Slamicide takes poetry off the page and into the Den

What do you get when you cross poetry, theater and social justice? And how many slam poets does it take to change a light bulb?

The latter remains a mystery, but the former would yield a variety of zany and off-beat answers from the group of poets who walked into the bar last Sunday at SLAMicide's weekly poetry slam at the Den on St. Paul Street. Offered the choice of CDs (for "people who didn't catch all the words the first time around"), DVDs (for "visual learners") and chapbooks (for "people who like to actually read their poetry on paper") by feature poet Nitche "The Original Woman" Ward, one poet in the audience piped up, "And do you also have a personality test, so we can tell which of those people we are?"

Dave "Granma" Schein (who founded SLAMicide in September 2000) opened the evening with a rant against Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder and chairman of the American Family Association, which promotes conservative Christian values. The Reverend recently launched an effort to boycott McDonald's because of the fast-food chain's $20,000 donation to the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. His poetic diatribe ended with a defiant vow to walk through the Golden Arches toting his pink triangle, re-casting the well-worn "I'm lovin' it!" into a gay-rights battle cry.

This passionate dedication to social justice set the tone for the rest of the evening. According to one of the poets, a Baltimore native named Rachel who has been living in Israel for the past nine years, "People here are solution-oriented. They're not just kvetching ... They're saying beautiful and important things."

Beautiful and important: the art of slam, as defined on the SLAMicide's Web site (www.slamicide.com) is "competitive performance poetry." The rules: Each performer has three minutes to deliver an original piece, and randomly picked judges from the audience award participants a score of 0.0 to 10.0, influenced by how loudly the rest of the audience applauds the performance. The scores are added, and the top-scoring poet wins - usually, a cash prize.

This evening's slam started with an open-mic session, which is non-competitive. Anyone can sign up to perform, and the pieces do not have to be original. A middle-aged man read two poems by Rudyard Kipling, an undergraduate from Goucher did a dramatic recitation of "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert Service, a MICA graduate performed a love-hate poem about his art-school experience and I read a poem of my own.

I introduced my poem with the disclaimer that it was my first time reading at the slam, and the audience was supportive: There was loud applause, and someone commented that it was good to have "fresh blood." As a musician, I can tell when an audience is truly interacting with a performance, and this was a completely engaged audience - I could feel them hanging onto my words, and I even got a few laughs.

The environment and the feeling I experienced in front of the microphone reminded me more of a play or concert than the kind of poetry readings I've attended at universities and bookstores. Rather than an oral version of published writing, it was the creation of something new and alive, in the moment, onstage.

The difference between a poetry slam and an academic poetry reading, as SLAMicide team member Chris Wilson explained, is that slam seeks a "return to the oral tradition of poetry ... It's not enough for a poem to be good on the page; It has to be gripping and entertaining."

Slam was founded in the 1980s by a group of construction workers who wanted a way to share their poetry with each other in a friendly, familiar venue (namely, bars). Nowadays, Wilson said, "Slam is bridging over into academia," in an effort to establish its legitimacy as an art form, proving that it can be "as strong on the page as it is on the stage."

In fact, a majority of the poets present Sunday evening had some sort of theater background. David Hack, a retired employee of the Library of Congress, is currently taking part-time classes at Montgomery College towards a B.A. in musical theater. Rachel, who works for the Jerusalem newspaper J-Post while working towards a master's in English Lit, said that the performance aspect of slam appeals to her because she is also "an actress on the side." When I asked Dave "Granma" to compare slam poetry to academic-style poetry readings, he shrugged and commented, "A lot of the literati will accuse us of being troubadours ... and I'm like, uh, yeah?"

Troubadours, performers of the middle ages, typically wrote poems of love and chivalry. Today, slam poets like Chris August still compose lines about these fundamental aspects of the human condition. In his winning piece about finding a personal connection with a police officer who tried to search his car for drugs solely because of its "beat up" appearance, he said, "The world is so profoundly f---ed up/That it took two hours for either of us to even try to know the other."

After the open-mic, feature poet Nitche did a half-hour set, and then four poets competed in the slam. The atmosphere was close-knit, exuberant and not self-conscious: Several of the poets performed barefoot, and there were many inside jokes and hugs shared between the members of the SLAMicide team. Nitche's topics ranged from a political rant against America's culture of thoughtless gas consumption to a more introspective piece written during a "lonely" period of her life.

"For us broke motherf---ers, we use poetry as a therapist ... That's why some of us are crazy, 'cause that s--- don't always work!" she quipped.

"We certainly encourage quality writing first," Hack said, but what makes the power of slam unique is its focus on social activism and the intimate relationship it forges between performer and audience.

August describes his slam pieces as "three-minute, one-man shows," and although he writes stories and plays and has also been published in poetry journals, he "loves the instant gratification, the immediate feedback, of the slam audience."

And this slam audience was quite vocal. Nitche's harrowing cries for justice ("This is for the seven women being raped right now in the middle of this poem!") drew enthusiastic cheers, as did Hack's touching narrative of his return to poetry after a lifetime of other work: "Now I'm a student in the 'the-ay-ter' ... I'm thanking my Creator ... And if it happens bye and bye/That I do well, well ... then ... /I may give song another try."

Along with its potential for artistic activism, slam poetry provides one answer for the current era of young poets seeking a new way to encourage their peers to give poetry "another try."

SLAMicide is held every Sunday at the Den (3327 St. Paul St.). Open-mic sign ups begin at 7 p.m., and there is a $5 cover charge.