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Oppressed classes are like kidnapped white women when it comes to slam poetry. All they need to do, after identifying themselves as either a woman who was mistreated by a man or a black adult who had a drug addict for a parent is make guttural noises emphasizing the mistreatment that they suffered and then the crowd goes wild. It does not matter if the poem has talent, rhyme, or meter. Diction or metaphor? What’s that? Perhaps that’s an exaggeration: some of the poems do have diction, rhyme, and meter, and plenty of them have metaphors. But what they have more in common than that is an audience of college students and college dropouts and college wishfuls who wish that they could claim their failures to be productive came out of something so traumatic. So they clap to their empty heart’s content, trying to fill it with a little purpose on the back of somebody who was probably only mildly abused. You’re supposed to applaud the poet, not the score but you’re supposed to score the poem, not the poet. I understand that the score is for the performance and not just the poem, but you’re not supposed to score the identity, of the poet, and yet people do. |
Copyright ©2018 Ashi Shadow -3/14/18 on experiences at slam poetry (also observed elsewhere in society).
Initially, I meant to have some lines about how it is good to encourage people to perform and to give them self-esteem etc. to build them up into better performers, since they may have anxiety etc., but ultimately I'm sufficiently satisfied with what I ended up writing.