Competition celebrates slam poetry

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By MICAH MERTES / Lincoln Journal Star

This isn’t the goateed poet in the coffeehouse dive, sporting his beret, sipping an absurdly tiny espresso and passively mumbling a few verses about his gerbil. All while no one in the audience listens.

This isn’t that.

Here, the audience listens.

View Slideshow

JM Huscher, aka Johnny Tornado, left, listens to Dale Holt, aka Cannondale, during the Star City Slam team finals competition at Meadowlark Coffee and Espresso. 13 slam poets competed in the bout for 5 spots on the Lincoln National Poetry Slam team. (Heidi Hoffman)

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Mid-Morning Crisis Tour

The winners of last week's Star City Slam poetry contest will kick off their Mid-Morning Crisis Tour at 7 p.m. Thursday at Jones Coffee, 727 S. 11th St., where attendees can meet slam poets.

The tour will take them to several Midwest locations this summer, performing more than 20 shows in four states and sharing stages with musicians and other poets.

"This is a bold move for a local poetry slam, and we couldn't be more excited," said JM Huscher, spokesperson for Star City Slam. Stops on the tour will include, among more conventional poetry venues, street corners, classrooms and even prisons.

The tour will conclude in early August at the National Poetry Slam in Madison, Wis.

Here, the poets are animated, passionate, sometimes shouting from the pits of their stomachs, sometimes aiming to provoke, sometimes fishing for guffaws.

Here, the audience matters just as much as the poet.

This is slam.

What is slam?

“Slam is amazing,” said Lincolnite Tryst Kerbrat, a 27-year-old slam poet. “Slam is all about the poets trying to entertain the audience. It’s a spectacle for the right reason. It’s about being who you are on the stage and making the audience care about it.”

Slam is the rhythmic, energized, almost conversational manner of someone spilling his guts all over the stage to the scrutiny of the audience.

At last week’s Star City Slam poetry night at Meadowlark Coffee and Espresso, 10 of the best slam poets in the area duked it out in a three-round competition. The contest was to decide which five would become the official Star City Slam team and go on to the national competition this summer.

The coffee shop was wall-to-wall packed, with audience members sitting on the floor right to the front of the stage.

Fewer than two years ago, however, Star City Slam was still a concept — just a group of Lincoln poets who traveled to Omaha a few times a month to participate in events. But when it became apparent there were enough poets in Lincoln to form a group, a few slammers took the reins.

This May, the group will celebrate its two-year anniversary.

“At the time, we wanted to see if there was enough support to do something like this in our community,” said Ryan Tewell, executive director and co-founder of Star City Slam.

“And as hopeful as we were about that, even we have been blown away by the support we’ve received from the Lincoln community.”

Tewell was captain of last year’s first Star City Slam team, which went on to compete at nationals.

This year’s team will be spearheaded by last week’s highest scorer, Lincolnite Beth Gillespie, 38, who’s been writing all her life but just in the last three or four years got into slam, she said.

Gillespie’s poems are supercharged, confrontational and occasionally sexual in nature. For her, slam is a form of catharsis, a way to work out her stuff.

“When I’m up here,” she said of the stage, “the poems are never exactly the same. Sometimes they change, depending on what I’m feeling.”

For slam poet and Lincoln East High School student Kelsey Reifert, 17, the stage is no less expressive but also a constant source of terror.

“It never gets any easier,” she said of the stage. “I’ve been doing it for a year now — I started in my English class — and it’s usually more tough every time I get up there.”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of slam poetry contests is that they aren’t judged by those with a Ph.D. in literature or anyone especially well-versed in the art of writing verse.

At the Star City Slams, five judges are chosen randomly at the beginning of each event. They judge each poet on a scale of 0 to 10 for all three rounds. Slam poetry is even judged this way on a national level, with 400 poets and 75 teams being judged by random people in the audience.

This method is part of what Tewell calls “the democracy of the stage.”

“All we want you to be qualified by is that you came to this event and are interested in expressing your own opinions,” he said. “The only thing we ask is that as a judge, you’re not sleeping with one of the poets or they don’t owe you money, or something like that.”

The unacademic nature of judging, Tewell said, is a way of showing just how wonderfully un-academic something like slam can be.

“Most of us that are heavily involved in this movement understand that scoring art, reducing art to a numerical value, is a ridiculous process.”

But it’s still fun, right?

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “It’s still fun.”

Reach Micah Mertes at 473-7395 or mmertes@journalstar.com.