and inspire the poet/performers to do their best.
• At the National Poetry Slam, poets are required to perform their own work, in three minutes or less, wearing no costumes and using no props, and are scored on a scale from 0 to 10.
• At the beginning of each slam event, the emcee typically recites a disclaimer that undercuts the seriousness of the competition and sets a tone for the show.
• Organizers experiment with the standard slam format to create variations, such as Unseen Slam, Prop Slam, Theme Slam, and Relay Slam.
• To remain true to slam, follow the traditions that define it: Open it to anyone, allow all styles of poetry, and give the audience control.