They’re Poets and They Know It at the National Slam Face-Off

The heat of Texas can make you crazy. You snap your fingers to imaginary songs and glare at strangers like they landed from Mars. You drink margaritas until your stomach swims and seek a breeze like it’s the breath of God.

Put some poets, slam poets, under that heat and anything goes. They might faint or cry or tear off their shirts. They might whisper in a crowded bar or shout “YEE-HAH” in a crowded theater. They might nit-pick like a pack of lawyers or hug like they’ll hold on forever.

And they will be poets. They’ll tell all about their families, their politics, their love lives, their nightmares. They’ll groove like dancers and point like preachers. They’ll sing, scream, whisper and rap. They’ll say the things they could never say if they wanted to hold on to their day jobs.

For one very long weekend in August, 45 teams of four competed at the 9th annual National Poetry Slam, a four-day word feast at which poets gave it up for hollering fans and unpredictable judges. The winning team, from New York City, took home a $2,000 grand prize. Runners-up settled for smaller prizes and some of the wildest times they ever had.

“It was the most intense four days of my life, easily,” said Phil West, co-director of this year’s slam. “I basically got two hours of sleep.”

Phenomenon Spreading

Rooted in the punk and poetry scenes of the 1970s, officially born in a Chicago bar in the ‘80s, slam is now an international art form. Teams from Vancouver, B.C., to Asheville, N.C., showed up in Austin, and new slam communities keep popping up. Before the end of the year, two movies, the documentary “SlamNation” and the feature film “Slam,” will have been released.

“This foundation stands on the shoulders of a lot of people over the years,” said Marc Smith, who in the ‘80s gave slam its name (he was thinking of an Ernie Banks home run) and a platform at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago.

“Now, the individuals have to go back and get hold of their egos and understand this didn’t happen because of them. . . . The challenge for the rest of the year is for the poets to look for other ways to move and start building a foundation.”

Slam is populist art. Poets receive scores, like Olympic athletes, from randomly selected audience members. Slam welcomes poets of all races, sexes and sexual orientations. A lot of words are used, some unprintable. Many pieces attack corporations, racism and chauvinism. Others celebrate sex, send up religion and call for tearing down the whole system.

But as Mick Jagger, Allen Ginsberg and many others discovered, show some style when you curse the system and the system just might like it. Camera crews from CNN and PBS and a talent scout from MTV were sweating it out at the slam last month. At least one poet was asked to lend his voice to a video game.

Like a town growing into a city, slammers try to work out what it means to be in their community and how to keep it together. They debate what to do about endorsements and television. They love each other and fight with each other and, being poets, don’t always know which is which.

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I dreamt of a poem that knew how to stand up for itself

a poem not afraid to be mean

to offend

displease.

--”I Dreamt of a Poem Last Night”

Esther Griego, Albuquerque, N.M.

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Jason Cornwell expected the boos. Cornwell, associate casting director for MTV’s “Real World” and himself a slam poet, spoke briefly at the opening ceremonies. His introduction alone brought hisses. His announcement that the music channel was seeking slam poets, ages 18 to 24, brought more.

Still, before leaving town, Cornwell had spoken to dozens of applicants.

“Anything that’s mainstream they’re going to rebel against,” he said. “But a lot of these same poets would really like to get a spot on MTV. It’s a mixed thing. Some people are jealous and some people truly feel MTV is the beast.”

Slam poets don’t know what to make of the beast. They attack it, fear it, avoid it and desire it. In slam poems, corporations are easy bulls-eyes. Off stage, they’re a movable target.

Poets have accepted support from businesses and have appeared in commercials. The arguments: They need the money, they need the exposure, they work with the system because it’s the only system they’ve got. The counter-arguments: Commerce is the enemy of art.

“I hate corporations,” said Alix Olsen, a member of the New York team. “And I would never sell myself.”

“If anybody had told me five years ago I would work for a corporation, I would have said they were nuts,” said Bob Holman, a New York-based poet and a partner at Mouth Almighty Records, a spoken word label distributed by Mercury Records.

But athletes and movie stars have commercial connections, he said. Why not poets? “Most people in this country work for corporations.”

There are risks for both poets and corporations. Gerry Quickley, a Los Angeles slam poet, remembered being asked by Nike a couple of years ago to contribute a piece for a commercial. The only rule: He must mention Nike.

“I basically compared them to a slave ship, and they didn’t appreciate that,” he said with a laugh.

Poets worry more about control over their work than they do about selling out. And at a time when few have a chance to make money, ideals must be weighed against unpaid bills.

“I know a poet who did a television commercial, and I asked him what it meant for him to do that,” Holman said. “His reply to me was, ‘I can tell you what it meant for this poet. My wife was pregnant and I didn’t know whether we could afford the hospital bill.’

“It’s not as if poets could trade their poems for potatoes. The visibility factor can be a means for pole vaulting the poems of that poet.”

In any event, the controversy shows poetry is alive, he said. “People are talking about poetry, as opposed to a few years ago, when a poet was an exhibit at a dust museum.”

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I can make a difference

I can locate Botswana on a map.

I can swing dance.

I’m a team player.

--”Curriculum Vitae”

Ernie Cline, Austin, Texas

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When Henry James observed that the ideal author was one on whom nothing is lost, could he even have imagined someone like Genevieve Van Cleve? Short and intense, with long blond hair and dark-rimmed glasses, she has a poet’s heart and a strategist’s mind. On stage, she might touch an audience with a poem about her father. Off stage, she might challenge a judge she suspects does not care for the hometown team.

In slam’s early years, competition was so laid-back that it once took a week to notice a scorer’s error gave the win to the wrong poet. Now, poets and coaches carry stopwatches (poems have a 3-minute limit) and legal pads. Even as teams clap for each other, they look for loopholes and technicalities.

“It’s a very serious thing that we do,” Van Cleve said. “And we take it seriously, sometimes too seriously.”

Judges May Not Be Sober

Getting to the national slam takes a lot more than shouting into a microphone. Teams are formed in local competitions and the most determined ones rehearse for months. Because judges, those randomly selected, not always sober audience members, decide who wins, it often takes work, and luck, for everyone to get along. For poets, used to creating on their own, that can be a problem.

Van Cleve made it onto the Austin team. So did her friend, Susan Somers-Willett, and Somers-Willett’s boyfriend, Ernie Cline. So did Karyna McGlynn, at age 20 the youngest member.

They were poets, all in their 20s, but otherwise not a team they would have formed on their own. “It took awhile for her to fit in,” Somers-Willett said of McGlynn. “We all have different personalities.”

It wasn’t just personalities. Cline’s background was in stand-up comedy, McGlynn’s and Somers-Willett’s in more traditional academic writing. Van Cleve was a political science major.

To get to the finals you need at least 12 poems, four for each of the three preliminary rounds. The Austin poets rehearsed all summer, often three times a week. They worked on pieces about feminism, parents, ex-boyfriends and the religious right. They fought, made up, considered throwing it in, and went on rehearsing.

“You build an intense amount of intimacy,” Somers-Willett said. “I know things I don’t want to know about these people. . . . You’re working with such personal issues.”

Teammates’ differences can be an advantage, because no one knows what the crowd’s mood will be on a given night. “Curriculum Vitae,” Cline’s comic monologue about job interviews, was balanced by “Daddy,” an emotional group piece by the three women. The Austin team also learned to use their bodies, flirting in sync for “Come Here Often?” a satire of pickup lines, or holding hands and breathing in at the beginning of “Daddy.”

Performing for the hometown crowd, Austin won its first match, narrowly lost the second and needed to beat Dallas for a chance at the finals. Dallas still had its biggest crowd-pleasers, including a monologue, a “signature piece,” by a poet named Clebo.

“We knew he was going to do that piece,” Cline said.

Clebo Rainey, a big-voiced, big-bellied 49-year-old musician-turned-poet, had for three years performed “Rarefied in Arkansas,” a stomping sermon about finding glory in the beauty of nature. And for three years, after the line, “The world is terrified, but in Arkansas--in Arkansas!--I tear off my clothes,” he had thrown his shirt to the floor.

Slam poetry has rules against props--a poet was once criticized for using a belt as a phallic symbol--and Rainey wanted to be sure he could remove his shirt. He checked, several times, with slam officials.

“From the minute we got to Austin, we were talking to judges,” he said. “Everybody told us it was OK.”

“Rarefied” went over big and Dallas won, by two-tenths of a point. At the Dallas table, Rainey clapped his hands with joy. After the teams congratulated (and consoled) each other, the Dallas poets went back to their rented cabin and the Austin team went out to dinner.

Van Cleve would stay up all night, writing.

“I wrote a speech,” she recalled. “I changed slam; it will never be the same.”

Life stops for nothing, not even for poetry. Van Cleve’s grandfather, 85-year-old Albert Wallace, was in a Dallas hospital, recovering from triple bypass surgery he wasn’t expected to survive. In less than two weeks, she would be leaving for England to join her boyfriend.

The pressure, and the heat, had caused her to faint after the second-round bout. Now, after the third round, what kept her up was Clebo’s shirt.

She had thought of filing a protest--”The whole state of Texas will hate me for this”--but after talking with her teammates she settled for making a point. At a meeting the next morning, attended by poets and slam officials, Van Cleve got up.

Shaking, crying, she spoke of losing by just two-tenths of a point, and how hard that was. She asked: Was it fair for a man to be able to perform an act on stage that a woman could not?

“When Clebo takes off his shirt, no one is likely to stuff dollar bills in his belt,” she told the crowd. “No one would accuse Clebo of using his breasts for getting a better score or a better job.”

And then she took off her shirt.

“It was very difficult for me to do that,” she said later. “I don’t take my clothes off, and I think people saw I was very upset and sad and I think people felt my pain. It was very cathartic for some folks.”

The room was stunned. Friends hugged her and supported her. Clebo, saying he didn’t know he had offended anyone, promised he would not take off his shirt again. Cline worried that the Austin team was coming across as sore losers.

Marc Smith called it “the best moment we’ve ever had in the family.”

The finals were sold out that night, with fans out front actually looking to buy scalp tickets to get into the 1,300-seat theater. Inside, a few teams who didn’t make it were asked to perform; “Daddy” was selected. Later on, Clebo did “Rarefied,” kept his shirt on and scored even higher than he had against Austin.

Dallas came in second, just half a point behind New York City.

“They had all agreed going into the morning that they were winners, no matter,” said Rainey’s wife, Noemi Collie. “They were ecstatic going into the finals. They had accomplished what they wanted.”

For days after, poets exchanged e-mail, debating whether Van Cleve had made a legitimate point about going topless or whether she was just upset about losing.

Next year’s finals take place in Chicago. Before that, in the spring, the slam family will meet there and debate a ban on nudity.