Nuyorican Poets Cafe, New York City

A poetry slam is a competition at which poets read or recite original work. These performances are then judged on a numeric scale by previously selected members of the audience.

History[link]

Marc Smith is credited with starting the poetry slam at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago in November 1984. In July 1986, the slam moved to its permanent home, the Green Mill Jazz Club.^[1] In 1990, the first National Poetry Slam took place in Fort Mason, San Francisco, involving a team from Chicago, a team from San Francisco, and an individual poet from New York.^[2] As of 2010, the National Poetry Slam has grown and currently features approximately 80 certified teams each year, culminating in five days of competition.^[3]

Slams have spread all over the world, with slam scenes in Nepal, Canada, Germany, Sweden, France, Austria, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Portugal, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Poland, Serbia, Bosnia, Denmark, Latvia, South Korea, Japan, India, Greece, Spain, and Mexico.

Format[link]

In a poetry slam, members of the audience are chosen by an M.C. or host to act as judges for the event. In the standard slam, there are five judges. After each poet performs, each judge awards a score to that poem. Scores generally range between zero and ten. The highest and lowest score are dropped, giving each performance a rating between zero and thirty points.

Before the competition begins, the host will often bring up a "sacrificial poet", whom the judges will score in order to calibrate their judging.

A single round at a slam consists of performances by all eligible poets. Most slams last multiple rounds, and many involve the elimination of lower-scoring poets in successive rounds. A standard elimination rubric might run 8-4-2, with eight poets in the first round, four in the second, and two in the last. Some slams do not eliminate poets at all.

Props, costumes, and music are always forbidden in slams, distinguishing this category from its immediate predecessor, performance poetry. (The founder of performance poetry, Hedwig Gorski, does not believe in systems for the arts that include rules and restrictions since avant-gardists are also experimentalists.^[4]) Additionally, most slams enforce a time limit of three minutes (and a grace period of ten seconds), after which a poet's score may be docked according to how long the poem exceeded the limit.

Competition types[link]

In an "Open Slam," the most common slam type, competition is open to all who wish to compete, given the number of slots available. In an "Invitational Slam," by contrast, only those invited to do so may compete.

Poetry Slam, Inc. holds several National and World Poetry Slams, including the Individual World Poetry Slam, The National Poetry Team Slam and The Women of the World Poetry Slam. The current (2011) IWPS champion is Chris August.^[5] The current (2011) National Poetry Slam Team champions are Denver (Slam Nuba), Colorado. The current (2012) Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion is Dominique Ashaheed, who was also part of Denver's Slam Nuba in 2011.

A "Theme Slam" is one in which all performances must conform to a specified theme, genre, or formal constraint. Themes may include Nerd,^[6] Erotica, Queer, Improv, or other conceptual limitations. In theme slams, poets can sometimes be allowed to break "traditional" slam rules. For instance, they sometimes allow performance of work by another poet (e.g. the "Dead Poet Slam", in which all work must be by a deceased poet). They can also allow changes on the restrictions on costumes or props (e.g. the Swedish "Triathlon" slams that allow for a poet, musician, and dancer to all take the stage at the same time), changing the judging structure (e.g. having a specific guest judge), or changing the time limits (e.g. a "1-2-3" slam with three rounds of one minute, two minutes, and three minutes, respectively).

Although theme slams may seem restricting in nature, slam venues frequently use them to advocate participation by particular and perhaps underrepresented demographics. For example High School age poets only, or Women poets only may be allowed to participate in a particular slam, and thus it might encourage poets from those demographics to feel more confident in participating in a poetry slam for the first time.

Poetics[link]

Poetry slams can feature a broad range of voices, styles, cultural traditions, and approaches to writing and performance.

Some poets are closely associated with the vocal delivery style found in hip-hop music and draw heavily on the tradition of dub poetry, a rhythmic and politicized genre belonging to black and particularly West Indian culture. Others employ an unrhyming narrative formula. Some use traditional theatric devices including shifting voices and tones, while others may recite an entire poem in ironic monotone. Some poets use nothing but their words to deliver a poem, while others stretch the boundaries of the format, tap-dancing or beatboxing or using highly-choreographed movements.

What is a dominant / successful style one year may be passe the next. Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, slam poet and author of Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, was quoted in an interview on the Best American Poetry blog as saying:

One of the goals of a poetry slam is to challenge the authority of anyone who claims absolute authority over literary value. No poet is beyond critique, as everyone is dependent upon the goodwill of the audience. Since only the poets with the best cumulative scores advance to the final round of the night, the structure assures that the audience gets to choose from whom they will hear more poetry. Audience members furthermore become part of each poem's presence, thus breaking down the barriers between poet/performer, critic, and audience. Bob Holman, a poetry activist and former slammaster of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, once called the movement "the democratization of verse.^[8]" In 2005, Holman was also quoted as saying:

Responses to slam[link]

Slam has not been without its critics.

Non-academic responses to slam have included the Anti-Slam, begun at Collective:Unconscious on New York's Lower East Side. At an Anti-Slam, all forms of expression are given a six-minute set and all participants are given a perfect ten by the judges.^[10]

Academic responses to slam have varied. In an interview published in the Paris Review, literary critic Harold Bloom called the movement "the death of art."

Academics are not the only critics of slam. Poet and lead singer of King Missile, John S. Hall has also long been a vocal opponent, taking issue with such factors as its inherently competitive nature^[11] and what he considers its lack of stylistic diversity.^[12] In his 2005 interview in Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, he recalls seeing his first slam, at the Nuyorican Poets Café:

One of the most recent appraisals of slam comes from the poet Tim Clare. He offers a 'for and against' account of the phenomenon in 'Slam: A Poetic Diaialogue.'^[13]

Conversely, Slam poetry movement founder Marc Smith has been critical of the commercially successful Def Poetry television and Broadway live stage shows produced by Russell Simmons, decrying it as "an exploitive entertainment [program that] diminished the value and aesthetic of performance poetry."^[14]

Academia and slam[link]

As of 2011, four poets who have competed at National Poetry Slam have won National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Fellowships for Literature:

• Hal Sirowitz (who was on the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Poetry Slam team in 1993^[15]) won an NEA Fellowship in Poetry in 1994^[16]
• Jeffrey McDaniel (who was on numerous DC and California slam teams in the mid to late 1990s) won a NEA Fellowship in Poetry in 2003^[16]
• Adrienne Su (who was on the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Poetry Slam team in 1991^[15]) won a NEA Fellowship in Poetry in 2007^[17]
• Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz (who was on the NYC-Urbana Poetry Slam team in 1998, 2001, 2003 and 2010) won a NEA Fellowship in Poetry in 2011^[18]

A number of poets belong to both academia and slam: as noted above Jeffrey McDaniel slammed on several poetry slam teams, and has since published several books and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College; Patricia Smith, a four-time national slam champion, went on to win several prestigious literary awards, including being nominated for the 2008 National Book Award, and being inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent in 2006; Bob Holman founded the Nuyorican Poetry Slam has taught for years at the New School, Bard, Columbia and NYU; Craig Arnold won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and has competed at slams; Kip Fulbeck, a professor of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara competed in slam in the early-1990s and initiated the first spoken word course to be taught as part of a college art program's core curriculum; and poet/academics such as Michael Salinger, Felice Belle, Javon Johnson, Susan B. Anthony Somers-Willett, Robbie Q. Telfer, Phil West, Ragan Fox, and Karyna McGlynn have devoted much attention to the merging of the poetry slam community and the academic community in their respective works.

Some renowned poets have competed in slams, with less successful results. Henry Taylor, winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, competed in the 1997 National Poetry Slam as an individual and placed 75th out of 150.^{[citation needed]}

While slam poetry has often been ignored in traditional higher learning institutions, it slowly is finding its way into courses and programs of study. For example, at Berklee College of Music, in Boston, Slam Poetry is now available as a Minor course of study.^[19]

Youth poetry slam movement[link]

Slam poetry has found popularity as a form of self-expression among many teenagers. The World Poetry Bout Association sponsored the earliest slam poetry workshops for teenagers, through its "Poetry Education Project" in Taos, New Mexico in the early 1990s. The first statewide competition for high school students was held at Taos High School in 1993, with the top teams and individual participants awarded plaques. Members of Taos' competitive teams earned athletic letters annually up until 2008. [cf. The Taos News, Taos, NM, articles, 1993 to present.Youth Speaks Youth Speaks, a non-profit literary organization founded in 1996 by James Kass, patterned the slam competitions at the annual Brave New Voices festival after that seminal Taos event. Youth Speaks serves as one of the largest youth poetry organizations in America, offering opportunities for youth ages 13–19 to express their ideas on paper and stage.

Slam poetry has found popularity as a form of self-expression among many teenagers. Youth Speaks, a non-profit literary organization founded in 1996 by James Kass, serves as one of the largest youth poetry organizations in America, offering opportunities for youth ages 13–19 to express their ideas on paper and stage.

Another group offering opportunites in education and performance to teens is URBAN WORD NYC out of New York City, formerly known as Youth Speaks New York. URBAN WORD NYC holds the largest youth slam in NYC annually, with over 500 young people. The non-profit organization provides free workshops for inner-city youth ran by Hip-Hop poet and mentor, Michael Cirelli.

Young Chicago Authors (YCA) provides workshops, mentoring, and competition opportunities to youth in the Chicago area. Every year YCA presents Louder Than A Bomb, the world's largest team-based youth slam and subject of a forthcoming documentary by the same name.

The youth poetry slam movement will be the focus of a documentary film series produced by HBO and released in 2009.^[20] It will feature poets from Youth Speaks, Urban Word, Louder than a Bomb and other related youth poetry slam organizations.

In a 2005 interview, one of slam's best known poets Saul Williams praised the youth poetry slam movement, explaining:

Bibliography[link]

• Miguel Algarin & Bob Holman, ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe
• Gary Mex Glazner, Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry
• Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam
• Big Poppa E, The Wussy Boy Manifesto
• Beau Sia, A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge
• Daphne Gottlieb, Final Girl, Pelt, Why Things Burn, and 15 Ways to Stay Alive
• Douglas A. Martin, In the Time of Assignments
• Glenis Redmond, Backbone, Under the Sun,
• Jeffrey McDaniel, Alibi School, The Forgiveness Parade, and The Splinter Factory
• Jessica Care Moore, The Alphabet Verses the Ghetto, The Words Don't Fit in My Mouth, and God Is Not an American
• Justin Chin, Bite Hard, Harmless Medicine, and Gutted
• M. Ayodele Heath, Otherness
• Michael Salinger, Neon, Outspoken, and Well Defined: Vocabulary in Rhyme (with Sam Henderson)
• Patricia Smith, Big Towns, Big Talk : Poems, Close to Death : Poems, Life According to Motown, Teahouse Of The Almighty, and Blood Dazzler
• Rachel McKibbens, Pink Elephant
• Ragan Fox, Heterophobia and Exile in Gayville
• Regie Gibson, Storms Beneath the Skin
• Shane Koyczan, Visiting Hours
• Tara Betts, Arc and Hue
• Taylor Mali, What Learning Leaves, and Top Secret Slam Strategies
• Helen Gregory, The Quiet Revolution of Poetry Slam: The Sustainability of Cultural Capital in the Light of Changing Artistic Conventions. "Ethnography and Education", Vol. 3 (1): 61-71.
• Roger Bonair-Agard, Gully and Tarnish and Masquerade
• Saul Williams, The Seventh Octave, she, said the shotgun to the head, and The Dead Emcee Scrolls
• Tyehimba Jess, leadbelly

See also[link]

• Spoken word
• Performance poetry
• List of performance poets
• Results of the National Poetry Slam
• Oral poetry

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Poetry Slam

• International Poetry Slam Portal (european)
• "An Incomplete History of Slam" at e-poets.net
• "Verbs On Asphalt: A History of the Nuyorican Poetry Slam"
• Documentary Film about the National Poetry Slam
• Indiefeed Performance Poetry Channel Nine-Part Podcast Series on the History of the New York City Poetry Slam
• GotPoetry.com / performance poetry and Slam Poetry web directory.
• Prize Poem: an online poetry slam

Taylor Mali
Taylor Mali at the international school in Stockholm
Born	(1965-03-28) March 28, 1965 (age 47) New York City, New York, USA
Occupation	Poet, Teacher, Voice Actor
Nationality	American
Literary movement	Slam Poetry
Notable work(s)	What Learning Leaves
Spouse(s)	Marie-Elizabeth Mundheim
Influences Billy Collins, Saul Williams, Walt Whitman, Rives, Mary Oliver, and Naomi Shihab Nye
www.taylormali.com

Taylor McDowell Mali (born 28 March 1965) is an American slam poet, humorist, teacher, and voiceover artist.^[1][2][3]

Life[link]

A 10th-generation native of New York City, Taylor Mali graduated from the Collegiate School, a private school for boys, in 1983. He received a B.A. in English from Bowdoin College in 1987 and an M.A. in English/Creative Writing from Kansas State University in 1993. He also studied drama with the Royal Shakespeare Academy at Oxford. One of four children, his mother was children's book author Jane L. Mali,^[4] a recipient of the American Book Award, and his father was H. Allen Mali, vice president of Henry W.T. Mali & Co., manufacturers of pool table coverings. He is the great-great-grandson of John Taylor Johnston, founding president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1993, he married Rebecca Ruth Tauber, who died in 2004. On May 13, 2006 he married Marie-Elizabeth Mundheim,^[5] a high school friend.

Poetry[link]

Taylor Mali performing at the international school in Stockholm

As a slam poetry performer, Taylor Mali has been on seven National Poetry Slam teams; six appeared on the finals stage and four won the competition (1996 with Team Providence; 1997, 2000 and 2002 with Team NYC-Urbana). Mali is the author of What Learning Leaves and the Last Time as We Are (Write Bloody Publishing), has recorded four CDs, and is included in various anthologies. Poets who have influenced him include Billy Collins, Saul Williams, Walt Whitman, Rives, Mary Oliver, and Naomi Shihab Nye. He is perhaps best known for the poem "What Teachers Make."

He appeared in Taylor Mali & Friends Live at the Bowery Poetry Club and the documentaries "SlamNation" (1997) and "Slam Planet" (2006). He was also in the HBO production, "Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry," which won a Peabody Award in 2003. Taylor Mali is the former president of Poetry Slam Incorporated, and he has performed with such renowned poets as Billy Collins and Allen Ginsberg. Although he retired from the National Poetry Slam competition in 2005,^[6] he still helps curate NYC-Urbana Poetry Series, held weekly at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Teaching[link]

Taylor Mali spent nine years teaching English, history, and math, including stints at Browning School, a boys' school on the Upper East Side of New York City, and Cape Cod Academy, a K-12 private school on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He now lectures and conducts workshops for teachers and students all over the world. In 2001 Taylor Mali used a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts to develop the one-man show "Teacher! Teacher!" about poetry, teaching, and math. He is a strong advocate for the nobility of teaching and in 2000 he set out to create 1,000 new teachers through "poetry, persuasion, perseverance, or passion." As of January 13, 2012, he has 891.^[7]

Published works[link]

Books[link]

• What Learning Leaves, 2002 - ISBN 1-887012-17-6

Audio CDs[link]

• The Difference Between Left & Wrong, 1995
• Poems from the Like Free Zone, 2000
• Conviction, 2003
• Icarus Airlines, 2007

Anthologies[link]

Collections in which Taylor Mali's work is included

• Poetry on Stage: At the Red Barn Theatre, Key West, 1995 ISBN 978-1-888036-00-8
• Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry, 1998, ISBN 1-55065-112-9
• Will Work For Peace: New Political Poems, 1999, ISBN 0-9666459-1-X
• Bearing Witness, 2001, ISBN 978-1-56976-130-4
• Freedom to Speak Anthology, 2002, ISBN 1-893972-07-0
• The Spoken Word Revolution 2003, ISBN 978-1-4022-0037-3

CD Anthologies[link]

Collections in which Taylor Mali's work is included

• Attack of the Urbanabots (The Wordsmith Press, 2007)
• New High Score (The Wordsmith Press, 2004)
• Writers Week IX (WWIX, 2004)
• Best of Urbana 2003 (The Wordsmith Press, 2003)
• The Kerfuffle Incident: Best of the Kalamazoo Poetry Slam (KPS, 2003)
• Urbana: Bowery Poetry Club (The Wordsmith Press, 2002)
• Freedom to Speak Anthology(CD) (The Wordsmith Press, 2002)
• Spoken Word Underground (The Wordsmith Press, 2001)
• NYC Slams (Anthology) (PoetCD, 2000)

Narration[link]

• American Fairy Tales, audiobook, 1998
• Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World, audiobook, 2000
• Hope Along the Wind: The Story of Harry Hay, documentary, 2002
• Blizzard!, audiobook, 2003
• The Great Fire, audiobook, 2003
• Revenge of the Whale, audiobook, 2005
• ESCAPE! The Story of the Great Houdini, audiobook, 2006
• Close To Shore, audiobook, 2007

Awards[link]

• 1996, 1997, 2000, 2002 - National Poetry Slam winning team
• 2001 - U. S. Comedy Arts Festival jury prize for best solo performance, "Teacher! Teacher!"
• 2003 - AudioFile Earphones Award for The Great Fire.

See also[link]

Poetry portal

• Performance poetry
• Poetry slam
• Spoken word
• Voice acting
• Bowery Poetry Club

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Taylor Mali at the Internet Movie Database
• Taylor Mali's channel on YouTube
• Taylor Mali profile, Famecast web site
• Podcasts of poems
• Watch Taylor Mali recite his poems at Open-Door Poetry
• Audio of "What Teachers Make," "Like Lilly Like Wilson," "The Entire Act of Sorrow," "Depression Too Is a Kind of Fire," "Holding Your Position," "For the Life of Me," and "How To Write a Political Poem" (among others) on Indiefeed Performance Poetry Channel

YouTube videos[link]

Mali posts videos on his channel at YouTube of his own and other performances:

• Like You Know on YouTube
• What Teachers Make on YouTube
• The Impotence of Proofreading on YouTube
• Like Lilly Like Wilson on YouTube

Sarah Kay is a professor of French at New York University.

Kay was a student in the UK at the University of Oxford. She started her teaching career at the University of Liverpool then moved to the University of Cambridge. She was head of department at Cambridge from 1996 until 2001 and Director of Studies at Girton College, Cambridge from 2003 to 2005. Kay has been a fellow of the British Academy since 2004 and was awarded a D.Litt (Cambridge) in 2005.^[1]

Publications[link]

• Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003)
• (with Malcolm Bowie and Terence Cave) A Short History of French Literature (Oxford University Press, 2003)
• Courtly Contradictions (Stanford University Press, 2001)
• (with Simon Gaunt) The Troubadours. An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
• The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance (Oxford University Press, 1995)
• (as co-editor with Miri Rubin) Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester University Press, 1994)
• (as editor) Raoul de Cambrai (Oxford University Press, 1992)
• Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1990)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Kay's profile at Princeton University
• Review of Kay's Courtly Contradictions published in The Medieval Review, 2004.

This biography article of a United Kingdom academic is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e