Poetry Slam
A poetry slam is a competitive event where poets perform their work and are judged by the audience or a panel of judges. The performances are often dynamic and engaging, with a focus on the spoken word and delivery. Poetry slams provide a platform for poets to showcase their creativity and connect with audiences in a lively and interactive setting.
4 Key excerpts on "Poetry Slam"
eBook - ePubAnarchism and Art
Democracy in the Cracks and on the Margins
- Mark Mattern(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- SUNY Press(Publisher)
...4 Poetry Slam Stripped to its bare essentials, slam poetry is poetry that is performed in a competitive environment before a live audience. Judges, usually five, are chosen randomly from the audience with no attempt to first ascertain their ability to judge good from bad poetry. They rate the poets on a scale of zero to ten, with high and low scores tossed and the remaining three averaged. Generally, poems must be three minutes or less with points deducted for going over the time limit, though this can vary significantly across local slams. Poets are judged on the poem itself and its performance. A slam master emcees the show, and also does much of the organizing and preparation. The roots of slam are traced back several millennia to ancient oral traditions found in the Homeric epic, African griots, Zuni priests, Japanese Kojiki poets, and Greek bards who related communal stories via song, poetry, and narrative. According to one source, slam as a competition goes back at least to the first century B.C. when the Greek lyric poet Pindar was bested five times by a lesser-known poet, Korinna, and Pindar went on to ridicule her as a sow. Others note that the ancient Olympics included poetry competitions, with winners receiving laurel crowns. Other competitive roots include Japanese haiku contests and African word battles called “signifying.” Twentieth-century roots and influences include Dadaism, emphasizing childlike spontaneity, intellectual nihilism, and moving art outside the museum and concert hall. The 1950s and 1960s beat poets, who sought to transform poetry from a sedate, genteel diversion enjoyed by elites into something more immediate and accessible, are also cited as influences on slam poetry. Beat poets read in coffeehouses, bars, lofts, and cellars. They broke other rules of academic poetry by inviting audience participation, adding music, and injecting elements that sometimes made the readings appear like drunken chaos...
eBook - ePub- John Timpane, Maureen Watts(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- For Dummies(Publisher)
...But you’ll find that different venues are associated with particular kinds of poetry — which is something to pay attention to as you shop for slams. A strong, assertive first-person narrator (an I). Immediately striking language — often ribald, vulgar, hip, or slang. Lots of jokes and other humor. Constant allusions to contemporary popular culture (movies, TV, music), social history, politics, and poetry. An ending that leaves the audience with a concluding shock or joke. Figure 12-1: San Jose/Silicon Valley Team 1999 competing at the National Poetry Slam in Chicago. © David Huang Slams are slams. If you’re going to do them, you have to: Like the rough-and-tumble of it, the theater, the zaniness. Embrace the need to be a real actor, a ham if necessary. Grow the triple-thick, titanium-coated rhinoceros skin you’re going to need if response to your work is less than, shall we say, wonderful. Learn to be a good sport, to congratulate your conquerors, to be gracious and full of good humor if an audience or panel lets you have it. Conversely, if you win, you should be just as gracious. Promise yourself you won’t go to only one slam. Experience is everything, especially in this world halfway between fine arts and the World Wrestling Federation. Become part of the regular audience, get to know the poets and their entourages, and enjoy yourself. Keep reading your poetry in public. Each chance to perform will teach you about yourself and your poetry. Many are the times that we’ve discovered — in mid-reading! — a flaw or problem we needed to fix in a poem. But that sort of discovery makes a reading worthwhile. It’s the human connection that’s most important when it comes to poetry readings. Folks get to hear your poetry. What could be better than that? What more direct way of sharing your poetry could there be than delivering your own words your own way? What’s more, readings can be your introduction to a community of poets you may want to join...
- Wolfgang Gortschacher, David Malcolm, Wolfgang Gortschacher, David Malcolm(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...The effect has to be instantaneous; what matters is the audience's immediate reaction. Hence, it is almost a rule that performance poetry, often highly improvisational, makes generous use of humor and colloquial diction, depends much on the song‐like qualities of poetry (repetitions, refrains, call‐and‐response), and, by inviting the audience to participate, creates a sense of community. Poetry has become an event, which, as Jonathan Raban remarks, “implicates all its participants, one cannot separate out the work itself from either the author who performs it or from the audience whose participatory response has become an essential ingredient of the total experience” (Raban 1971, 86). Performance poetry, the rise of which coincided in Britain with the processes of devolution and the emergence of multicultural society, made extensive use of regional dialects, slang, and other “substandard” varieties of English, the characteristic features of which it would be impossible to record in writing. Among the various movements within performance poetry in the United Kingdom one can mention the Liverpool Poets (Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten), the Ranters associated with the punk explosion of the mid‐1970s (John Cooper Clarke, Joolz, Attila the Stockbroker), the new cabaret and music hall scene, with one of its centers in the Apples and Snakes venue in London (John Hegley, Liz Lochhead), or black rappers, such as Benjamin Zephaniah and Linton Kwesi Johnson (see: Hamilton 1994, 414). More recent poets include Patience Agbabi, who has produced a rap version of The Canterbury Tales (Agbabi 2015). One of the movements that emerged from performance poetry was slam. Marc Smith, who organized the first slam event in Chicago in 1984, is considered to be the originator of the movement. Slam is more an entertainment, as performers are engaged in a competition, struggling to get the highest score from the audience or the judges...
eBook - ePubThe New Art of Old Public Science Communication
The Science Slam
- Miira B. Hill(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...As we will later explore, Science Slam events are more based on visuals than Poetry Slams and they fit into a slightly different template. Yet, even if the Science Slam is typically described in relation to the Poetry Slam (‘it’s like the Poetry Slam, but with science’), Poetry Slams and Science Slams clearly distance themselves from each other. Science Slam organisers claim that Poetry Slammers reacted negatively to the Science Slam due to their belief that the Science Slam ‘stole the format’. Poetry Slammers, meanwhile, contend that the Science Slam is the bourgeois version of their original, anti-establishment event. As many of the aforementioned works have demonstrated, genre varies according to the conventions of different socially situated groups. For this reason, I believe that we should analyse the Science Slam as a form of communicative innovation and explore how the genre’s expectations and communicative actions have changed over time. I see the Science Slam as communicative innovation because it has changed traditional public science communication immensely and has had both situated and interpersonal success. This project seeks to answer how contemporary challenges in communicating and legitimising science are handled in the Science Slam. In previous chapters, I have principally characterised science communication as the communication of scientific knowledge. More specifically, for me at least, science communication occurs when scholars or scientists talk to each other, or even to non-scientists, and refer to their scientific expertise. To come to this assessment, I have looked at the communication and intersubjective validation of knowledge in Science Slams. My understanding is that trust in institutions and society is key. In previous chapters, I have presented the theoretical basis for my research, and there are theoretical pre-assumptions in my argumentation that I will not bring into question...
