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General Discussion / Slam poem form essay
« on: March 12, 2007, 09:01:14 AM »
I love the "Slam poem" debate - is it a form? is it not a form? - so it was with much anticipation that I took to the essay at the back of Gary Mex Glazner's book How to Make a Life as a Poet, entitled "The Slam Poem as Poetry Form" by Logan Phillips and Suzy La Follette.
Alas, I felt my excitement wane and slip as I went from assumption to assumption, unfairness to unfairness, and in the end I was underwhelmed by their offering to the debate.
There is the overwhelming sophomorism of the whole affair (much of it reads like "My First Slam Debate for Dummies"), with its plug-in-and-prove arguments: half-handed Get Me High Lounge origins, hip-hop influence - complete with the obligatory-if-skating Gil Scott-Heron/Last Poets references, the Taylor Mali quote, the three-minute pool from which all slam poems evolve, et al. It is the sort of argument that captures all of the agruments, but ten years after the fact.
I make no secret of my anti-form position where Slam poems are concerned - to me a Slam poem is merely a poem that's been read in a Slam. And while I may concede to the observation of tendencies in slams that suggest a genre or form could be developing as keen, almost none of the pro-formers acknowledge the fact that their findings are largely based on what appears in slams, yet bypass the fact that while focusing their attention on the well-to-do slammers they spend almost no time on why a winner or finalist may be reading what they're reading. That poets want to win slams has as much to do with what types of poems consistently appear in slams.
It's a essay worth reading if you've not been in the debate about form much, but if you have, this is old territory that makes old mistakes.
Alas, I felt my excitement wane and slip as I went from assumption to assumption, unfairness to unfairness, and in the end I was underwhelmed by their offering to the debate.
There is the overwhelming sophomorism of the whole affair (much of it reads like "My First Slam Debate for Dummies"), with its plug-in-and-prove arguments: half-handed Get Me High Lounge origins, hip-hop influence - complete with the obligatory-if-skating Gil Scott-Heron/Last Poets references, the Taylor Mali quote, the three-minute pool from which all slam poems evolve, et al. It is the sort of argument that captures all of the agruments, but ten years after the fact.
I make no secret of my anti-form position where Slam poems are concerned - to me a Slam poem is merely a poem that's been read in a Slam. And while I may concede to the observation of tendencies in slams that suggest a genre or form could be developing as keen, almost none of the pro-formers acknowledge the fact that their findings are largely based on what appears in slams, yet bypass the fact that while focusing their attention on the well-to-do slammers they spend almost no time on why a winner or finalist may be reading what they're reading. That poets want to win slams has as much to do with what types of poems consistently appear in slams.
It's a essay worth reading if you've not been in the debate about form much, but if you have, this is old territory that makes old mistakes.