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Showing posts with label Big Read. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Big Read. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Attending a Poetry Slam in Monterey County California by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

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