Attending a Poetry Slam
in Monterey County California by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Most
of Monterey County’s Poetry Slams are held in the East Village Coffee Lounge in
downtown Monterey, but the Steinbeck Center in Salinas held one as part of the
National Endowment of the Arts Big Read program honoring Carmel poet Robinson
Jeffers when I was the youth services librarian for Monterey County.
I
took my daughter Florence along to attend a poetry slam held in conjunction
with the Robinson Jeffers Big Read. Slam
poetry is a performance art. The genre
is urban and was most definitely influenced by hip hop music. The teen poets who performed that evening
came from Oakland, California.
The
evening was organized by Monterey’s local slam poets Garland Thompson and
Marcos Cabrera – stars at the time at the East Village Coffee Lounge, newspaper
writers, and fellow producers of youth summer reading programs from the Salinas
Public Library.
Thompson
began the evening by saying that poetry slams in coffee houses begin with
people snapping their fingers to bring the poets on stage. I began snapping my fingers rhythmically
imitating dance music, looking forward to a great evening.
The
teen poets dealt with every problem in the US and the world it seemed. I was happy that social studies had not been
dropped from school curriculums and that the teens had some solutions for pollution.
The
only thing I would change about the evening would be to end with a Japanese
renga poem, which has a same beginning that everyone adds to in order to bring
everyone into the poetry circle.
Then,
I would use poetry rounds to start having attendees think about simple poetry
prompts for their own work. The one
round that everyone learns in kindergarten in “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” That one might generate laughs, but songs
like “Home on the Range” and “America the Beautiful” encourage poets to look
for beauty around them.
Reading
a poem together might create a contemplative atmosphere for writing after an
evening of poetry slamming. My
suggestion would be “A Negro Speaks of Rivers” by New York poet Langston Hughes
in order to have Monterey County slam poetry attendees to think of our
underground Salinas River and usually dry Carmel River.
I
am not a poet, but love reading Japanese haiku poems about nature. The form and subject are easy to learn and
might be a good wrap up for a poetry slam as well.
I
like slam poetry for the way it draws the audience in, but think it could be
even more powerful by capitalizing on audience energy to write group poems and
individual poems focused on solutions to maintain or retrieve unpolluted nature.
(Clean, pristine water is beautiful, and we need it everywhere.)
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
