Fighting Words

Virginia R. Marshall '15 and Bex H. Kwan '14 perform. By Maura D. Church

Cassandra E. Euphrat Weston ’14 is alternately ecstatic and remarkably calm as she sits in Café Gato Rojo and recounts the origins of Speak Out Loud, the Harvard slam poetry collective she co-founded as a freshman three years ago. “It was the first year with a formal Wintersession—the first year of ‘You come back to campus, we’ll give you money to start student programs,’” she says, theatrically mimicking the gruff tones of an imagined uptight Harvardian On High.

Much of the initial impetus in creating SOL was to offer an alternative to the more intense entry processes of other Harvard arts groups. “So many of the activities and creative outlets were based on competition—I mean, comp sounds like competition right?” Euphrat Weston says. “We wanted to make Speak Out Loud a community where, above all, there were no entry requirements.”

As the group grew, however, the non-hierarchical and relaxed environment of SOL was countered by a desire to slam with other collectives. But both Euphrat Weston and the rest of SOL’s members are acutely aware of the potentially contradictory nature of attempting to create personal and nuanced work while also aiming to please a diverse audience. “Everyone who does slam knows that it’s broken—that it’s a game and it’s imperfect,” Euphrat Weston admits. SOL’s diverse ways of rationalizing the tension between the confessional and the competitive reflects how the spoken word community at large continues to grapple with the paradoxical nature of the slam format. Reconciling the competitive aspects of slam poetry with the artistic aspirations of spoken word poetry  is difficult, but according to the poets of SOL, not impossible.

WHY SLAM?

Euphrat Weston is careful to underline the distinction between spoken word poetry, an art form based on the presentation of honest, candid, and often technically experimental work, and slam poetry, a scored face-off between a group of spoken word poets. SOL certainly didn’t gravitate towards slam in the hopes of boosting turnout. In fact, despite never having led a spoken word workshop before starting SOL, Euphrat Weston says the first workshop she planned with co-founder Kyra A. Atekwana ’14 “went better than we could have imagined.”

Slam, however, brings with it other irresistible perks. Euphrat Weston sees the draw towards spoken word competition primarily as an impetus for spoken word poets to produce higher quality poetry. “People want to have something really polished,” she says. Moreover, slam offered the best avenue to formally enter the national and local spoken word communities. These tempting impetuses caused the group to begin to transition away from the inherently introspective activity of creating art and towards the confusing and provocative world of trial-by-audience.

After a momentary pause, Euphrat Weston shrugs and quickly offers another reason for becoming involved in slam: so SOL can go to CUPSI. CUPSI, or the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, is a renowned yearly national college slam competition. This year, Speak Out Loud is sending five of its poets, including Euphrat Weston, to represent Harvard in Boulder, Colo. When the poets go to CUPSI, each will bring along distinct and developed opinions about how to resolve the inherent conflict in creating art for the purpose of competition.

COMPETITION FOSTERING COMMUNITY

George V. Watsky, almost a year removed from his second studio album, “Cardboard Castles,” which shot up to number one on the iTunes hip-hop/rap charts last March, took a break from his marathonic recording sessions for his follow-up record to talk via phone about the role of audience and community in his journey to artistic recognition. Watsky, a San Francisco native who was involved with CUPSI and the spoken word organization Youth Speaks, first received attention for the slam poetry he presented to much success in national slams and on YouTube. Watsky quickly rattles off an impressively informed history of spoken word that suggests the art is predicated on the existence of slam as a means of networking and visibility. “It’s hard to separate spoken word from slam poetry because the whole spoken word community blossomed around slam competitions,” he says.

Watsky, who believes that the popularity of slam was integral to his own transformation from spoken word artist to best-selling rapper, cites the influence of spoken word on “Def Poetry Jam.” The HBO series, hosted by hip-hop magnate Russell Simmons, brought the art form to a large group of young people during its run from 2002 to 2007. Watsky believes that main point of the competitive aspect of slam is to increase awareness about slam and thereby inspire further artistic innovation. “I’m not really a rule stickler. I don’t care enough about the competition to be worried about honing the rules of slam,” Watsky says. “Slam is great because it allows people to find out about the art form.”

Watsky’s exposure to both the cultures of slam competitions and rap battles has also reinforced his belief that the slam community is designed for mutual support far more than bitter rivalries. “You use poetic devices in rap battles, but it’s a totally different vibe…. You are directly opposing someone else, and your goal is to tear them down,” he says. “In spoken word, your piece is not about how everybody else is whack and sucks…. A poetry slam is like finger snaps and hippie love. The stereotypes start with a grain of truth.” The very reputation of slam, in Watsky’s mind, evokes Woodstock-like images of communal bliss––if slam poetry were to veer too heavily into strategy and machination, it would lose its identity.

CONFINES OF CUPSI

“I think all slam poets kind of hate slam poetry,” SOL board member Virginia R. Marshall ‘15, an active Crimson Arts editor, says ponderously. Although minor variations to the slam form crop up from competition to competition, the basic system is the same for almost all events, including CUPSI: three to five random judges, who don’t necessarily know anything about spoken word, are picked out of the audience to judge the event, which has a set number of pre-determined poets. The judges, who may given a somewhat nebulous rubric (five points for content, five points for presentation, for example), grade each artist’s up to three-minute performance on a 10-point scale. A number of rounds follow, after which the highest and lowest scores for each poet are usually dropped. At the end of the night, those who have the highest average scores win the event.

Marshall’s issues with the system concern how much the psychology of the audience impacts the program. “In the psychology of a slam, what’s most interesting is that it actually does matter what order you go in,” Marshall says. “Warming up an audience is extremely essential.”

To help with the process, many slams employ so-called “sacrificial poets,” who go first and act as calibrators of judge’s tastes and scoring proclivities. In addition to giving official competitors a chance to know the judges and adjust their impending programs accordingly, the “sacrificial poets” system helps to combat the phenomenon of “score creep”: the tendency of judges to grade poets more liberally as they event progresses. But Marshall is quick to stress that the system is flawed. “Sacrificial poets are meant to bring the scores up by the time you get to the first competitor, but it never really works…. Inevitably, people get warmed up to the experience of hearing poetry and will grade successive poets higher,” Marshall says.

Marshall says that she takes solace in the fact that Speak Out Loud has the humor and self-awareness to turn the judge-pleaser tropes inside out and create “meta” explorations of poetic stereotypes and pandering. “We really try to challenge the perceptions about what a spoken word poem is supposed to be,” Marshall says, smiling with a hint of mischief. “There’s a lot of manipulation of emotion that goes on in slam poetry.”

In addition to the “shock poem”archetype, Marshall outlined other slam poem archetypes that SOL attempts to subvert, including the funny referential poem, which she says often includes repeated allusions to late-1990s Nickelodeon cartoons. If Marshall, who emanates optimism, has an archetype, she says it’s the “happy poem,” which was harder to sell to audiences early on in her tumultuous slam journey. “I accidentally signed up for a slam not knowing what it was…. My first slam was a terrifying experience where I got incredibly low scores and lost. I was shocked but also a little bit exhilarated,” she says.

Marshall’s willingness to stick with the construct has led her from traumatized early dabblings to a place on Harvard’s CUPSI team. One of new poems is “( ),” a group piece that plays extensively with form and function, and suggests that slam archetypes are meant to be broken. By being conscious of the limitations of sensationalism and actively working to avoid slam poetry clichés, Marshall has managed to channel her distaste for the competitive aspects of slam into artistic innovation.

SLAM AS SPORT

Where Marshall deals with scoring by reveling in SOL’s propensity for irreverence and self-commentary, Bex H. Kwan ’14 embraces the raw competition of slam. “I’m the kind of person who makes little competitions for myself when I’m bored,” Kwan said. “I used to play competitive sports a lot.”

Kwan is aware of the what many perceive as an ideological conflict between art and sport but believes that slam is the closest thing to  a combination between the two disciplines. Kwan, who speaks with a magnetic cerebrality and poeticism, suddenly quotes Robert Frost: “‘Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.’”

Kwan’s borrowed simile suggests that the creation of poetry tailored towards competition still allows poets a considerable amount of freedom. Kwan confesses to feeling a modicum of frustration about the intricate rules of slam poetry but also believes, similarly to Euphrat Weston, that the nitpicky nature of competition pushes the art to the next level. “If I could change the form easily, then it wouldn’t challenge me as much,” Kwan said.

What Kwan is wary of is how slam can be reduced to its more mechanical elements, offering a cautionary example about the roboticism that occasionally creeps into competitive dance routines. “It’s all ‘How many high-kicks can you do? How many pirouettes can you do?’ Sometimes these art forms that we love so much can feel like just the tricks and the flashy parts,” Kwan says. Kwan rejects the rationales of those who feel like they need to give in to an oppressive system to get a good score and shares Marshall’s view that one of SOL’s goals is to transcend slam’s more conformist elements, but also believes that the competitive nature of slam fosters artistry by dramatizing questions already present in poets’ minds.

“What’s the context? What has the audience seen before? What will come after? These are questions that already exist, but slam brings them to the forefront of the poet’s mind, and that’s just fun.” For Kwan, the battle is the essence of the art.

Jalem D. Towler '15 performs a spoken word poem. By Maura D. Church

THE SHOWCASE AND THE TRUTH

Each poet’s booming voice reverberates off the wooden walls of Holden Chapel and into the ears of enthusiastic audience members. The five CUPSI poets, along with guests from other Boston schools, are hosting a send-off spoken word event before their departure for Boulder. Despite the fact that the showcase is primarily for friends of SOL and doesn’t have an official winner, yellow scorecards and comment sheets still grace the insides of the programs—any pre-CUPSI criticism can help.

Due in part to the highly personal nature of much of slam poetry, SOL has a well-defined privacy policy about printing the specifics of individual poems, but the issues the CUPSI team discussed ranged from gentrification to immigration, from parental expectation to the pressure on poets to discuss social justice. A running soundtrack of gasps of approval, extensive snaps, and supportive shouts comes both from their teammates and the rest of the crowd. The positivity of the audience was astounding. When poets stumbled, they received more applause. When they revealed deeply personal truths or just offered a light quip, they were met with the same enthusiasm and joyful noise.

Jalem D. Towler ’15 and Henri C. Garrison-Desany ’16, still noticeably amped up from their performances, discussed the importance of presenting emotionally honest sketches of their lives through their poetry. For Towler, who is involved with youth tutoring in Roxbury, the first priority is transmitting his passions. “I like to tell stories with my work,” he says. “The kids that I work with in Roxbury, God and my faith, and personal experiences are all central.” Towler’s desire to get at the truth of his experience has caused him to minimize his initial interest in the competitive aspects of slam. “When I first came into poetry slam, I was definitely focused on competition, catering to my audience, scoring well, and having my art be appreciated,” he says. “At the end of the day, that’s no longer my purpose for getting on the mic.”

Garrison-Desany, a Human Evolutionary Biology concentrator, often injects scientific concepts and logic into his ruminations on love, loss, and the confusion of college life. Like Towler, he believes the authenticity of his work is more important than any external judgment. “Some poets do put a lot of weight on scores, and by that sometimes the art has suffered,” he says. “I’ve seen teams that are very closed off from other teams and in their own competitive bubble.”

Garrison-Desany says he thinks this entirely defeats the collaborative purpose of the form and is grateful SOL doesn’t fall into a similar mindset. “We keep our poems honest and real, and that is the growing sentiment within the slam community, ” he says. Garrison-Desany suggests that SOL’s closeness and passion for their art allows them to hold each other accountable for creating truthful, expressive poems rather than ones that conform to slam norms.

REMAINING POSITIVE

The judgment inherent in slam poetry carries with it pressure to create overly familiar work that is likely to please audiences, as well as the potential for inter-team animosity and a more general critical atmosphere. The members of Speak Out Loud, however, have managed through their philosophical framings of slam, managed to transcend the petty pitfalls of standoffish slamming. Euphrat Weston’s desire for polish, Marshall’s for subversion, Kwan’s for sport, Towler and Garrison-Desany’s for truth, and, Watsky’s suggestion of the importance of  community and respect, all combine to create a welcoming and warm community and space for artistic expression. If Speak Out Loud and history are any indication, the spoken word world has managed largely to stave off the competitiveness and hostility that can come with the tournament format, instead managing to preserve the spirit of warmth and inclusiveness for which it is known.

—Staff writer David J. Kurlander can be reached at david.kurlander@thecrimson.com.