Give Me a Frozen Sex on the Beach and a 75-Minute Poetry Show

How the 2004 National Poetry Slam Allowed Us to Bring Our Poems to People Who Just Might Need Them, and to People Who Definitely Don’t Want Them

You can get a sense of what a National Poetry Slam is going to be like even before the competition starts. If you arrive on Tuesday, the day before the first events, and you go to the host hotel, and you follow some of the poets around, you’re likely to happen upon that NPS’s particular zeitgeist, even though you might not be able to discern what it is until after the week is over, when you find yourself recuperating and contextualizing.

Sometimes baseball figures in. On the eve of the ’99 NPS in Chicago, for instance, a longtime poet who doubles as a Wrigley Field beer jockey reserved a block of tickets for poets along the first base line, and some of the organizers attended the game, looking far more relaxed and in control than any NPS organizer has a right to look the day the poets get to town. That NPS was arguably the best-run edition of the event in its history.

This year in St. Louis, there was also baseball – a game that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch would later call the first game ever played in tropical rain forest conditions. Temperatures were in the high 80s, with humidity in the high 90s. If you looked out across the expanse of Busch Stadium, you could literally see the air coalesce and glisten and refuse to move. Even with the sticky conditions, it was a compelling game, with ample drama and a handful of home runs, including one to tie the game and send it into extra innings. But it took either superhuman stamina, or a contractual obligation to be there, to gut it out to the final out of the 12th inning.

The game provided a grim foreshadowing for the 2004 National Poetry Slam. What could be said of the baseball game could be said of the Nationals experience: From the outside, conditions looked right, but once inside, it was much more challenging to just get through it than anyone anticipated. Alcohol helped, but only for a while, as you realized that, ultimately, nothing could significantly change the conditions – the unpleasantness in the air was not just going to go away. Yet, if you stuck around and endured, you saw some art within the arena that reminded you why you loved the game.

Having been to nine National Poetry Slams in a ten-year span, I’ve seen some that have run smoothly, some that have been cursed with problems from the get-go, and I’ve even been a co-director of one myself.

As a competitor, I’ve read at a range of venues. At the most extreme poles, I’ve performed on a massive stage in a sleek, immaculate performing arts center in the heart of downtown Portland, with 1,000 people watching and documentary crews rolling tape – and I’ve read in a bagel shop in Middletown, Connecticut, under fluorescent lights, straining to be heard over a milk steamer.

This year, one veteran poet advanced the argument that, as the National Poetry Slam becomes bigger and involves more and more teams each year, we should only be doing this event in the three or four cities that have the infrastructure to best support it.

I see the wisdom in this, and yet, I would miss the opportunity to walk into a city I’ve never visited, with the mission of delivering a four-day poetry spectacular to them. There’s a certain beauty in the attitude that enables slam poets to enter strange venues in strange towns, size up the positives and negatives of the particular room he or she is reading in, and then attempt to own that room on the strength of content and performance.

The real mission of slam, one could argue, is not to make the librarian who goes to three open mike readings a week stand up and take notice of one’s poem, but to reach the blue-collar worker or white-collar professional with no notion of how poetry might speak to his or her condition. Slam’s mission, from the outset, was to show people with no idea that poetry could impact them just how profoundly it could speak to them. Rather than preach to the converted, slammers, in a sense, seek to convert.

So, in the spirit of fulfilling our mission, it made sense for us to try St. Louis. But the esoteric project of attempting to reach new audiences is compromised when those new audiences stay home.

The bulk of the NPS events were held in Laclede’s Landing, an enclave of bars and restaurants at the edge of downtown St. Louis, bordered by three of the city’s most recognizable landmarks – the Edward Jones Dome, the Gateway Arch, and the Mississippi River.

From a logistics standpoint, it was ideal – the city’s Metrolink commuter train ran from the airport directly to Laclede’s Landing, depositing poets a mere two blocks from the host hotel. In fact, the Arch/Laclede’s Landing stop emptied out onto 2nd Street, on which most of the NPS venues were located.

But from a poetry standpoint, it was what we’ll euphemistically label “challenging.” Even before we arrived, some poets wondered if the Fat Tuesday alluded to in the list of venues was part of the Fat Tuesday chain of frozen daiquiri bars – and indeed it was. That led to the inevitable question of whether we could really expect audience members to order a frozen Sex on the Beach and then settle in for a 75-minute poetry show.

Even more alarming was the report on Club Buca. Several weeks before Nationals, one savvy slammer found and circulated an October 2003 article, in the online version of the University of Missouri-St. Louis’s student newspaper, The Current, detailing a female reporter’s night at Club Buca. The writer, painting a scene of sordid debauchery that would receive the Caligula Stamp of Approval, advised, “Leave coats, shyness and inactivity at the door of this club. You will be touched. You will be groped. You will not sit down. You will not be able to have intellectual conversations with other wallflowers.”

Clearly, that’s not a good sign.

Yet, because teams work hard all summer, and set their expectations high about what the National Poetry Slam will be and mean and do, we figure that people will turn out to see them, the best performance poets in North America, out of sheer curiosity and an inborn desire to be moved by a poem. We picture the bars and restaurants to be transformable by the sheer mass of poets who move, like a nomadic tribe, from city to city each year. We expect everyday people to be caught in the crest of the wave and dragged to our shores. We expect the opportunity to convert, and we expect conversion.

Not this year.

Though the slam community provided a mass of nearly 500 competitors, coaches and organizers traveling en masse to some of the larger events, they were spread out amongst seven venues on Wednesday or Thursday, and attendance from the general public for the first two nights was thin if not anemic. The team I coached, from San Antonio, found themselves in a bout with two perennial finalist teams, from Seattle and from New York’s Louder Arts collective – yet with barely enough people in attendance to scare up five judges.

The owner of the venue, a delightfully kitschy medieval-themed dinner theater called the Royal Dumpe, was conscripted to judge both Wednesday bouts. A slammaster from Southern Indiana was brought into the mix to judge out bout after 45 minutes of waiting for spectators who proved as elusive as Godot.

The St. Louis organizers managed to place small articles in the Post-Dispatch (one of the 30 largest daily newspapers in the country, by circulation numbers) and the city’s alt-weekly, the Riverfront Times. They also brokered a media partnership agreement with three local stations owned by the Clear Channel conglomerate, resulting in an alleged $100,000 worth of radio advertising promoting the event. They even managed to secure some local TV prior to the event, to let the people of St. Louis know that the poets were here.

Clearly, though, the efforts weren’t enough. One friend of mine from Chicago, knowing a bit about the St. Louis arts community, was puzzled at the absence of flyers, noting that flyers are particularly effective for getting audience out in St. Louis, and questioned the insistence of staging NPS at Laclede’s rather than the far more arts-friendly Delmar Loop.

Here, as best as I can gather, is a summation of how the relationship between clubs and organizers devolved over the course of the week:

1. Organizers promised clubs massive audiences who would come to see poetry and buy drinks.
2. Massive audiences did not materialize.
3. Poetry got in the way of the typical drinking/dancing/mating ritual behavior of the clubs’ regulars.
4. Clubs grew increasingly weary of poets and poetry.
5. Tempers flared.
6. Thursday night.

Thursday night was historic, featuring two unprecedented events in NPS history. At Fat Tuesday, where I was bout managing, and this year’s Spirit of the Slam Award winner Danny Solis was hosting, a member of the Miami entourage was kicked out of the club by bouncers for (initially) trying to shush patrons, and in the ensuing ugliness to follow, a member of the Miami team was kicked out of the venue before getting a chance to read.

The ensuing ugliness involved the initial ejectee trying to re-enter the club. Apparently, pushing was involved, and out of nowhere, poets and entourage members from inside the club rushed the front door – exploding past the poet from Salt Lake City halfway through a raw, emotional piece – and one of the bouncers announced, immediately upon the interruption, that the show was over and we were all kicked out of the club.

Tense moments followed, a St. Louis organizer who witnessed everything made calls to a district manager or some such, and we were able to continue the bout after a ten-minute caesura, albeit in an even more highly charged atmosphere than before. To their credit, the judges stayed with us, the audience (still mostly poets, with some club regulars in the back of the room) stayed with us, and much of the poetry in the bout was stellar.

Over at Club Buca, they were not so lucky. One of the judges left three poets into the bout, after giving nothing but 10s; the people staffing the bout decided to plug 10s into her spot the rest of the way. Three poets from the end of the bout, an overzealous DJ decided he had had enough of the poetry, and cranked up the dance music in the middle of a poem. Later, at the host hotel, after conferencing with the teams involved in that bout, the tournament officials decided – because the bout was run with four judges, and because it was not allowed to actually finish – to redo the entire bout the next afternoon.

What’s admirable here is the resilience of the poets involved, and their willingness to get back on the horse again the next day after surviving a fairly scathing performance experience barely 12 hours before.

But you would expect that of slam poets. Actors in a play have an unbreachable contract with their audience, based in decorum and the rules of theater. Audience members simply do not interrupt performers, and indeed are coaxed into appropriate responses, starting with the hushed anticipation as the house lights dim and Act One starts. Comics who are heckled are expected to fire back a scathing rejoinder at the heckler – in other words, they’re allowed the space and the mechanism to recuperate the order of their show. Musicians can simply turn up their amps and incorporate an air of disdain into their on-stage personae.

But poets competing in slams have no such protections. The audience at a slam, after all, is encouraged to respond to the poem when the mood strikes them. The audience at a slam isn’t necessarily willing to sit intently and discuss what they liked and didn’t like, as a theater crowd might, over a post-show glass of wine or cup of coffee. They let the performer know immediately, sometimes forcefully, sometimes obnoxiously.

The National Poetry Slam has its special rules of decorum that insulate the competitors from the worst brands of heckling. There are even specific guidelines in the rulebook, as well as a Code of Honour, to ensure that poets don’t heckle other poets. The event is predicated on the notion that these poets are the best that slam has to offer, culled from competitions in cities across North America, and thus have earned more of a right to the audience’s attention than at a typical neighborhood slam event.

But to a drunken patron of a dance club or daiquiri bar, the person in front of the mike is merely, at that moment, an annoying poet. The decorum afforded to most performers falls away, and in this climate, even the assumed sanctity of the competition is stripped away from the event, dropping the poet and audience member into the Petri dish of Marc Smith’s original experiment. The hypothesis being tested, in this trip to the lab, is that a poet, given a microphone and three minutes, can make someone with no personal attachment to poetry listen to a poem.

But for this to work, the venue has to be conducive to performance, and the audience has to have a sense that performance might break out in the room. At the Pageant, where team finals was held, and Mississippi Nights, where indie finals and a team semis were held, those in attendance understood performers might appear on the stage. Even the Royal Dumpe, in its Ren Fair-ocity, was adequately configured and acculturated for performance.

Clubs like Crazy Louie and the Drink, by contrast, were bars and dance clubs first, pulled into service as poetry venues by virtue of their proximity to the host hotel and the optimistic notion that promotional efforts would be enough to cancel out architecture and reputation. The very configurations of the rooms – large, vacuous spaces with comically narrow stages and few places to sit – were enough to signal disconnect between event and venue.

Slam was birthed in a pair of Chicago dive bars in what were then rough neighborhoods. The patrons were sometimes unruly and disruptive, but because the bars were established jazz clubs, and because slam came out of an avant-garde, performance art aesthetic, they were also attuned to sometimes difficult art.

The Laclede’s Landing set, by contrast, didn’t want anything difficult. They wanted to escape what they perceived to be the difficulty of their daily lives. You could see it in their faces, and in their demeanors: I want alcohol. I want to dance with abandon. I see my baseball team on the television above the bar, and I want to root for them. I want a temporary pair of arms around me. I want to feel appreciably attractive in this altered slur of hours. I want to change the channel on my life until I wake up the next morning.

As poets, we like to think this is where we’re most needed. Perhaps the most resonant moment of this year’s Slam Family meeting came from Team Urbana’s Rachel McKibbens, who asserted that the people of St. Louis missed out on what we had to offer because of the example we set with our work. To paraphrase, we model an outlet for self-expression, a cathartic release of emotions, which provides a healthy alternative to physically hurting others or ourselves.

To some poets, the call to poetry is that basic and that life affirming. To others, it’s a vehicle to potential success, to an appearance on Def Poetry, to a possible career as a performance poet – viable to only a select few, but much less improbable than it was even ten years ago.

Because there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 poets competing this year, it’s difficult for even the most dedicated audience member to hear more than a fraction of those. And while it’s likely that the bell curve of poet talent has remained fairly consistent over the years, the sheer size of the event makes it harder to recognize the patterns.

For the participants, the failure to attract appreciable audience to the preliminary bouts arguably placed more focus on poet as community member rather than poet as entertainer. This might be good, actually – allowing us to recognize the shared ideals in our mission while, at the same time, acknowledging the shades of difference in our writing and performance aesthetics.

Yet there’s a certain humility that can’t be helped when poets in competition are, for the most part, reading for each other. St. Louis showed that poets sometimes find themselves in arenas that will only reluctantly have them.

Some of us can adapt and make any room our own, be it an audience of three or an audience of 3,000. Stay in performance poetry for any length of time, and you will read to small and large audiences, to rooms devoid of energy and full of jagged energy, and to people who will love you simply because you are a poet. The St. Louis experience reminded me, no matter how any one show goes, the most important quality for a poet, particularly one in our particular arena, is perseverance. It’s crucial to keep writing, to keep reading, to keep performing, and to keep listening to others performing.

The sheer numbers of poets at this year’s Nationals shows how much work we’ve done since Marc Smith hatched his improbable concept for a poetry show in 1986. This year’s Nationals illustrates, perhaps more than any other, that the work has no end, and is sometimes incalculably hard.