#whitepeoplestuff

My friend had a big post about how as a cracker he felt unwelcome in slam poetry. And, decide a decade+ of attending slams, he decided to quit going. I told him this: If white male cis* poets cede the space as "not theirs" and resolve to join other hobbies, then we're allowing ghettoization. I remember being at Emerson and hearing a lame "Where are my Republican poets?" ode. I'm sure it told people leaning R it's not their space. There was a Republican who went to the Cantab for years. He sucked, but it wasn't because he believed something different than everyone else. "Morning in America" and "A thousand points of light" are still good speeches, even if you disagree with their conclusions. But Slam is a scene where the personal, the political, and the professional** are deeply interwoven. And when we avoid detangling scores and politics, we choose the people we hear from. Cedric The Entertainer had the #1 show in 2002-03 Among African Americans. Due to Neilsen's racial makeup, it still got canceled. I believe in performance poetry as something deeply touching and capable of beauty. That's why I went 40+ weeks a year for half a decade***. Conclusions in next post, this feels long. *Is Jew still a minority group? **To the extent that winning Nationals can raise your touring rate ***I went to a venue in LA exactly once. It was Really Bad. --- Not having said enough, I continued.

Competitive slam isn't "not for honkeys". But the reasons it doesn't serve all audiences is the above (a feedback loop where people want to hear and perform in a zone of general agreement) and the following systemic things. I'm sure there are more; every poet has more. -The polite score range being 7.3 to 10, meaning that judges with low "rebuke the audience" thresholds are using a forth of the spectrum. [IMO Slam scores should go from 7 to 14 or something so that people see a 9.4 as not worthy of booing.] -The sonic capacity of the human ear may not be able to process 51+ minutes of poetry across 7 speakers -Nobody's ever found a way to read 16 poems by 4 teams that gives fair point distribution -The poetic traditions of American regions differ vastly in politicization, style and quality. Some of the Nuyo stuff I heard was lyrically dense, 16 stanzas of hard hitting lines and punchlines. Other poems were about eating apple seeds to kill yourself*. It's still hard to taxonomicallly agree what a POEM is, besides "180 seconds of human speech." So while slam may be listing to a more PoC view, it's not because suddenly white people have nothing to add*. It's because the metrics of what audiences are looking for is reflecting a variety of how slam is performed. *This doesn't work. It just makes an apple grow in your stomach. **"White" as a blanket descriptor is erasure as a lot of first gen immigrants and heebs will attest.