Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Art of Performance: Nazila Jamison, a member of Oakland Team, travels to the South Bay to participate in poetry slams, where judges plucked from the audience rate performances.
Local poets keep spoken word alive and thriving with slams
Campbell's Chris Aahz is the slam scene's unofficial historian and audio documentarian
By Steven Raphael
Cheers of delight erupt from the crowd as a performer raps, scats, sings and swings his way through a host of carefully composed lyrics. Pulling the mic close to his mouth, he bursts into carefully articulated lines, spoken faster and faster. A fan in the back chants along.
"Two for that thing that you do, that voodoo, that chicken greases up your inner upper thighs."
No, it's not Puff Daddy. It's Silicon Valley slam poetry, a performance art started to give new life to poetry, to take it from the page and bring it to the masses.
"There's a lot of power in the word," says Campbell resident Chris Aahz, 31, a major player in the Silicon Valley slam poetry scene.
Slam poetry originated in Chicago in the mid-'80s. A great poetry fan named Marc Smith had grown tired of sterile, boring, open-mic poetry sessions. He wanted people to understand his passion for poetry, and slam poetry was his tool to achieve this. He's the one who came up with the system of using judges and scoring in a competition-like setting.
Slam Schedule: Information on where and when Silicon Valley Poetry Slams take place.
Slam poetry relies on the drama of performance and competition to draw people in. One by one, poets take the stage for a three-minute reading of a poem. While they read, the audience is encouraged to participate, chanting along or yelling responsively. At the end of each performance, poets are scored by judges randomly chosen from the audience.
The top-scoring poets receive a small monetary prize and qualify for the next round of competition, with the cream of the crop ultimately progressing to national finals. At the first national tournament in 1990, three teams traveled to San Francisco to compete for the top prize. Eleven years later, the national tournament, held in Rhode Island, featured 56 teams.
Silicon Valley slam poetry was founded in 1996 by Vadim Litvak, a poet who, like Smith, was fed up with traditional open-mic poetry readings. "I wanted to have a performance space that I could be comfortable with," he said.
As a team, Silicon Valley Slam Poetry has been very successful. They have reached nationals both of the last two years, winning the championship in 1999.
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Taper Section: Campbell resident Chris Aahz records poetry slams and releases the results on CD.
But, for Litvak, the points are only a means to an end, a fun game to help market the poetry.
"In essence, it's completely meaningless," he says. "How do you really apply points to poetry? That's part of the game and part of the joke."
What's more important is bringing the poetry to the people. And for this, Aahz is the go-to guy. At the back of the room the big man, with curly black hair and thick, black glasses, and a pack of Camels in the pocket of his flannel shirt, controls the sound system. He sets up the mics and speakers that broadcast the poets' work.
His most important role, however, is that of slam poetry historian. Moved by the beauty of performance, Aahz took steps to document it.
"I'd go to these shows and I'd see all these amazing shows and then they're gone," he says. "That's the problem with performance poetry. It's as much performance as poetry; you can't always get the same thing from just reading it."
So, Aahz began recording the performances, using his own equipment, and releasing the recordings on CD. Only hours before he is due for his graveyard shift at the Hamilton Avenue Kinko's, Aahz masterfully handles the complexities of recording live performance.
And he does it like a pro. "He produces some of the best sounding, spoken word albums I've heard," Litvak said. "Unless you do it professionally, you can't get sound quality like that."
His skills are tapped by poets from across the nation. Aahz not only records the tracks, he also mixes and masters them, cleans up each track, removes background noise, presses the CDs, does the artwork and handles the distribution. Any profit he makes goes into the team's coffers and is used to defray the cost of traveling to nationals.
If Aahz's recording is what allows slam poetry to endure over time, it is competition that molds it into a distinct art form and makes it exciting. The best slammers are not necessarily the best writers; they are the performers who are able to gauge an audience and give judges what they want.
For some poets, this means bellowing, screaming and ranting. Other poets sound like rappers, as they skillfully enunciate the rapidly flowing syllables of their verse. Still others use their quick wit to create a poem startlingly similar to stand-up comedy.
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Screamer: For poets like Robert Carini, performance is the main focus of slams, with a heavy emphasis on language and emotion.
Certain themes tend to resonate well with audiences. Poems about sex, race and politics elicit strong responses. And, as a rule, openness and honesty lead to good scores.
"I'm tired; I'm hot; I'm fat. What do I have that would attract my kind of woman," muses poet Mike McGee at a slam in San Jose. A portly man with a long goatee, he confronts feelings of inadequacy and is awarded third place as a result.
"My world fell apart on a Sunday. Where is Mother Teresa on a day like this?" he says.
The second place winner also opens herself up to the audience. "My lover tells me to go f--- myself while we sit on the floor of a men's bathroom," says the girl known only by her first name, Jessica. Her dyed-black hair falling gently her in face, she delicately recites a story about her lesbian lover whose passion for risk-taking led to a heroin addiction.
But, the winner of the night shared virtually nothing about himself, and his poems were the least literary of the bunch. Ryan Mergen first won the crowd over with his "It was a Honda love," a witty play on words with more puns per line than listeners could follow. Mergen had the crowd roaring with laughter as he related a love story, drawing his vocabulary almost exclusively from car names and parts. Three of the five judges gave the performance a perfect ten, and the other two weren't far behind.
Then, in an abrupt 180-degree turn, Mergen began his second poem by sternly bellowing, "There is a rapist in this room," referring to a statistic that one in ten men will commit a rape.
The poem read like a news story, with well-researched facts and statistics thrown in alongside Mergen's speculation and advice to men that they need to be more emotionally open. The message rang true, and Mergen's scores soared almost as high for this poem as his first.
When the night finally ended, the winners had earned a few extra bucks and a spot in the semis, and the audience had enjoyed a great show. In time, slammers and fans alike will turn to Aahz to keep the memories alive.
What they may not realize for years to come, however, is that Aahz's recordings are doing more than simply capturing poetry. What they are doing is helping to preserve an art form and to guarantee its place in history.
"If it wasn't for him," Litvak said. "A lot of this would just go by the wayside. It would just be lost to history."
Campbell, California
