Performance artists of all types enjoy the awe and the kudos coming their way from the general public. In return, any concert or performance turns livelier with audience participation. During the recent decades, more and more musicians--even those in the classical music field--have begun to encourage the audience to sing along or clap to the beat. This behavior has seeped out to other fields such as stand-up comedy and open-mic poetry readings.



With these facts in mind, I imagine, the slam poetry is succeeding because people are drawn into the magnetism of our clannish eras when everyone participated in the tribal dances, telling stories, and sing-along sessions. Truth is, I had not heard of “Slams” in regard to poetry, until--in the writing site I belong to--I started to participate in the slam poetry contests, hosted by two site members: one, a creative writing professor from Chicago and the other an English teacher/poet from Australia.

Later on, I found out that slam poetry was sometimes attacked by the academia with the idea that slams cheapen the true art of poetry. As an answer to this accusation, slam poets became more vocal and more organized to make themselves accepted as members of a serious performance media.

The first slam poetry started in 1984, in the Get Me High lounge, a Chicago jazz club, by a construction worker named Marc Smith. Two years later, Marc Smith offered a plan to another jazz club, the Green Mill. When the owner accepted Marc Smith's plan of hosting a poetry competition for performance poets every Saturday night, the slam poetry competition was introduced to the public arena.

Although the opposition to the poetry slams still exists, slams have performed an impressive function in promoting poetry to the general public. During the later years, more poetry books have been sold and an astonishing number of searches about poetry have been conducted on the internet search engines.

Poetry slams are here to stay because they have pushed poetry into the livelier world of performance, turning it into an intense experience for both the poet-participants and the audience. The art of poetry too, when faced with detachment or worse yet extinction, has welcomed the slams, as if returning to its earliest origin of spoken words made to be heard.

A serious poetry slam, as performance poetry, does not depend on the quality of the words, lines, and the poetic devices alone. It also involves oral skills such as eye contact with the audience, emphatic reading, voice control, and controlled body language. This is because poetry slams are performed primarily for the audience entertainment. A slam is not the same as an open-mic performance since an open-mic is there to encourage the poets while the audience fares second.

Sometime ago, I was among the audience in an informal poetry slam. True, it felt akin to a vaudeville show, but the audience participation and the poets' enjoyment were genuine. In an informal slam poetry contest, the judges are selected from among the audience and all forms of audience participation are encouraged, even booing the poets at the end or the middle of their poetry readings. If the audience is dissatisfied the poet leaves the stage; however, during the slam I watched nobody left the stage as the result of public booing. Probably, I was inside a quieter audience.

In the beginning, slam poetry used to be about specific subjects that involved public concerns like politics, baseball, social issues, etc. Afterwards, the themes and the subjects expanded in range immensely.

At present, poetry slams find worldwide fame due to the efforts of PSI or Poetry Slam Inc. and The National Poetry Slam or the annual slam championship tournament. During the first round of a serious slam competition, all entrants can read their poetry. The time period for each poem is three minutes. Poets are allowed to enter the succeeding rounds if they qualify. The judges' scores are numerical from zero to ten.

In the beginning, this competition was for poets singly. Nowadays, poets compete in four or five persons in a team in their home states and countries from North America and Europe. The winning teams travel to a city hosting the final competition. Since most local public radios broadcast the competition live to their listeners, the annual National Poetry Slam has become a popular event.

Besides the National Poetry Slam, any community may organize special slams such as: Dead Poet Slams that is reading from the works of deceased poets; Cover Slams where poets read other poets' works; Improv Slams where poets say whatever comes to their minds without previous preparation; Group-Poem Slams written by a group of poets instead of one; Haiku or Limerick Slams; and the very funny Bad Poem Slams or the Low-Ball Slams where the worst score wins.

Poetry slams are not a passing fad. Any form of entertainment that is grounded in imagination with its roots in art will surely endure excess showmanship or high-brow criticism. Poetry Slams and their organization Poetry Slam Inc. are here to stay in earnest.