60 Minutes: The Poets Slam Back!
Dateline: 12/07/99Last week, 60 Minutes devoted 12 of them (and actually, of course, like a shrink's hour, 60 Minutes is more like 52) to poetry. Slam poetry, to be exact. Our newest Museletter correspondent, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, files the following report:
When poetry slams began over a decade ago in a bar room with a construction worker forcing audience members to attach numbers to poems, few people thought it would last two years, let alone ten. Even fewer people would think that a feature-length film (SLAM!) and documentary (SlamNation) would be made involving slam. And now, slam has been embraced by the establishment, or, at the very least, a chain-smoking Morley Safer.
This past summer, the Tenth Annual National Poetry Slam was held in slam's birthplace, Chicago. And while most of the participating poets were busy catching up with old friends they hadn't seen since the last Nationals, few could ignore the sight of 60 Minutes' crew busily loading and unloading equipment, and soon 60 Minutes became the topic de slam. Rumors were flying and teams began to worry openly about the effect the filming would have during their competitions: Would the cameras block the audience from seeing the poet? Would the sight of a cameraman switching off his camera and sitting down mid-poem unjustly signal to the judges that the poem was not as good as other, fully-taped performances? What about those competitions not being taped? Would the audience follow the camera crew?
Under these comments festered a deeper fear: misrepresentation. Slammers are a leery bunch, since their poetry has oft been represented as trash: bad writing read with enough flair by an attractive enough person to score high. Rumors ran throughout the week that the 60 Minutes crew wasn't really doing a feature on us, but rather using us as an example of the death of poetry. Meanwhile we all smiled numbly as the camera buzzed around us and tried not to stare too hard at Morley Safer as he continuously lit one cigarette from the butt of another.
For months, we heard nothing. Then, suddenly, the news came out of the Slam list serv: “OUR SEGMENT TO AIR ON 60 MINUTES THE SUNDAY AFTER THANKSGIVING!!!” Everyone got excited, though some pessimistically foresaw doom. Others, ignoring the soothsayers, begged for someone to make a tape of it, since they would be away from their TV during the big moment.
Then, on November 28, it happened. As hundreds of jittery slam poets gathered around the screen, some with family, some with other poets (is there a difference?), 60 Minutes aired its piece on Slam Poetry.
The 12-minute-long feature seemed incredibly brief to those who had seen the slam documentary SlamNation (which clocked in at around an hour and a half), but to 60 Minutes' credit, it did seem to pack a lot into the short time. It had interviews with Slam Founder Marc Smith, Slam Diva Gayle Danley, Slam Prodigy, 13-year-old Dan Houston and, in counterpoint, Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. This was in addition to various slammers whose poems were sound-bitten, but who went unnamed (including Daniel Roop, Taylor Mali, Jamie Kennedy, Roger Bonair-Agard & Staceyann Chin, among others).
Besides covering the bases (what is a slam, when and how did it begin, etc.), 60 Minutes also gave slam a lot of room to prove its worth. Gayle Danley served as an excellent poster poet for the movement:
In the position of not-so-loyal opposition, Robert Pinsky, the highly respected Poet Laureate, wondered out loud if slam relies too much on performance and not on poetry, adding that real poetry should be good “no matter who reads it.” But when 60 Minutes revealed the audience at a Pinsky reading, the crowd was mostly old, white and lethargic, nothing like the screaming, raucous, multi-culture crowds packing it in at the slam venues. (One shot of the audience even included slam's very own Ms. Spelt, who watched a poet gape-mouthed in awe, all the while looking fierce in her goatee and dress; not to mention a wonderful shot of my exposed lower back as I jumped around in ecstasy after the finals finished, which caused my parents to jump out yelling “There's Crissy's butt! There's Crissy's butt,” thus instantly validating my life as a poet.) IMHO, it was this difference in audience and energy that the TV audience will take with them: Slammers seemed to come out on top.
However, the real test of success was the reaction on the list serv -- how did 60 Minutes' portrayal of slam feel to the slam community? For the most part, response was positive, although, of course, the negative was immediately jumped upon. Some were upset by the perceived pretension of Robert Pinsky's comments. (Re: his audience, one poet reminded the serv, “Check it again on slowmo; one of the women is sleeping.”) Others were angered about the use of the statement “In Slam, ego rules!” in the voice-over.
“The most glaring omission from the 60 Minutes article was the lack of a complete poem,” wrote Eitan Kadosh, from the 1999 Championship San Francisco Team. “Instead, the viewers were treated to out-of-context snippets that did little, by themselves, to convey the impression that slam can be anything other than declarative or confrontational. One well-crafted, well-performed piece could have exposed millions of average Americans to something artful, composed, and powerful.”
“The video sampling 'poet's poems on poetry' used by 60 Minutes to supplement the scripting, stole from the presentation of Slam's diverse appeal. . . ” wrote Adele Houston, the mother of the 13-year-old poet Dan Houston, who was interviewed in the feature. “It enabled the negative ego & therapy angles to emerge as if in context. What was not said in the shallows of scripting, but is so great about Slam, is that the ego, therapy poetry is accepted alongside every other poetic muse.” However, Adele also added her pleasure with the piece, noting, “The video clips of faces of the audience at the Nationals told our story: engaged, diverse.”
Kim Holzer Leeds, from the 1995 Asheville Championship Team, shared Mrs. Houston's happiness. “Slam Poetry is NEWS!” she wrote, “How many times in our lives are we part of something that, if only for fifteen minutes, is the most important thing on CBS? I don't care if the viewing public liked us or not -- at least they know who we are now!”
This sentiment was echoed by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez from the 1998 Championship Team from New York City: “In the end. . . some 12 million people learned a little bit about something new and vibrant in the poetry world and a small community of artists got some much-needed exposure. All else aside, that's a good thing.”
And as quickly as 60 Minutes' piece became the topic of riotous debate, it went away. Bored, the Slam List Serv moved on to something a little closer to their own hearts: a spontaneous game of “Guess Who Wrote this Line of Poetry and When?” with Poetry Slam, Inc., employee Steve Marsh gleefully doling out cash to those who answered correctly.
Meanwhile, all across America, citizens prepare to go to their very first slam.
60 Minutes:
“Isn't slam poetry, then, really therapy?”Gayle, without shame:
The camera even followed her to a middle school where Gayle was teaching slam. “Did you dig deep?” is the question she writes on the board as a way to determine whether a poem is finished.
“Yes.”
We're talking about 60 Minutes' segment on slam in the About.com Poetry Forum -- come join in the discussion.
Visit The Data Wranglers if you wish to join the Slam Listserv, where about 150-200 poets are talking about poetry & slamming, always within the rules, of course!
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz has just signed on as New York correspondent for the About.com Poetry Museletter. She was born & raised in Philly -- her poem “Ascensions” & a short-short prose piece, “Spilt,” are online in a 1995 issue of Mirror, the Central High School of Philadelphia lit mag. Cristin was a member of the 1998 Manhattan Slam Team and is currently Slam Mistress of the 1999/2000 Manhattan team & host of the Urbana slam in New York City. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her poem in Will Work for Peace & is slated for May 2000 graduation from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in Dramatic Writing.
