Thanks Aimee,
I stopped SLAMming recently for a number of reasons, more personal than poetic, but I was just chuckling thinking of something that seems to happen to me at every SLAM. I go up there and read, usually something I wrote an hour ago at the bar, get polite applause, and then the MC (usually Charles at the Berkeley SLAM) says, "Imagine someone trying to win SLAM with poetry", which is a joke about how squarely "poetic" my writing is, in contrast to the hyper-performative nature of what seems to succeed at SLAM.
I really like what you had to say about silence and turning up the quiet instead of the loud. As a fellow (or sister?- funny how English has no convention for partnering oneself across a gender line that doesn't favour one or the other) musician, I am fascinated by what you can do with dynamics to engage an audience, like taking a bashing, loud drum solo down to a quiet scratching on the floor. This kind of thing takes a sort of technical mastery to achieve, which often is impossible in performance poetry venues: the PA always sucks, the venue has bad acoustics, the bardtender is on the phone. I've seen some really clever performers get by this and command all the aspects of a performance, but this is few and far between. The solution may be to up the ante on the technical aspects of performing, more preparation, better equipment, etc. but it seems like this would reduce the egalitarian nature (or theory, anyways) of an open-mic, where you just set it up and let everybody take their shot. However, it is a shame to see how often this egalitarian venue gets taken over by a bunch of aggressive dudes, whether they're poser white MC's or the educated urban elite, to turn it into a penis fest (which is to say I agree with Erika a bit as well).
On that note, did anyone see The Yes Men. The corporate leisure suit is worth the price of admission (I won't ruin it), but there's a particularly poignant moment where the group (who do guerilla satire at WTO conventions) are writing a serious denouncement of the WTO to deliver in Australia, and they turn to eachother and say, "do you get the sense that sincerity is less fun than satire.- Yeah, I think you're right, sincerity really is less fun". Maybe even the New kind.
I stopped SLAMming recently for a number of reasons, more personal than poetic, but I was just chuckling thinking of something that seems to happen to me at every SLAM. I go up there and read, usually something I wrote an hour ago at the bar, get polite applause, and then the MC (usually Charles at the Berkeley SLAM) says, "Imagine someone trying to win SLAM with poetry", which is a joke about how squarely "poetic" my writing is, in contrast to the hyper-performative nature of what seems to succeed at SLAM.
I really like what you had to say about silence and turning up the quiet instead of the loud. As a fellow (or sister?- funny how English has no convention for partnering oneself across a gender line that doesn't favour one or the other) musician, I am fascinated by what you can do with dynamics to engage an audience, like taking a bashing, loud drum solo down to a quiet scratching on the floor. This kind of thing takes a sort of technical mastery to achieve, which often is impossible in performance poetry venues: the PA always sucks, the venue has bad acoustics, the bardtender is on the phone. I've seen some really clever performers get by this and command all the aspects of a performance, but this is few and far between. The solution may be to up the ante on the technical aspects of performing, more preparation, better equipment, etc. but it seems like this would reduce the egalitarian nature (or theory, anyways) of an open-mic, where you just set it up and let everybody take their shot. However, it is a shame to see how often this egalitarian venue gets taken over by a bunch of aggressive dudes, whether they're poser white MC's or the educated urban elite, to turn it into a penis fest (which is to say I agree with Erika a bit as well).
On that note, did anyone see The Yes Men. The corporate leisure suit is worth the price of admission (I won't ruin it), but there's a particularly poignant moment where the group (who do guerilla satire at WTO conventions) are writing a serious denouncement of the WTO to deliver in Australia, and they turn to eachother and say, "do you get the sense that sincerity is less fun than satire.- Yeah, I think you're right, sincerity really is less fun". Maybe even the New kind.
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