A group of about 50 students — plus an emcee, a dee-jay and three guest speakers — gathered in the TV Lounge of Robert Purcell Community Center last Friday for a Spoken Soul poetry slam. The emcee, Gabriel Peoples grad, opened the show by chatting about his car: a local mechanic told him that he either had to get a new or used engine or dump the entire car. This opening monologue worked as a segueway into dee-jay Double A's music — namely Kanye West's new album, Graduation — and then Peoples's spoken-word poem, “The Opposite of Shallow.”
The music on rotation at the poetry slams on the Cornell campus lies in the “mainstream hip-hop” genre, Double A said, but, he noted that he likes to throw “old school hip-hop and funk” into the mix.
Music at slams is important because, Peoples explained, “Poetry slams are not just restricted to poetry, but also dance and hip-hop.”
Music aside, a Spoken Soul poetry slam event usually begins with an open mic — “a warm up to the slam, the actual competition,” Double A said.
Peoples, who began the Spoken Soul events at Cornell in November 2006, said that contestants in the Spoken Soul slams are awarded a score on a scale of zero to ten based on their creativity and performance. The winners of the slams are then pitted against each other in a final poetry slam. The top three or four winners of the final slam compose the Cornell poetry slam team and will attend the 2007 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational.
“Competitors take their poems extremely seriously,” Peoples said. “But we try to de-emphasize the competition — we have a whack poetry slam in the middle of the real slam to decrease the tension.”
In the heat of the slam, while judges deliberate scores and the audience cheers on the performers, there may be an excited, competitive atmosphere — but Peoples sees a slam as something more than a contest.
A slam, for Peoples, has multiple purposes. The events foster creative self-expression. And, because the featured guest sections — placed between the open mic and the slam — showcase more-established, award-winning spoken-word poets, the events allow students to learn more about spoken-word poetry.
Chinaka Hodge — who won a young authors scholarship from David Eggers's 826 Valencia program and who has appeared on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam on HBO — was one poet featured at last week's Spoken Soul poetry slam.
Here’s more for the educational side of Spoken Soul events: an “Identity and Politics” writing workshop was held Thursday at the Carol Tatkon Center and was led by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, a National Poetry Slam champion who has also been featured on HBO's Def Poetry Jam.
According to Theo Hummer grad, and member of SOON Productions, a small poetry press in Ithaca, slam poetry “creates an instant community in a room because of the rhetoric it uses; it uses 'we' a lot.”
Hummer said that she finds that most slam poems are either “intensely personal, in a way that forges intimacy between the performer and the audience” or “rousingly political,” a characteristic that can also bond performer and audience.
The communities fostered at poetry slams are often left-wing, Hummer said — slams are populated by people who “think the world is too capitalistic, too corporate and too Republican,” she elaborated.
Hummer described spoken-word poetry as “less dense” than poetry for the page. Poetry for the page, she said, is meant to be read “at leisure, four or five times over.” Poetry for the stage, however packs its punch with “repetition and with a simpler, more conversational syntax with a lot of rhyme.”
Because rhyming and performing are crucial components in spoken-word poetry, it seems natural to assume that such poetry is a close cousin to hip-hop music. Hip-hop and spoken word poetry do share a “lyrical lineage” and have a common source for inspiration, Peoples said.
But, the slam poetry brewed down the hill from Cornell at Juna’s Cafe on the Commons, differs from hip-hop flavored spoken-word poetry.
Andy Doyle, a long time Ithaca area resident, who has been organizing slam poetry events since 1995, has found that the city's small size and rural setting influence the poetry the Ithaca team brings to the Poetry Slam National competition. Doyle said that Ithacan slam poetry has less of an urban nuance — less of a hip-hop sound — than poetry coming out of cities like New York and San Francisco. He said it has a more academic style.
Doyle noted, however, that this year's Ithaca Slam team has a member from the southside of Ithaca who brings in more of an urban edge.
Ithaca is the second smallest city in the poetry slam league, said Doyle, but the city’s intellectual atmosphere — including the independent bookstores smattered through downtown — is conducive to the composition of poetry.