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New York Heavyweight Poetry Bout
A Ringside Report from the Peoples' Poetry Gathering

The boxing ring was with podium and mic, 900 people packed into the Peoples' Poetry Gathering Great Hall. Peter Rabbit was fez-bedecked, Annie MacNaughton had ascertained that none of the three judges had literary pretensions nor relations with the two top-ranked poets who would battle for the first-ever New York Heavyweight Poetry Bout Crown: Sherman Alexie, the fastest growing star in the poetry firmament, representing the Coeur d’Alene Rez, humor, and new Hollywood connections, and Patricia Smith, 4-time National Poetry Slam Individual Champ, representing Blacks, women, skinheads, and reporters mustered from the ranks for piping poems through their columns.

MacNaughton and Rabbit created the Bout in Taos 15 years ago, and in a panel discussion rapped the upstart form that has become a national pastime, the Slam, primarily for the fees that are charged to participate ($75/poet) vs. the moneys that they hand out ($1000/poet, win or lose). This would be a big bucks bout!

Round 1: Smith won the toss and elected to receive. Ring girl Regina Cabico flounced out in a ravishing puple gown and we were underway. Both poets opened with classics -- Alexie’s “Defending Walt Whitman” is an extraordinary vision of the bearded US bard showing up at the rez and admiring the brown bodies on the court, the ease of Alexie’s handling the mix of homoeroticism, politics and athletics. Smith’s reply also dealt with youth, a poem about a fourth grade class she taught poetry to in Florida; rather, the lessons on death, and life, she learned from these underclass children and their violent lives. She charged all poets to write for these kids, as they wait for us. Alexie seemed a little hesitant in his delivery; Smith pulled her powers from deep inside, gave more resonance than I’d heard from her before. Round 1 Smith.

Round 2: The slowest round: Alexie’s “Elegy” brings the Indian death march into the twentieth century, Smith’s “For My Father,” another classic, means to personalize what Alexie treated more universally, but is oddly lacking in emotion. Round 2 Alexie.

Round 3: Out of nowhere the Bout catches fire. Alexie’s “Song for Brown-Skinned Woman” starts out like generic love for the people, then careens into an extraordinary chthonic chant finding a place for Native males -- indeed, all penis-bearers -- in this era of fatherlessness. Smith’s reply is the poem the audience has been waiting for: the premiere of her first poem relating to the Boston Globe scandal. Casting the whole series of events as if it were a late-night TV ad for a new diet, Smith soars with irony, blasts away at gender and racial prejudices that resulted in her being fired, deserted by husband, friends, co-workers, the world. “Aren’t you Patricia Smith?” “No, but how bout that lyin’ bitch?” This round is the best of what Bout is, and was hair’s-breadth close. It was the universality that Alexie climbed to that made me ultimately give Round 3: Alexie.

Regina skitters out with the Round Card bedecked in garbage bag millinery. She stops, pouts, and admonishes quietly, “Please recycle.” It’s Round 4: Alexie tries to flip the call-response by responding to Patricia’s TV verve with “The Native American Broadcast System.” Bitter, bitter, he rakes the metaphors with a surrealist tar. “Give them a survival manual and tear out the last chapter” is part of a list that takes broken promises as a given to explode. Smith changes up completely with her “Poem for John Coltrane,” but her musicality never lifts the poem into jazz. Round 4: Alexie.

Round 5: Deciding that this “free round” means he can sing a little, Alexie deconstructs the “One-Eyed Ford” of Indian pow-wow. “I have more faith in the drums than in the people,” he moans. Smith comes back with “A Poem for Everyone Who’s Been Told They’re No Longer a Writer,” utilizing single words hits, pointillistically charting the means to find self in language. This constructural coup slows down the bout, abstracts the language, shows the bare skeleton of language through the poem:

“blanket
Band-Aid
carpet
sunlit
struggle.”
Round 5: Smith.

Round 6: I’d heard Alexie read “Fire as a Verb and Noun,” a poem that grew out of his visiting Dachau, at St. Mark’s Church a few weeks ago, and was struck then with the difficulty of non-Jews dealing with the Holocaust. At St. Mark’s he was reading with the great Cambodian poet, U Sam Oeur, whose “jewel in the lotus” style of poem-chant in Khmer gives a firsthand understanding to the Pol Pot genocide. Patricia’s poem, “Undertaker,” also deals with death -- this Smith classic comes from the eyes of the man who must make murdered teenage boys’ bodies pretty again. She interrupted the poem with a notice about the troubles of her own son, a risky move that didn’t quite work for me, but still, the persona of the mortician was a formal move that won out in the end. Round 6: Smith.

Probably like most of the house, I was drained at this point. Six rounds and I had an absolute tie on my scorecard. Everything would hinge on this, the improvisational last round. Rabbit lugged his lanky frame out to the ringside, Alexie dug in: he selected a scrap of paper upon which was writ the word “vibrato.” A technical term for a poet whose poetry ate form for breakfast? Alexie looked at MacNaughton and queried, “5 minutes, right?” a joke -- the improv poems rarely last more than a minute. But here, Alexie soared, and on and on rolled his chant, his poem, his ever-growing list of pains and tragedies and joys, an open sharing, an in-full-view creation, a praise song to his enemies before he, himself, is defeated, in essence admitting his defeat to Patricia Smith, in essence fighting back with a calm heart as drum.

“Praise the nurse who whispered
Praise the nurse who whispered to me
That my son might not make it
Praise the heart and lung machine
Praise Christopher Columbus as a heart and lung machine
Praise my enemy before he defeats me.”
On and on he rolled, spouting the longest Improv in Bout history. Smith’s word was “slot,” and again she went to her father, the bluesman, like a coin without a slot, ka-ching. Alexie had settled on a form, a rhythm, a mode (chant) that carried the poem; Smith’s memoir dropped back into talk at times, and lacked the shapeliness of Alexie’s bravura creation. Round 7, the tie-breaker, to Alexie. This mirrored the split decision of the Judges, 2-1 for Alexie; the popular vote went to Smith.

Poetry, of course, was the winner.

Bob Holman


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