Slam, Bam, Thank You Ma'am

Third inning. He storms to the mound, throws his arms out to the side, gears up for delivery. Checks out the fans, waiting for the right moment. Now he winds up, and now the pitch. The audience gasps as the thing soars. It hits the wall.

The crowd goes wild.

Wild about a poem.

Standing amidst more than a hundred poetry mavens crowded into a tiny room at the Bookcellar Cafe in Porter Square, Ryc McIntyre jumps into the audience, shouting at them, looking his judges in the eye. It's all part of the poetry world's latest craze: the Slam.

The poets here don't sit in a dark corner, sipping cappucino and smoking Turkish cigarettes. If you want the judges to let you taste victory, says Slam Co-Host Michael Brown, you've got to go get them.

Performance poetry is nothing new, but the point of the Slam is to knock your opponents out of competition--a boxing ring with literary types. Brown and his wife Patricia Smith brought the Slam to Boston from Chicago, where competitive poetry reading has been part of the scene for years. Local poets come to the Bookcellar every week to perform their pieces for the audience and for randomly chosen judges, who hold up Olympic-style scorecards. Poets steel themselves for rejection; the audience cheers or growls for their favorites. The more reaction, the better.

"We're gonna kick some serious poeticass!" shouts Patricia Smith to the crowd, and they whoop in approval. This week is the semi-finals, and the crowd is pumped. McIntyre has been on the official Boston Slam Team for a while now, and he knows how to get the audience going. He walks among them, slamming his fist in his hand.

Then there's Dylan Tweney, a newcomer who doesn't storm in and take the crowd over, but lets his neurotic persona do the job; he writhes as he becomes a guilty wife-beater or a distraught lover. And then there's Marc Weidershein, a middle-aged man who stands square in front of the crowd, reading from his book, incanting the words like a priest in his congregation, which is squished about him on the floor.

Since the Slam started back in September, it has rattled the local literary circuit. Two weeks ago the Bookcellar opened a Saturday Slam to accomodate the crowds which scrunch into the cafe to watch the poetic conflagrations.

Smith, who admits that the Slam is "a rather silly game," says it has given the Boston poetry scene the kick in the pants it needs. The slammers say that the competition energizes them. Tweney says the slam makes him "put in his soul. It's cool."

But in a city already crowded with writers and academicians, many poets have fought the Slam as fiercely as slammers in the ring.

"We don't want the Arsenio Hall bullpen," says Jack Powers, director of the Stone Soup poetry series at T.T. the Bear's. "We want an audience who listens to the poet, not one which erupts into sounds."

Slammers contend that the competition proves nothing about the quality of the poet. "It depends on the judges that day. It's a crapshoot," says Smith.

McIntyre offers a more cosmic answer for the response from the judges: "Maybe your biorhythms were up that day."

Powers doesn't disagree. But he fears that slam winners get attention at the expense of better poets. "The first poem to win the Slam was 'I Stink.' The speaker discussed various bodily smells. It was funny. It was shrill. But it won. A couple poems were good, but got tiny votes."

Poems can get lost in the theater of the event, Powers says. "Gesticulation becomes more forced, more plastic. You get into a posture, you're preoccupied with stimulation."

A reporter for The Boston Globe, Smith went head-on with Powers on the front page of the paper's Sunday Arts section two weeks ago. Smith said that Powers "shies away from more innovative and experimental offerings."

Powers is furious, and is fighting back. "It's innuendo at the expense of people who have been on the poetry circuit for years," he says. "Rather than being scared of innovation, we supported the Slams."

He's right--the first four Boston Slams were hosted by Powers and Stone Soup. "This 'new voice' didn't arrive from Chicago," he says. "Promotion for the Slam says `The energy is back.' Where was it all the other time?"

Smith savors the controversy. "We're happy affecting people, whether positively or negatively." She is surprised, though, at the way the fight is taking shape. "It might be the New England mentality," she says. Smith says that lots of people have already told her to go back to Chicago.

Powers cites the "exaggerated outrage, chutzpah, in-your-face" style of many slammers. He might be talking about McIntyre, whose performances involve lots of shouting and stomping. McIntyre's poem in the semi-finals turns out to be a tale of misery from Frankenstein's monster. The crowd is mesmerized. He stops, and leaves the stage.

"That's Ryc McIntyre," shouts Brown, stretching out the words like a boxing referee. The spell breaks. The audience cheers. Judges scribble their decisions.

One judge gets particularly loud boos from the audience, especially from fans of McIntyre. Catherine Hogan, sitting in the corner of the room, raises her cards with a hey-you-asked-for-it expression on her face. When McIntyre ultimately takes the Slam from Tweney and Weidershein, she's clearly disappointed.

Her post-bout analysis: "[McIntyre] relied on stock pop phraseology. It was mostly theatrical. The audience I guess was taken in by that."

As for Tweney, who nearly won the slam but lost major subtlety points on his wife-beating poem, Hogan says that he "has a future. Definitely."