The following was delivered as a paper for Huddersfield
University’s Open Mic Symposium 6th May 2017
My housemate, Dave Jarman,
runs two open mics. Monday and Tuesday
mornings often one of the first questions I ask him is: “How was the open mic?” Responses range from quiet to busy, typical
to nuts, fucking mint to a bit shit.
York has a very specific
open mic culture. There’s one most
nights, usually more than one. Sunday
you can nip from the Fleece to the Hop to Dusk, which runs from 11pm to
late. You see the same faces, it’s a
community of people who play in each other’s bands, go to each other’s nights
and, inevitable, talk about each other behind their backs.
I’m part of the poetry and
spoken word scene, and there’s no better thrill for me to sit down and set the
scene to rights with my other poetry mates.
Did you hear that person’s new poem?
That night was ace. That night
was a bit naff. Their new book is
out. If I hear one more poem about
fucking dinosaurs…!
I think this is across the
open mic spectrum. I think inevitably
audiences, and performers, have their favourite acts from a night, despite that
not being the ethos of the evening.
Western Culture is shaped
to appreciate competition. It’s at the
centre of capitalism. Top of the film
and music charts. Top of the football
league. Top of the polls. We’ve seen it
in the Buzzfeed articles of Top 10 Clickbaits you Need To Avoid and we’ve seen
it in the binary of 1 Government, 1 Prime Minister, 1 President, 1 Referendum
Outcome coming out on top.
In a slam each poet gets a
time limit, usually 3 minutes and judges, usually chosen from the audience,
just give each poet a score, usually from 1 to 10 (with decimal points). The winner receives some form of monetary
rewards, either a paid gig, some money or a even a trophy.
As Tim Clare puts it in
his essay from the Penned In The Margin's Stress Fracture’s collection: “Analysing a slam poem’s reaction is
refreshingly binary: either it wins or
it doesn’t.”
Tim is an incredibly
energetic and playful poet, a regular at Latitude and the Edinburgh
Fringe. He’s not afraid to scream, to
writhe, to improvise, to utterly deconstruct genre to manic levels of
intensity.
“Slam exists outside the
echo chamber of academia; it’s consumers aren’t expected to recognise abstruse
Classical references or reductive, self-indulgent conversations with previous
writers.” It values the opinion of the
casual listener as much as the learned expert.
When I allocate judges, I often get this response “I don’t know anything
about poetry.” Doesn’t matter, judge
something on your terms, your experience, your perception. You can’t be wrong. Just disagreed with. This is democratising, taking power away from
the structured order of publishing and academia and into the audience in the
heat of the moment.
The best thing about a
slam, is it gives more agency to the audience.
Whether judging or not, everyone is calculating their own private
score. They can debate this afterwards amongst
themselves. You find yourself rooting
for a poet over another poet. The sports
comparison only goes so far: yes it’s a
competition but entirely subjective.
It’s not about quantifiable goals.
However, by setting up
this competitive and opinion-based structure, it encourages people to disagree
with the judges, to discuss who they thought was their favourite act, they
should have done a different poem, that wasn’t as strong, if they’d only learnt
the poem etc. At the last slam I
compered for a student society, 3 of the 4 entrants had never entered a slam
previously. I put this down to the
unusual nature of the event being attractive proposition.
Post-night, you will have
a favourite acts, because all our views are shaped to criticise and conclude.
Years ago I did a gig in
Bolton. No one was really in the
audience, it was nice but I left feeling like it didn’t serve a purpose. A chap I was playing with said “it was an answer
to a question nobody asked”. But there
is a point to the slam night. It’s to
crown a victor. I’ve heard it said: “The point isn’t the points, the point is the
poetry” but I tend to sideline this phrase, and ideology. If it’s not the point to get points, what’s
the point of the points? When you distil
a slam night down, yes it’s about fun, it’s about performance, it’s about
sharing art but we have a narrative drive from doors open to ending poem. It means we can keep the night on track,
audiences can zone in and out, but they know where the story is going. They just don’t know who the protagonist is.
In Aristotle’s Poetics, he
says: “Tragedies are not performed in order to represent character, though
character is involved for the sake of the action. The plot is the first essential part of
tragedy, its lifeblood, so to speak.”
I don’t want to go into
too much detail of the various ideas of Propp and Todorov because Narrative
theory is a wide spectrum of ideas and perceptions. But essentially Stories have rules, they have
the starting balance, breaking of equilibrium, they have climax, they have
resolution. They have structure.
Aristotle says “The
character takes second place” and in the slam, the character is merely a
component of the story (though hopefully not a tragic one). Especially with an established slam, there’s
a predictable format: Intro from host,
sacrificial poem to warm-up the crowd, first round, guest poet, second round
with top 5 scorers, crown the winner who does a finale poem.
So within this structure
we have introduction of the world, the characters, the conflict, the climax and
the resolution. And if even if the
audience know the entrant as a friend, here they are transformed as a character
within this narrative, a slammer eager to outdo their opponents.
Perhaps there is something
refreshing, even liberating, to become part of this predictable structure and
become a cog within the slam machine for the evening? You are no longer simply a human, you are a
performer, a slammer, a high scorer, a winner?
Certainly as a character,
you have your desire, and drive. Like
Richard III after the crown, Hamlet after revenge, Romeo after love: the slammer is after a high score and
victory. As play-wright Stanislavski
says: “tell me what you want, and I’ll
tell you who you are”. Play-wright Alan
Ayckbourn says: “No one crops up in a
play without a specific function.” The
function of each slammer is, at their core, to win. Sure, there are other reasons for entering,
to boost their confidence, to try new material, out of curiosity, get into the
night for free, to impress someone. But,
at its core, there is a specific, quantifiable, understandable, goal for each
character in the slam. No more “answers
to a question nobody asked” like my Bolton gig.
Obviously I’m being slightly
frivolous to imply that a slam is like a play.
But my adding this layer of a dramatic arc, everyone’s energy is
upped. They have adrenaline, they have
purpose, they have a goal. By openly
celebrating the slam as a competition, it allows the poet to embody an aim. And that, I would argue, makes everything
tantalisingly dramatic.
But are slams truly
shaking the establishment? Horkheimer
and Adorno in Dialectic of Entitlement talk about the monopoly of culture that
is a “common denomination for cataloguing and classification which bring
culture under the sphere of administration.”
Culture is controlled and
defined as something to do in relation to work.
“Amusement under late
capitalism is the prolongation of work.
It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to
recruit strength in order to cope with it again.”
This means that culture
has no benefit beyond recharging humans go back into work, continue to slave in
the workplace, to then afford some culture at the end of the week.
“Pleasure hardens into
boredom because, if it to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and
therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association. No independent thinking must be expected from
the audience… any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly
avoided.”
Ah, but Dialectic of
Entitlement was written in 1947, a post-war world where culture was tied to the
difficult task of rebuilding a war-ravaged world. The late 50s and 60s brought counter-culture,
and slam poetry owes its legacy to Allen Ginsberg, Gil Scott-Heron and Patti
Smith. Of course slams do call for
mental effort from the audience, it actively encourages and enforces this
“independent thinking.”
Audiences at slams are not
passive. Even if they are not a scorer, the format means they can disagree with
the scores and the outcome. And if
someone thinks they could do better, they’re welcome to sign up for the next
slam.
The problem with slams is
that there is fast becoming a model for how slams work, and who wins. What kind of poems tend to win slams?
Tim Clare points out
successful slam poetry often takes one of two forms:
1. a first-person identity politics monologue
championing the position of an ostensibly marginalised voice
2. the presentation of a strawmen argument –
typically conservative – which the poet proceeds to tear apart, often
humorously.
At a slam this week, two
of the competitors said their poems weren’t particularly ‘slammy’.
Negative aspects of slams:
·
The poetry that
wins has been crafted to hit certain criteria, it’s funny or political. If a slam is a competition, like any athlete,
they follow a certain mode of winning.
·
It puts far too
much emphasis on celebrity, the ability to get up and get the crowd on side,
regardless of the writing quality of the poem
·
It reduces the
poem into a brief 3 minute maximum format
·
It creates a
who-to-book formula, the slam-winning poets apparently have a decent CV, and
poets who can’t, or don’t wish to, win slams seemingly get left to the wayside.
‘Slam Poetry Sucks’, a parody on YouTube by
Harris Alterman. In it, he takes these
forms of performance, writing and style and produces a very accurate, if a bit
nasty, satire on slams.
A comment on YouTube:
“Sums
up the entire slam poetry movement, but minus the relentless Marxist propaganda
(especially hypocritical, considering that slam poets are invariably privileged
middle class students) and interminable clichés and tendency to yell out and
overemphasise lines made of cheap political maxims. So it's actually a bit
better than the crap I've had to sit through at spoken word events.”-
Iain Robb, 2016
So what am I saying?
I’d argue that all Open
mics are intrinsically competitive. The
slam format embraces this and, for better or worse, creates a vibe you don’t
find at a traditional open mic.
Is that because we live in
a competitive society?
Is that an organic space
for people to improve?
Arguably in this
capitalist society, competition forces wages and working conditions down. The end result is: profit.
What is the ‘profit’ gained
from an open mic? I guess the
recognition you entertained people.
Maybe future gigs. In a slam
there is the very definitive reward. Or
prize. Or capital. We could even see this victory as profit.
On a grassroots level, the
poetry scene means that the individual artist owns the means of production,
e.g. their own mind, mouth and ability to perform. But we’re still selling that product, the
poem, to the slam audience.
In order to prove our YouTube friend, Iain Robb
correct, I’m going to quote a little Karl Marx.
I’m a walking, talking, poetrying stereotype. In the Communist
Manifesto, Karl Marx states: “These
labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every
other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes
of competition, to all the
fluctuations of the market.”
Obviously Marx is talking about economic
competition, but at the same time we cannot underappreciated the comparison
with a poet selling themselves at a slam, becoming the commodity, creating a
poem from their labour, the “fluctuations of the market” being the whim of the
audience, the type of night, the context of the week, the comparison with other
poets at the event.
Key event happened that week? Do your political poem. Headliner a feminist? Do your feminist poem. Everyone doing very serious pieces? Do your funny poem.
Das Kapital, Marx adds “The labourer is not a
capitalist, although he brings a commodity to market, namely his own skin.”
Open mics exist as an
open space, slam’s competitive element adds a capitalist undertone of labour
for profit, or at least victory. We
poets are not the capitalists, though we produce fodder for the slam engine.
The arts can be
commodified so that the end result is owned by the corporation rather than the
individual. Comic books being a good
example. Teams of individual writers and
artists create the books, stories and characters but the result is a Marvel or
DC product. The recent wave of poets
writing poems for adverts, like Nationwide or Deliveroo or the Jeep Renegade,
are the same, the poet’s produce is not their own.
But there is a point that
slam poetry has been monopolised. Has
slam poetry become another form of commercial consumption? To quote my favourite podcast: Tab A into Slot B poetry?
Slam has hit a popular
point, wherein it can be defined, predicted and even rigged so that the
outcomes are all a palatable combination of the predictions I have mentioned
before.
I love slams, and will
continue to promote them. But I will
also continue to redefine, even undermine them.
I want to stop the competitive element turning slams into a
commodification of art, whilst at the same time seeing them rocket as an
accessible form of inspiring, agitating and divisive entertainment.
There are many ways that
we can make sure slams stay passionate and democratic and diverse. I’ll touch on these in a later blog, so your
thoughts would be highly appreciated.
10/10
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