Meg van Huygen's short feature on the open-mic scene inaugurates a series that will appear in the books section once a month for the next six months. Featuring local and regional writers such as Jonathan Raban, Monica Drake, Stacey Levine, Nic Veroli, and members of the Seattle Research Institute, Write Here will present individual and honest accounts of Seattle's literary environment. My hope is that you find the series entertaining and edifying.
--Charles Mudede, Books Editor
Poetry is a touchy subject. There's plenty to be said in praise of the Beats, but today, poetry generally comes in two flavors: the teenaged rant and the shoegazing prose about owls that my English teacher used to write. Neither one is very appetizing. Closely related but somehow separate from poetry is "spoken word," whose boundaries of difference aren't clear--only that "poetry" seems to be a misnomer for something that's antagonistic by definition and is usually about poverty or heroin or clumsy sexual liaisons.
Really, spoken word is just poetry for scenesters: somewhere between rants and prose, made palatable by a neo-Beat costume and some extra vitriol. Spoken word as a genre was best publicized in the mid-'90s, thanks mostly to MTV's spoken-word colonization campaign, which pushed poetic rock stars like Maggie Estep into minor fame. But when MTV inevitably discarded "spoken word" for the next fad, it was stuffed away in the boiler room, tainted by its uncool origins. And without MTV, it went back to being poetry again.
When I was in art school here in Seattle, I used to go to these writers' open mics. They were held on weeknights at a handful of vegan hippieshit cafes around town, and the crowd was invariable: every week, the same cadre of teen outcasts and grizzled bachelors wearing hats. The shows were more theater than literature. Readers would get all lathered up, shouting and gesticulating wildly as a matter of course. Feminists were in heavy rotation. Everybody was vigilantly bitter and aspired to be either Jack Kerouac or Trent Reznor.
I liked it because that was funny, and because I was underage and they let me in. Maybe they liked me in turn because I didn't read prose about being an omnipresent moon maiden with planets bursting from my uterus. Like all open mics, the quality of the performances was negligible. Sometimes, the poets weren't bad, and when they were really bad, that was funny too. I didn't read often, but occasionally I'd find some kishkes and take the stand. And the folks did me right--supported me, clapped whether I was good or not, gave me feedback. It took a while to fit in (like there was the time I got kicked out of a reading for declining to join in a pre-show energy circle), but eventually I began to make friends and earn myself a place in the circuit's creepy, Freemason-type fellowship. My writing got measurably better. Ultimately, I landed a gig hosting a show at the Globe, which I enjoyed a lot more than reading. Over the few months that it lasted, I got some invaluable lessons about confidence and performance. The scene and I had a nice little homeostasis.
And then I turned 21. And I went to the Seattle Poetry Slam at the Sit & Spin a couple of times to see what the fuss was, and soon, I realized that I was 21 and I didn't have to fraternize with the spoken-word swells anymore. I was eligible for more fashionable places. And that was the end of it.
Although slightly diminished, Seattle's spoken-word scene is still plenty populated without me. The hosts and the venues have shuffled around over time, but the cause is still beloved and people spend a lot of time and effort to preserve them. On a recent Monday night at Coffee Messiah, there was standing room only--to witness a young girl recite some Ani DiFranco lyrics, and a handful of high-strung goth kids harangue about stuff. Nothing that followed was especially inspired or poetic either. Sifting through a bunch of crap at a spoken-word show wasn't anything new for me, but I was a year out of practice, and it was the show's effect on me that had changed. Not only were the writers unimpressive now--they also super sucked.
I halfheartedly tried some other venues, and they were every bit as ghastly. The congregations applauded uniformly for everybody--the kid who met a lot of hostile people while jumping trains, the woman who professed that she wanted to make love to "the Buddha," the dude who spent his allotted time and a half to tell "a short story" about two kids he knew during his childhood who liked to kick each other in the nuts for sport. Rhyming verses were forgiven. Imagery was left bleeding in the dust. Everyone was praised and encouraged. Save for bongos, they had every element of the worst caricature of a poetry reading imaginable. Watching them, for me, was like tearing a scab off before it's ready.
But no, that's not what the shows were like when I had something to do with them. We were glamorous, hardcore artists with something to say. I struggled to retrograde my point of view, back to the days when I didn't mind this kind of spectacle. I'd show up to these every week like clockwork, enthusiastic, and it's the same crowd now that it always was. Are the spoken-word scene's salad days really finished, or were we just too green to know writing from refuse?
Of course we were, but that doesn't mean anything because the performers don't care either way if they suck or not. Hippieshit cafes are the best shot that young writers have if they want their writing heard, and the poets are the show's own impresarios, their MCs, cafe owners, baristas. They create these things to support themselves and their circles, not to cater to a room full of snotty misanthropes. The shows may be bad--really, criminally bad--but to a high-school kid? They're priceless conduits for progress. Being so long removed from the scene, I'd forgotten that the quality of the poetry couldn't mean less, and I felt like an incredible asshole.
The Seattle Poetry Slam, however, is another ball game. There's a forum created for assholes if there ever was one. In concept, a poetry slam is flat-out draconian: Three rounds of poets, by and large professional couch-surfers, compete for a small cash prize (in the case of the Slam, it's $25). They are awarded points by audience members who are chosen at random, and they lose points if their performances go over three minutes. Props are forbidden, which is probably necessary, since poets will employ all manner of gimmicks--sermons on feminism, religion, racial equality--to strike strategic chords with the crowd. And people pay money to watch.
Even if the readers are awful, the Slam can still be a riot. By nature, the dramatics are marvelous, and all of the stunts and desperate measures that the readers use can be as entertaining as the poetry itself. It's also held at a bar, which adds another competitor: the audience. I've seen performers get booed off the stage--unlike the open mics, there's no blockade of sobriety holding people back. The Slam always reminded me of starving Tantalus of Greek myth, reaching again for the fruit only to have the branch shrink away from him to the gods' delight. Except this is more like making bums fight each other for a sandwich.
Bloodlust notwithstanding, the Slam is also your best bet if you want to see some decent "spoken word" in Seattle. People aren't trying out their chops here; no one wrote this on his lunch break. I've never dreamt of performing at the Slam, not even in secret, because I'm too shy and not good enough. And that's the audience's insurance. The Slam is for real. Founded on Darwinism, it does not feel sorry for you and your dearth of talent. Seattle poet Ira Parnes opens one of his pieces by declaring that "the Slam wants to fuck your face." It does.
It's also a fair show for four bucks. Along with its poetry slam, the Slam also provides a complimentary open mic, a featured performer, and a jazz-improv combo, over which the slam winner freestyles after the show. It works hard to be the archetype--straight-up Nuyorican style, just like in So I Married an Axe Murderer. There's also the possibility that you'll be picked as a judge, and then you get to judge everybody.
And for all of those reasons, there are a lot of open-mic patriots hatin' the Slam. It's contentious in nature, it's portentous in attendance, it's generally elitist to judge art. These folks want to make demands, which is stupid, the same way it was stupid of me to demand a grand cabaret from an open mic at a coffeehouse. What the haters never seem to recognize is that open mics and slams are used for two utterly different functions. A slam isn't a workshop--it's an exhibition. It happens to involve art, but it doesn't necessarily promote art's evolution. But you can't win any fans by suckling on an open mic's indiscriminate love, and you won't learn to write worth a damn under a slam's iron fist. Open mics are where you go if you want to perform poetry, essentially, and slams are where you go to hear it.
This isn't to say that spoken-word open mics never, ever merit a visit from a spectator, even a cynical one. It's perfectly feasible that you'd go to an open mic and hear something said so succinctly, so flawlessly, that your whole life would be changed for a week. I've filled entire steno pads with open mics--based essays and pursued friendships on single phrases. Likewise, you could come away from an open mic with a stomachache. And this is another important distinction between open mics and slams: The effect of a bad open mic is always a stomachache; the effect of a bad slam is always a headache.
