Slam August

As is becoming a regular event on this blog, it is now August 7 and I am announcing the project for this month.

In the months of August and September Spoken Word SA is holding the heats for the 2017 Poetry Slam, so naturally I am going to enter and hopefully win (I won’t). The first heat is the 18th of August and the last is 15th of September with the final on the 22nd of September.

I have had the tab open for this for pretty much 6-months, and have not started working on anything in that time, which is why I am setting this as a project. For most people (myself included) see slam poetry as probably something like this.

I do find something endearing about slam poetry though. My idea is to do something akin to the dual dialogue you hear a lot in musicals. In particular I really love the song Farmer Refuted by Lin-Manuel Miranda in Hamilton.

I mean this annotation on Genius says it all.

Yo, pay attention to the sickening amount of sound play that Miranda/Hamilton works into this epic counterpoint takedown. Highlighted words attached to this annotation indicate just about all instances of matched consonance and assonance.

So this is the kind of form I want to write my poem, with two voices that talk at the same time overlapping to create a third meta voice but all performed by one person. Seems hard, maybe impossible and it probably is — but I will try.

I also really like the way the poetry slam is judged.

Five judges chosen by the MC at random from the audience. Judges hold up score cards using a 1 – 10 scale to one decimal point, with 10 being the highest possible score. Of the five scores for each poet, only the middle three scores are counted. The decision of the judges is final.

I think that is really cool and makes you really work to make a connection with the audience on the night.