A Completely Biased History of Poetry Slams

Not even pretending to be objective

I recently read Joshua Bennett’s Spoken Word: a Cultural History, and saddened to see that it was horribly titled. There is some history, but only as it pertained to him, but most of it was a first-person memoir. Nothing wrong with it being that, but it should have been titled to his personal bias. It wasn’t a complete history of the New York City poetry slam scene, much less an exploration of the spoken word scene where he lived. Now, once you take the subject matter to the national level, Bennett documented less than one percent of what was going on.

I don’t think he cares, and he doesn’t have to—he’s very successful in academia and has won more awards than most poets will be nominated for—but it’s typical of the types of poets who drove me nuts while in the scene. He’s good at working the game at all levels, of writing well-crafted poems that get published, rank high scores at the poetry slams, and getting into schools, but never writing anything that struck me as original. It’s the literary equivalent to someone who can play a classical song note-for-note versus the Ramones, who don’t have the techniques but all their music has so much heart, and, well, it just sounds more fun. But as my best drug connection used to tell me, “never hate a hustle”—this is his hustle, and he’s good at it. He went to schools I couldn’t afford and he makes more money than I do, so fuck it, right? I should probably be calling him and asking for a lesson.

But what really gets me about poetry slams and the horrible crap they became is that it went full circle from being poetry that regular people could enjoy to more reasons for people to hate poetry readings. They weren’t always how they ended up. I swear to god they were fun for a while.

198?–1993: The Carefree Fun Years

The slams started at the Green Mill in Chicago by a guy named Marc Smith. It was the mid/late ‘80s and I’ve seen different years so I’m going to leave it here. Not long after, it was happening in New York City as well. And one guy, Gary Glazner, in San Francisco, started doing one. So as far as I know, there were only three cities participating at the time.

The slam in San Francisco would not have gotten anywhere without Gary’s personality. As annoying as I thought slams were, I loved that guy. He’s a truly fun person to be around. By trade, he was a florist. He wasn’t trying to make a living off anyone, he genuinely wanted everyone to have a good time.

But we didn’t really have a slam scene in the Bay. There were a number of cliques and factions who all had their own styles of poetics. Back then, I could tell you what neighborhood you hung out in by what your poems sounded like. There were old Beats, hippies, hipsters, and punks with their own poetry readings. There were small presses that evolved from these open mikes that are still going today. So we didn’t need a slam to bring people out, we had people coming anyway.

Gary organized the first National Poetry Slam in San Francisco that had three teams: New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, and aside from him, I don’t know anyone who went. It really wasn’t a big deal. He held it up in Fort Mason, which is a real pain in the ass to get to on public transit, so I think a lot of people just didn’t bother. Looking back on it, I really wish I had gone because it was the only time Paul Beatty read poems in the Bay—he read from his novels a few times, but quit writing/performing poetry soon after.

Paul Beatty only wrote two books of poetry but he was copied from and ripped off so much, it’s astounding¹. He’s like the “Funky Drummer” or “Apache” of poetry, if you are familiar with sampling. For years, people stole lines and imagery from Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce and passed them as their own. Where does thievery stop and influence begin? That’s for another post.

For years, if you wanted to go the the National Poetry Slams, you just formed a team and went. No rounds of competition, you just paid the plane fare and showed up. There were themed teams of all cowboys or old ladies. It was really laid back and fun.

The slams back then were like the early years of the UFC: there were poets of all kinds meeting up to see who was the best. Funny poets, political poets, rhyming poets, you name it, they were there, and it was more demographically representative then. In about fifteen years, it solidified to a young people’s art form with the same sing-songy style but I’ll get to that later. Hell, back then, you could read your poems off a piece of paper.

The greatest thing is that Poetry Slams began popping up across the country, and it became a popular focal point for local scenes. Cities where they would have 12 poets reading to each other began having readings where 12 people read to 100. Local papers would actually cover the slams because they had a “hook.” And papers were important then.

1994–1998: From Lollapalooza to the Slam/SlamNation Films

Look, the 1994 Lollapalooza readings were a bust. I was there at the first one in Vegas when the poets were still on the main stage and we were pulled from that due to safety. Hollywood said that spoken word was the next rock-n-roll, but the public at large disagreed, and showed their vote with a hailstorm of water bottles, flip-flops, and pizza crusts that showered the poets when they took the stage. And the spoken word tent, which was one of the few places with shade became heckling contests. But the great part was this was how we found each other.

Juliette Torrez spent a lot of time getting everyone’s contact info onto a master list. This was the single most important event of spoken word that year. Suddenly, we knew places to read all over the country. You weren’t going to get paid enough to cover gas money, but if you wanted to, you could go on tour. But the slams did usually pay something—$20 plus drink tickets was a standard. It was a infinite raise from nothing, which was the previous standard. And these crowds bought chapbooks!

For the next years, most of my featured poets at my reading series were from out of town. Fresh blood! Also, a diversity of styles was in full display: hip-hop influenced East Coasters, blue collar Chicago poets, and southern wacko drawlers all showed up, and they were always at least okay. It’s okay to not be brilliant, just don’t suck.

And here came the second wave of slam poets: the ones who first wrote and performed poetry because they saw it at a slam. The first wave of us were already writing and reading out when slams showed up.

But then, two movies hit the video stores around the same time: Slam and SlamNation, and I felt like every blues singer watching Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show—this shit is about to change, and not for the better, I thought. And I was right. Saul Williams, the lead of Slam, and featured in SlamNation, became the template of the next wave of slam poets.

1999–2002 The Three-Poem Era

Saul Williams was an actor before he was a poet. He studied at Tisch. He’s a classically trained thespian who came from a long line of private education. As a performer, he was better than everyone else at the readings—he stood out, starkly, from most of us. And it changed the expectation of the audience nationwide.

The poets, to advance through the slams, suddenly had to memorize their poems, and really get into the performance, with hand gestures, overplayed facial expressions, and rehearsed voice trembles. In this era, it became more of a theatrical art than a writing expression. And looks, unfortunately, played a huge part—good-looking poets scored higher. You had to dress well and not be old, and if you were overweight, you had to address in one of your three poems how that you were still beautiful.

This was the third wave of slams: poets who weren’t interested in becoming writers, but more wanted to perform their pieces only. There was no emphasis on building a body of work. I call it “the three-poem era.”

I say “three poems” because this is all most of the poets had. Before this, poets were interested in building a body of work—bringing the same poem to a reading series two weeks in a row was shameful. But slams promoted creating three pieces, refining their performance until they got all 10s, and leaning on those every week. Because of this, the vast majority of slam poets that came from this era never published a book, unlike the previous two eras of poets were very prolific.

Tropes for successful poems emerged for style, tone, and emotional content, and people wrote to these tropes, whether or not it was true to who they were.

I remember seeing a guy talk about “raw” and “moving weight.” This is when I was still up to no good, drug-wise. The cocaine in the Bay Area was horrible. It was cheap, but very stepped on. Those of us who had turned on in the ‘80s were upset—the meth sucked too, and the only good drugs around were weed and E, and that wasn’t always what we wanted. This guy has raw? I thought. I knew a lot of people who would be interested, so I caught him alone and asked.

“Oh, that’s a persona poem,” he told me.

Persona poems are the equivalent to the license taken by singers. Johnny Cash never shot a man just to watch him die, Dr. Dre was neither a doctor nor a gangster, and Marilyn Manson wasn’t really from hell. We understand that, but in spoken word at the time, it was the norm that you were honest in your writing.

There was a lot of fakery and poser behavior at this time, which was the real shame of the era. MFA candidates from nice homes who pretended to be “street.” Actors talking about their dead grandma’s hands and choking up in the same place every time. People who used one type of language in their poems and another in social conversation. Again, it’s a poetic license, but to me, horrible phony bullshit.

But the exciting part was that there were crowds who were paying to get in. There was money! For the first time, there was money in poetry! Taylor Mali scored a Burger voiceover. Acting gigs! Even one shoe deal² (I think)! And people were buying merch!

Which brings us to a generation of horribly recorded, burned-at-home CDs. Mind you, I didn’t know many people who could burn CDs, for the opposite reason I still don’t: few had the technology available. The CDs sounded like the poet was reading into a Mason jar and a good number of them wouldn’t play at all. But by the time you figured that out, the poet had moved to another town.

The really sad part about this era, was the exclusion began. A lot of the Bay Area poets were really poor—three prominent poets were unhoused, on the street, and many others living on SSI—and asking for $7 or $10 was a lot. “No one turned away for lack of funds,” as stated on the flyers, was absolute bullshit. I saw it happen, especially to the ones who “looked homeless.”

By my estimate³, one local slam was making over $25000 a year. This is when you could buy a nice house in Berkeley for $100K. I advocated that we should use the money to buy our own venue as a collective and was met with blank stares. This won’t last! I said. Let’s use the money to buy permanence!

To this day, I’d love to know where all the money went. Because they still had to have fundraisers to send the teams to Nationals.

2002–stopped paying attention: Russell Simmons Takes the Money

We could have made a lot of money in development deals, but no one could agree on anything. Russell Simmons wanted to license the term “poetry slam” and partner up. But people couldn’t agree. So he called it Def Poetry Jam instead.

If you find a DVD of this somewhere⁴, look on the cover. Are any of the non-celebrity poets named? Nope. Russell used just enough of the real poets to maintain legitimacy, paid them scale with no royalties and ran the seasons.

After all this, Russell Simmons made the most money off the slam scene. After that, it was the venues, airlines, and car rental services. The poets have none of the money.

Sure, a few put it on resumes to give them a little “street cred” and went on to teach or whatever, but all that money that generated in this scene is in someone else’s pockets.

The frequency of bullshit in poetics reached an all-time high in this era. Audiences came because they saw the show, and the poets pandered to that desire. If you weren’t doing what they saw on TV, they were upset.

Thus began the fourth era of slam: people who wanted to use poetry slams to propel their career at something else.

While slam poems were supposed to be original, it became frequent that people sang song lyrics in the middle of their poems and swiped lines from poets like Gil Scott Heron without credit. If you wanted to compete in the slams, you were up against renditions of “Amazing Grace” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

The last time I participated in a slam, I was asked by the MC to come. He was tired of hearing the same poems and wanted to mix things up a little. I was already done with it. But he convinced me to come out.

I walked out on stage, announced my poem.

“This is called ‘Drowning on God’s Urine,’” I said to stunned silence.

One judge held up a 0.0 as I began and read my poem. I didn’t care. I still don’t. It’s funny to me. The poem was later published in a book, of which I have eight. To me, it’s like a Led Zeppelin fan saying that Willie Dixon stole their riffs—it’s so backwards that it’s laughable.

The poets, in the back of the room, were cracking up, because the poem is really funny, and inventive, and if you know of any other poem like it, let me know. I got to places no one else did in my poems and to me, real success as a poet is having a unique voice. But like Lenny Bruce making the band laugh, it’s not high art that people want—they want easy-to-digest pablum.

The Aftermath

So for all the hype, the promotion, and publicity, what is there left to show of the slam scene? One great documentary and one mildly entertaining drama.

Show me the bookshelf of the great slam poets. I’ll wait. There’s just not a lot there. Most of them didn’t write enough to publish one book. There are a few exceptions here and there, but while the early days were filled with poets like Patricia Smith, the later days were filled with uh…who remembers?

There were legit writers who did well at the slams, but if you called them a “slam poet,” they bristled. No one liked the limiting moniker until it became a weird brag.

It’s full circle: what became the hook of the slam, what got people to go, eventually ruined it. If you let the general public vote on anything long enough, the middle will rise to the top like a bell curve. The extremes will be at the bottom.

What could have been revolutionary became as dated and of the times as JNCO jeans. I really think, had we played it differently, that there would be poetry clubs today just as there are comedy clubs. But this would have taken long-term vision, and most of those poets were just in it for themselves.

1. Follow the link to find another post dedicated just to him.

2. I vaguely remember Reg E. Gaines getting a shoe commercial for Flak Techs, and assume he got a shoe sponsorship, but I never got the details on this, and it’s one of those things that the Internet is not helping me with right now.

3. Counting attendance and considering entry fees

4. Good luck finding these DVDs anywhere. And I don’t believe it’s streaming. It’s lost to history, like tears in the rain…