Poetry slam

I've never had much of an appreciation for poetry. Ok - let me be perfectly honest - I've always considered it as the height of self-indulgent emo. When forced to read it at school I always resisted through ruthless reductionism: breaking down the whole, wrenching the meaning and rhetorical device out of every syllable, memorising it for my exam and reducing it to just another thing on the checklist to rote learn. I can name a dozen books that have changed my life, but not a single poem. Maybe Tagore managed to raise a few hairs on the back of my neck, but that's about the extent of my engagement with verse.

Today I happened to attend a poetry slam at Bumbershoot, Seattle's annual music and arts festival. The format is very simple - it's a competition where the poets come on stage and recite their work, and pre-selected members of the audience judge their performances based on delivery and content. In concept it sounds a little too spelling bee, but the result is really amazing. For the first time in my life, I actually truly appreciated and enjoyed poetry.

The poets on stage ranged from a forty-year-old woman from Seattle, to a ragtag group of lefty uni students from Berkeley, to a bunch of underprivileged high school kids. They yelled, they whispered, they punched the air, they grinned knowingly, reciting on everything from Blackbeard the pirate to September 11 to childhood abuse to the art of seducing attractive hippies at Pike Place Market. Whatever the subject, the poetry came straight from the heart, and hearing it from the mouth of the poet was a transcendental experience. It brought all that wordsmithery, which never jumped off the page for me, to life.

I never thought I'd hear myself say the words "we should go to more poetry readings". But that was just incredible.

Comments

[ronin]

Damn, another Bumbershoot that I missed...
If I wasn't so busy with work I'd be pissed.
I ought to attend more stuff like that while I'm here
Guess I'm too disorganised, maybe next year?
Ok now I'm sounding like a tool...
Then again I never was very cool :).