[EDITED TO ADD:
Disclaimer: Amazon Syren is not the online name of Luna Allison. Likewise, the opinions expressed in this blog are not the Official Opinions of Voices of Venus or anyone other than me associated there-with. If you don't like what you read here, please don't take it out on Luna or Festrell or anyone else but me.
Note #1: I've taken the pictures out of this post. I yanked them off the internet without permission and put them in here and, I figure, if one person doesn't like that, there's a good chance the others won't be thrilled about it either.
Note #2: Hi, new readers! Welcome to my suddenly notorious post. When I wrote this, I was completely oblivious to the political climate of the national spoken word scene[1] and as such had no idea about the powder keg I’ve inadevertently gone and stepped on. Similarly: When I wrote this, I thought I was being fairly obvious about the post being on the subject of (in this case inadvertently) gendered spaces, stereotypes of masculinity, and alienation (see footnote 2 for further clarification). Having since got a couple of notes from people telling me that I’m coming off as really, really racist, I’ve looked at the post again and come to the conclusion that I wasn’t being clear at all and that, yeah, I can see how people got that impression.
Much as part of me totally wants to take this offending thing down and hide for a while, I think doing that would probably qualify as some kind of dishonest. As such, other than (A) taking out the pictures, and (B) adding this introduction and a couple of footnotes for the sake of clarifying where I stand, I haven’t changed the content. Anyone whose name is mentioned herein is someone whose work I think is cool. Hopefully the clarifications will help keep this post from hurting anyone else. I sure as hell didn’t mean to stir up all this trouble, and – despite some bitchiness towards the middle – I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. I’m sorry I did.
With that in mind. Happy reading.
[/EDIT]
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So I went to my first Poetry Slam last night.
Capital Slam (which has been going for years now) at the Mercury Lounge in the market.
I have to confess, I was kind of disappointed.
I mean, I knew going into it that it was going to be very heavy on a specific style[2], and I suspected that it would be fairly guy-heavy. I co-organize Voices of Venus, which is a local women-only spoken work series that got started specifically because the local scene is very guy-heavy and there’s not a whole lot of women’s voices being heard at the slams (which are a significant part of the local spoken word scene).
So I knew what to expect, and I also knew that I was going in with my own set of biases.
And I was still floored by… no, actually, not *just* by the overwhelming majority of guys on that stage – three women slamming versus nine men[4] – but also by the… by the stylistic monotony of it all.
Performer after performer (as in ten out of twelve competitors) getting up on stage and spitting words like bullets at the audience, gasping for breath between sentence-fragments, making jerky hand-motions as if to underline a point that may or may not actually be there, and pushing a bravado/machismo style of speaking that leaves little to no room for vulnerability or truth.
A lot of tired images, “fighting for peace”, “all my brothers”, “bring back the soldiers”, “all of your lies”.
Why don’t they say something real?
Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Rusty’s poem about the word l-o-v-e and about his going-on-twenty-years relationship with Ruth-Anne – I thought that was beautiful and personal and true – and some of the fellows presenting in the bullets-and-bravado style are good – the two who got first and second place (Proofrock and John Akpata, respectively) offered poems that included both word-craft and some kind of a “plot” or message, and that were well-suited to the style in-which they were written and performed. But it’s clear that this particular style of poetry is what gets rewarded, whether or not the poem in question has much in the way of substance.
And this makes me sad – no. This doesn’t make me sad.
This makes me angry.
Because it’s not a very good style, all things considered.
Yelling into the mic and beating your chest for three minutes is, by and large, the same defensive masculinity that polices itself through homophobia – which was plentiful – and bolsters itself with privileged assumptions – also. plentiful.
And this is what new poets are learning if they only go to the slams.
I see it in women like Ivy and Talia, who so clearly are learning their craft through imitation of that particular style.
I want to know what Talia’s Voice will sound like on its own, not when she’s beating her chest and trying to be one of the boys. I want to know how those young poets (the boys and the girls) would develop if their role-models were more stylistically diverse.
I listen to someone like Festrell[5], and I hear the aggression of that style, but it’s blended and molded into their own style, mingled with humour and geekery and soul-darkness and vulnerability that come through in how they perform, as well as through the lyrical content. Who uses their own style to make the personal political in a very real way, instead of using the trendily political to bolster their own opinion of themself.
And it felt like a lot of the guys on stage tonight were doing the latter, even if that’s not what they intended. 
A LOT of GUYS doing Angry-Young-Man agro-poetry where they didn’t say a whole lot. They weren’t saying *nothing*. But what they were saying was wrapped up in so much “I’m So Angry and Political” language, and tinted with enough unexamined male-and/or-white privilege, that most, if not all, of the deeper, more personal truths in their pieces were lost.
Or at least they were lost on me.
And that sucks.
Tomy Bewick – a fellow from Toronto who Featured at the show and tricked with words most eloquently – stumbled into the same situation. He presented a poem about the birth of his daughter, how he felt when she was born with her umbilical cord around her neck, how she was born dying, and how she lived.
And it was really moving.
And I very nearly cried.
But it was still done in that aggressive, never-back-down, never-show-your-soft-spots style that just… That poem would have brought an entire audience to tears if he had let the fear and the hope and the agony of those two minutes come through in his performance, as well as in his lyrical content.
See… I aspire to the June Jordan school of poetry. E.G.: That poetry is a means of telling the truth, with each word selected for maximum impact and not a single word wasted.
Obviously I’ve got a ways to go with this. But that’s why my poems tend to run short rather than long, and it’s why I tend to write about extremely personal experiences and emotional stuff.
Because those are my truths.
I think the point of poetry is to peel back the layers of your armour and expose yourself – the ugly bits, the bits that hurt, the bits you’re ashamed of (and ashamed of being ashamed of), but also the bits that are beautiful and precious to you, the bits you’re afraid to show for fear that they – and you – will be rejected at your most vulnerable.
The point of poetry is to show your truth to the world.
So, yes. I went to my first slam tonight.
I will, most likely, go to more. (Once doesn’t give a show much of a chance, after all).
But I was, sadly, not too impressed with what I saw.
[Further Edited to Add: There is now a follow-up post available here. /EDIT]
- TTFN,
- Amazon.
[1] Edited to Add: Hi. Total noob. The VoV co-organizer gig fell into my lap because I was in the right place at the right time. Before that, I participated in a neighbourhood open mic quite frequently, but that was it.[/EDIT]
[2] Edited to Add: To my eyes and ears, this style comes across as one that requires/idealizes some of the less pleasant stereotypes about masculinity — unnecessary agression, confrontation, and the requirement that Real Men(tm) only express themselves emotionally in public through anger (a set of stereotypes that do actual real men no favours what so ever. Please understand that the ensuing critique was prompted by seeing, on the one hand, very few women turning up to perform and, on the other hand, the rewarding of a style of poetry that came across, to me, as hypermasculine in a way that might feel alienating to some of the women who might otherwise come out to perform. I’m absolutely NOT blaming those specific poets or that specific style for the lack of women on stage that night. However, in the context of an overarching culture that teachs little girls to be quiet and non-confrontational and little boys to be in-your-face but to never cry in public, I wonder if a space where such a hypermasculine[3] style of performance was set as the bar for excellence, would some women find that space intimidating, or even unwelcoming, despite the best efforts of the organizers to encourage women to come out and perform? [/EDIT]
[3] Further Edited to Add: I’ve since learned that what comes across as hypermasculine to me is not necessarily so across the board and, for someone else, qualifies as gender-non-specific. It’s a lot less cross-culturally the case than I thought. My mistake. Sorry about that. [/EDIT]
[4] I’ve since learned that a 3:9 ratio of gals:guys is actually a good average for Capital Slam. Personally, I think this is dismal.
[5] Or Emily Kwissa or Shannon Beahen, for that matter.
So, it’s 
An anecdote:
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