The People’s Poets
Local team to represent Omaha at the National Poetry Slam in St. Paul
Photo by Beth Rigatuso of Catch Creative
It’s a strange beast, poetry. Generally the subject divides people into two camps: those – a tiny sliver – for whom it is life-sustaining expression, and the rest: those who think of it as elitist, self-indulgent, boring. Ironically, it’s that latter group that gave rise to the poetry slam, a modern performance twist that braids the written word, the spoken word, and sporting competition.
Marc Smith, godfather of slam, is credited with the form’s inception in Chicago in the mid-’80s. Fed up with the elitist, self-indulgent, boring litany of many academic poetry readings, Smith began his own reading series by handing scorecards to random audience members, asking the impromptu judges to rate each poem on a scale of 0 to 10; those poets winning the highest scores could continue to read throughout the event.
“It doesn’t matter if you’ve been to 1,000 slams or if this is the first time you’ve ever heard the word poetry – you’re qualified to be a judge,” said Pat McEvoy, a member of the Omaha slam team. Smith’s simple alteration shifted the atmosphere, yanking lost poets back to reality, forcing performers to remember that, first and foremost, the audience is the reason you read.
“That’s how the local slams are judged, that’s how the National Slam is judged,” said Matt Mason, Omaha’s longtime “slammaster.” “At the National Slam finals, five yahoos in the audience get scorecards. It doesn’t mean the best people are going to win, but it does mean the audience is in control, and that’s really the whole thing that Marc Smith wanted – to make the audience part of the show.”
Slam rules are simple: get on stage and read a poem. Don’t take longer than three minutes (with a 10-second grace period). Don’t use props, music, or costumes. Beyond that, the team’s creativity is the limit. Though the slam format hasn’t changed since it began, the poets themselves demonstrate an evolving aesthetic: what were once a motley collection of individuals reading poems off of wrinkled pages are now highly choreographed sequences, multivoiced group readings, the well-oiled machines of verbal innovation and cutting-edge stage work.
The National Poetry Slam is the coveted stomping ground for these performers, an annual event with a potent mix of workshops, camaraderie, education, and performances by friends, colleagues, and rivals. “It’s a writer’s dream. It’s just a week where that’s all you’re talking about, all you’re thinking about,” said Marissa Gill, Omaha slam team assistant coach. “You can’t go and not be affected by it…It changes everybody.”
The 2010 event will be held in St. Paul, Minn., August 3-7, with teams from 76 cities across the globe. Omaha will be represented by team coach Mason, Gill, McEvoy, and fellow poets Jarvis (“just Jarvis”), Ben Wenzl, and Katie F-S. The team is created from scratch each year through qualifying slams held during the prior winter.
For the lucky few who attend the national event, “half the fun is going out at the end of the day after a team has trounced you in a bout, or you trounced a team, and you can go have a beer with them and talk to them,” said McEvoy. “You get to hear so many voices – people who are YouTube sensations or have spoken for presidents or been on a TV series. You get to see these people perform…and you just hope that, at the end of the day, your team is one of those teams where people say, ‘They’re the people we really want to hear again.’”
“You make relationships at [the National Poetry Slam], whether they’re the best [poets] in the world or just starting out,” said Mason. “You meet some really cool folks and keep those bonds going.”
In a local slam, poets compete as individuals against each other, but the National Slam pits city team against city team. Each team performs four poems against four other arbitrarily selected teams before adding up the scores and moving on (or not) to the semifinals and finals.
“When a team sends up four poems, you have to have some range,” said Mason. “If all your poems sound the same, you blend in to the walls eventually.” Added Jarvis, “And nobody at Nationals this year has range like Omaha.”
The writers draw on the group dynamic, both before and after the national event, for inspiration, feedback, and energy. Rehearsing once or twice per week, the Omaha poets practice their poems, giving and accepting criticism, tweaking lines, changing facial expressions, altering and creating new movements for their performances.
“If it’s an intense poem, it’s going to get way more intense,” said McEvoy. “Poems get better, the performances get better, as the summer progresses, because the team knows what to try and what not to try.”
“What it all comes down to is that we’re in it together, and you can’t just lean on one poet at the National Poetry Slam,” said Jarvis. “You can’t Michael Jordan your way to the final stage. It doesn’t work like that…It’s a really selfless tournament, which is what makes it so great.”
Omaha has regularly sent a team to the annual competition since 2003 (excluding 2008), making it one of the only cities in the region to do so.
“Kansas City isn’t well-represented, and Des Moines isn’t represented at all anymore,” said Jarvis. “There are a lot of traditionally Midwestern cities that just don’t have a voice at the national championship, so it’s good to be that representation.”
Representing the Midwest on a national platform – in any industry, more often than not – means confronting coastal stereotypes. “People think we’re going to roll up in jeans and cowboy boots and pearl snaps and say some things about combines and cows,” said McEvoy.
“The stellar thing about being from Omaha is that a lot of people have their perceptions of what an Omaha poet would be,” said Jarvis. “While we have a good reputation, they still might not know exactly who we are or what we bring to the stage. I feel like a lot of the times when we’re done, when we walk off stage, a lot of people are like, ‘Wow, that’s what Omaha sounds like in a poem.’”
But that element of surprise has its drawbacks as well. “It’s nice to be underestimated by the other teams, [but] every time we go in, we’re underestimated by the audience and the judges right off the bat,” said Mason. “I think, as a team from Omaha, we face a one point penalty from the judges for being from Omaha.”
Unlike some teams, Omaha’s poets “don’t build our poetic identity around our city – we build it around ourselves,” said Jarvis. “We all have poems that are about our own personal experiences, and we speak to them with such genuine emotion, I think we command the crowd to feel what we feel.”
In the slam scene, Omaha has built a reputation for genuine, introspective, and personal performances. Outsiders may pigeonhole slam as a platform for polarizing political tirades, but Omaha’s team seems much more interested in speaking with an authentic voice, sharing experiences, and connecting with the audience.
“Generally speaking, if you hear a poem, it happened,” said McEvoy. “There might be some embellishments here and there, but that’s just good storytelling. I grew up in a really Irish family – there are always going to be some embellishments…But there’s always the truth in the poem, and that’s what people also respect quite a bit about Omaha.”
The team hopes that respect will win them some bouts at the National Poetry Slam next week, though they’re more excited for the experience than the scoring; after all, they’re in it for the poetry, not the money. The cost of sending a team to Nationals is around $4,000-$5,000. “It takes a bit of work in that respect,” said Mason. “We’ve had good people supporting us, good businesses who have done great by us.”
The best way to support the team is to attend the monthly slams – held at the OM Center downtown, which the poets laud as a welcoming venue – and donate when possible. Increased audience, as well, increases the possibility of bringing renowned poets to the Omaha stage, energizing local tourism and creating a positive feedback loop for local arts.
“It’s hard to get people in the door for something labeled poetry, which is unfortunate,” said Mason. “[But] I get so many people after a slam saying, ‘Oh my god, my friends dragged me here, I had no idea this was not going to suck. This was awesome.’ And they come back.”
Oftentimes, that’s all it takes to get a poet or audience member hooked on the slam scene: an accidental visit, a nudge from a more well-informed friend or stranger, an event that flips a sudden switch – whatever breaks down that “high school curriculum” view of what poetry is – or can be.
Jarvis, like most, got involved in the slam scene after “it suddenly clicked that you really didn’t have to follow the rules of pentameters, everything that we learned in high school that we loved to hate,” he said. “You didn’t have to follow the rules at all if you didn’t want to…you could write something beautiful without all of these tools that everybody said you have to use.”
Slam, in this way, democratizes an art form considered by too many to be old, stuffy, lost and lofty, turning the focus from a poet’s inner world and out onto the larger audience – and poets, in turn, respond by crafting work that is meant to be, not read, but heard, seen, and shared.
“You hear so many people’s life stories,” said Wenzl. “It’s become the most important thing that’s happened to me, honestly. It’s opened a lot of doors.”
“There’s no other place that I have found where poetry or the written word is appreciated as much as at a slam,” said Gill. “There’s no way to not have a positive experience when you go to a slam. That’s what keeps me coming back. You get motivated to write because you just want to share with the people in the room, and you want to get to experience things like going to Nationals and being on a team or just getting to know other poets and writers. It’s a singular experience, I think, for somebody who likes to write, to find this kind of atmosphere where it’s really appreciated.”