Euphrat Weston agrees about the importance of individuality and developmental identity. “Technique falls into place because of the things you have to say,” she says. “It personalizes other stories that would otherwise just be another statistic.”

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

While individuality is inherent in spoken word, the competitive framework of a slam threatens to turn those personal stories back into statistics by reducing poems to comparative scores.

At the Cantab, it’s routine that a slam follow the open mic. Tonight, it’s the first round of try-outs for the team that will go to the National Poetry Slam being held this year in Boston—hosted in part by none other than the Cantab Lounge. A short break follows the open mic and the slam begins. The emcee takes the mic and says, “we are going to have two hours of spoken word poetry. You will be tired; you will cry. You will also laugh, and you will break your heart then build it up again better.”

The National Poetry Slam began in 1990, with three teams; it now features around 80 teams and lasts five days. The popularity of slam, however, is confined to the private sphere. When asked what makes a good poem in an interview, Yale Professor Harold Bloom lamented the rise of competitive performance poetry: “Now it’s all gone to hell. I can’t bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other … This isn’t even silly; it is the death of art.”

At the Cantab, the crowd climbs over itself to get a drink, or to line up for the restrooms, or to get another drink. I watch on from my corner and scribble, but before I know it I am being addressed. Brian S. Ellis has been coming here for five years, writing poems and “helping out.” He has a long schoolboy face with toothbrush sideburns and a wisp of beard; his green, striped tie is loud under his grey suit vest. Ellis wants me to be one of the five audience judges for the slam. “Just make a judgment,” he tells me. “Just do what your gut tells you.” My inexperience is an advantage: “Because the job of art is to communicate, the job of the poet is to make you feel!”

I am given a marker and a whiteboard. “You have three seconds to make a snap judgment about art, based on how much the poem makes you feel.” The scoring is Olympic, of course, with 0.0 the worst imaginable poem and 10.0 a perfect work of art. The job comes with free drinks.

A young man addresses a powerful monologue to autism, externalizing the discourse that would confine his life and trying to rise above the label given to him. I give it 8.7. Every time I give a bad score, I feel compelled to wipe off the board quickly. The death of a girlfriend: 9.2. Coming out: 7.8 (the jokes were a bit corny). The judge across from me—a self-styled ‘writer,’ a young bloke who stretches a black polo over thickset shoulders—keeps giving scores above 9, including a 9.9 and a 10. (Eventually he gives a 5 to a poem about the many types of smurf erotica, which climaxes in the line “who’s your Papa Smurf now?”) I can’t tell which of us is missing the point.

The most powerful poems are the most extreme ones. The rawer, the more confronting, the more I am inclined to give a high score. Little gasps or shouts go up from the audience from time to time. Every bad score is booed, occasionally accompanied by a “what’s wrong with you?” I only get one of these.

It turns out that I have done well—I’m told to come back next week—and it was just as they said: I laughed, I cried, and I confidently adjudicated between decimal points.

As these scores imply, there are better spoken word poets and worse ones. There are celebrities and no-hopers. There are enormous competitions where the very best rise to the top and become household names. Even the anti-elitist movement has its elite, and the slam is where they are knighted.

The folks at the Cantab weren’t competitive about things; slam was just a play for intrigue. Euphrat Weston claims that the all slams she has been to give a disclaimer about the form’s artifice. But there is no avoiding the effect that competition has on poetry. If the spoken word movement insists on inclusivity and authenticity, then what makes a winner and a loser? And if the quantity of emotion is the only metric, then what stops an art form from veering toward cliché and bombast?

CATHARSIS AND COMMUNION

For spoken word at large, the difference lies in the moment of performance, which radically changes both the nature and the goals of the art form. The act of performing a poem undoes it as a fixed, discrete unit of language. The poem is contained entirely in one unrepeated act of enunciation. The audience hears the voice of the poet, sees the tremble of a lip or the wave of a hand, and so is present for the moment of creation. Permanence is exchanged for relevance.

Euphrat Weston has many poems that she no longer performs. “I think, ‘I can’t read this anymore because it’s not me anymore,’” she says. Far from a bid to universal utterance, spoken word poets aspire to an expression of only that self that exists in the moment of performance. And that moment is contingent: the poem depends on the time, the place, and the audience. The act of performance is political and particularized, and ultimately the sole existence of the work—hence the supremacy of the individual voice, and the anti-dogmatic tendencies of the spoken word form.

In his essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes argues that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.” Spoken word poets do not write, they speak, and through their speech they insist on the point of origin so reduce the text to an instant. The fluid, developmental self has one opportunity to be understood correctly—at the expense, perhaps, of the complexity and the enduring richness of the work.

Spoken word represents a momentary catharsis for the listener and a lasting therapy for the poet: it is an opportunity for beauty and challenge and communion. In this sense, spoken word poetry departs from the conventional aims of art—it insists on the relevance of the poet over the transcendence of the poem. For a poem to instantly come alive, it has to face the fact of its immediate and inescapable death.

—Staff writer Alexander J.B. Wells can be reached at alexander.wells@college.harvard.edu.