A brief guide to slam poetry

By David Morgan

Competition poetry comes out of traditions as old as the hills but has come into existence as slam poetry over the last 25 years.

The first slam poetry competition was in Chicago at Green Mills music venue. Marc Smith had talked the owner into giving over the usually slow Sunday night slot to a live poetry session.

Originally the format was to be an open mic, followed by featured poets, followed by a regular slot done by Chicago Poetry Ensemble, the performance poetry team that Marc Smith had founded. But the CPE found that writing a new poetry show every week, was too demanding, and so the new format was born: a poetry competition run a bit like a boxing match.

Along with rap and hip-hop, slam poetry was stongly influenced by a jazz tradtion of solos and cutting. It was also heavily influenced by the revival of the oral tradition of poetry that came with the Beats. An immediate pre-cursor to the poetry slams in Chicago were the Poetry Circus competitions in Taos, New Mexico that actually took place in a boxing ring surrounded by hundreds of cheering/jeering fans.

The city of Chicago itself was also probably a big influence, as it had always seen itself as a rougher, tougher version of New York – “hog butcher to the world, city of the big shoulders”.

The rules

The basic rules of slam poetry have stayed pretty much the same through the years (although almost every slam has slight variations – especially in the UK). A poet reads/performs her poem, then the judges hold up their score cards, just as if it were an Olympic gymnastics competition: 7.8, 8.1, 8.0. There are usually three judges, picked at random from the crowd. The poets compete against each other in heats, then the winners go on to a final. It must be original poetry, performed with no props, costumes or musical accompaniment, and the usual time limit is 3 minutes.

Those involved in creating the slam poetry phenomenon were keenly aware that the term “poetry competition” is a bit of an oxymoron, that it’s not really possible to compare two poems and say which is the best on a scale of 1 to 10. In fact, one of the favourite slam sayings is “The best poem never wins.”

But the idea is that competition adds an edge, both to the performers and to the audience. At it’s best, a good slam can have everyone leaving the show thinking about the poems, what they said, and what makes a good poem in general.

It is no exaggeration to say that slam poetry has completely rewritten the map of poetry performance in the US (and more and more in the rest of the ‘Western’ world). Virtually every major city in the US has one or more regular slam poetry competitions, and the national championships have audiences numbered in the thousands (ok, one or two thousand, but still…).

In the UK, the largest audiences number in the hundreds. There are slams in many cities, and a growing number of literary festivals feature poetry slams. It is not possible to list all the slams in the UK, but here’s a few of the main ones and/or their organisers.

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This article first appeared in the Guild's magazine, UK Writer (Autumn 2005).