Poetry slam
[3] American poet Marc Smith was credited with starting the poetry slam at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago in November 1984.
In August 1988, the first poetry slam held in New York City was hosted by Bob Holman at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
[7] Soon afterward, poetry slam increased popularity allowed some poets to make full-time careers in performance and competition, touring the United States and eventually the world.
[citation needed] As of 2017[update], the National Poetry Slam featured 72 certified teams, culminating in five days of competition.
[11] In a poetry slam, members of the audience are chosen by a master of ceremonies or host to act as judges for the event.
The Boston Poetry Slam[12] takes a different approach; it uses the 8-4-2 three-round format, but the poets go head-to-head in separate bouts within the round.
Hedwig Gorski, the founder of performance poetry as a distinct genre, saw props, costumes, and music as essential for a complete theatrical experience while also following theorist Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theater by blurring lines between the real person, actor, and speakers in scripted literary art.
Poetry slams can feature a broad range of voices, styles, cultural traditions, and approaches to writing and performance.
[22] Some poets are closely associated with the vocal delivery style found in hip-hop music and draw heavily on the tradition of dub poetry, a rhythmic and politicized genre belonging to black and particularly West Indian culture.
Some use traditional theatrical devices including shifting voices and tones, while others may recite an entire poem in ironic monotone.
Some poets use nothing but their words to deliver a poem, while others stretch the boundaries of the format, tap-dancing or beatboxing or using highly choreographed movements.
Ranting hipsters, freestyle rappers, bohemian drifters, proto-comedians, mystical shamans and gothy punks have all had their time at the top of the slam food chain, but in the end, something different always comes along and challenges the poets to try something new.
Since only the poets with the best cumulative scores advance to the final round of the night, the structure assures that the audience gets to choose from whom they will hear more poetry.
Bob Holman, a poetry activist and former slammaster of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, once called the movement "the democratization of verse".
"[25] At the 1993 National Poetry Slam in San Francisco, a participating team from Canada (Kedrick James, Alex Ferguson and John Sobol) wrote, printed and circulated an instant broadside titled Like Lambs to the Slammer, that criticized what they perceived as the complacency, conformity, and calculated tear-jerking endemic to the poetry slam scene.
[26] In an interview in the Paris Review, literary critic Harold Bloom wrote I can't bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other.
[27]Poet and lead singer of King Missile, John S. Hall, has also long been a vocal opponent, taking issue with such factors as its inherently competitive nature[28] and what he considers its lack of stylistic diversity.
In 2022, Italy won the XVI Poetry Slam World Cup for the second time, represented by performance artist, writer, poet, and actor Lorenzo Maragoni, member of the artistic collective WOW - Incendi Spontanei, same as the former world champion Giuliano Logos.
Every year YCA presents Louder Than a Bomb, the world's largest team-based youth slam and subject of a documentary by the same name.
[52] An Open Letter to Honey Singh, a rap video featuring Rene Sharanya Verma performing at Delhi Poetry Slam,[53] went viral on YouTube receiving over 1.5 million hits.
According to al-Misry, having a variety jobs gave him the experience to understand the struggles of Egyptian people in different classes of life.
He had good knowledge of Arabic literature, grammar and some commonly used foreign words as well as slang; which he used to form Halamantishi poetry.
[57] Poets such as Bayram At-Tunisi, Ahmad Rami, and Kamel Ash-Shennawy paved the way after al-Misry with lyrical slam poems that use a melodic rhythm to attract the audience.
Kusunoki created annual “poetry boxing” tournaments in order to provide a medium for expression and social interaction .
Winners compete in series of challenges such as timed presentation and a round of improvised jousting.” A master of ceremonies adds to the event by providing nicknames for the competitors.
