Slam poets travel to national competition

Anna Gallagher ’12, Alex Geller ’12, Maya Goldberg-Safir ’12, Mori Rothman ’11 and Bella Tudisco ’13.5 didn’t have high expectations when they traveled to Yale University on the first weekend of spring break for the northeast regional poetry slam qualifying tournament. They had heard about the tournament at the last minute from Special Assistant to the Dean of the College and Senior Advisor for Diversity Jennifer Herrera and they had just barely managed to scrape together their team. Not many of them had performed spoken word poetry on stage more than a few times, if at all, and none of them had ever competed in a collegiate poetry slam.

They found themselves there because Gallagher and Tudisco, after seeing the Verbal Onslaught-sponsored performance by traveling poetry trio Night Kite Revival (featuring Taylor Mali) earlier this year, had decided to form a spoken word poetry group that would have regular meetings and, ideally, might someday cohere into a team that could travel and represent Middlebury College in competitive poetry slams.

The tournament at Yale found that idea becoming reality sooner than they may have thought. To their surprise and excitement, they upset Wesleyan and advanced to the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI), the national collegiate spoken word poetry competition being held this year at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Enthused by their unexpected success at the Yale tournament, and excited to gather with 38 teams of people who love poetry as much as they do, the team quickly made arrangements to attend CUPSI, which took place April 6-9.

At the tournament, they found themselves living up to their impromptu name choice — “Poor Form Poetry” (if you say it fast, it sounds like “perform poetry”) — in a pleasantly surprising way; judges, not to mention other teams, admired their scrappiness. It was clear that they were there out of a love of poetry, not of competition, and that their inexperience with the collegiate poetry slam “scene” led them to do things their own way and brought a certain honesty and genuineness to their performance.

Now that they’re seasoned veterans, they’ll tell you that honesty plays an interesting role in these competitions — a poem’s emotional honesty might win the performance some extra points from the judge, so it will sometimes seem like a team is forcing honesty or exploiting a tragic memory in order to score points. Such are the odd predicaments that arise in the strange world of “competitive art.”

As exciting as the competition is, they insisted, the real magic of these tournaments is the extreme bonding that occurs despite these competitive conditions. If a poet on stage delivered a great line, even if they were a member of an opposing team, audience members were extremely vocal in showing their admiration. Many rounds concluded with a massive beatbox/freestyle rap circle in the hallway, the team added. And at the end of the day, many teams went out together and all ended up in a hotel room, standing on beds and chairs spitting poems in an informal “third round.”

The bonding, Gallagher explained, is due to the fact that most poets are up on stage revealing extremely personal details about their life in the course of three minutes. Before you’ve even talked to another poet, you may know things about them that people they’ve known for years don’t even know.

Most importantly, it’s about “being around a bunch of people who are excited about writing,” said Goldberg-Safir. Such people are in no short supply at Middlebury, but there aren’t many exisiting ways for them to come together outside the classroom, and that’s why they want to continue Poor Form poetry next year, choosing a team to represent the College for the year and inviting other colleges for slams. Keep your eyes and ears peeled.