Slamtastic!

By Dave Karlotski
HippoPress.com

New Hampshire Writers' Project director of programs Karen Marzloff originally requested 60 chairs for the Slam-O-Rama being held at the New Hampshire Institute of Art on Saturday, April 6. As anticipation for the event rose, she upped her estimate to 150 seats for the audience. Even that number crept up, though, and about 200 chairs were set out for Saturday night.

But a few minutes into the open mike, it was standing room only.

The back wall of the auditorium had to be opened up so that more chairs could be placed among the eerie poetry-inspired sculptures and drawings provided by the Yo Gallery, another of the event's key collaborators.

The audience brought energy as well as numbers, since it was an impressively mixed and enthusiastic crowd: people in long hair and funny hats, respectable-looking middle-aged people, kind old couples and a startlingly healthy number of people under twenty. The tribe of words is large and sundry, with members everywhere.

The first half of Slam-O-Rama was an hour of open mike poetry by people who'd signed up to read at the beginning of the night. Some were old pros, some admitted it was the first time they'd ever read in public, and about half recited their poems from memory, a mark of the high quality of the readings. Adding to the mix, New Hampshire's Poet Laureate Marie Harris signed up and read for the open mike just like any other civilian.

The second half of the night was the slam itself, an invitation-only tournament of competitive poetry performed by six slam pros, most from the Boston area where there is actually a slam scene. Simone Beaubien, Brian Comiskey, Geof Hewitt, Zilla McCue, Nina Simon, and Jack McCarthy put on a great show with poems that were by turns funny and serious, poems about love and cubicle life and riding vacuums, poems about slips, hitchhiking, fathers, and a donut fight at a truck stop.

In the first round, each poet read two poems that were judged from 1-10 by five audience volunteers who held up their scores on cards for all to see; while the poets were never booed, the judges often were. Hewitt, McCue, Comiskey, and McCarthy moved on to the semifinals where they paired off against each other.

The Achilles heel of the event was the MCs, who seemed neither prepared for nor concerned with their responsibilities. The main function of an MC is to keep things moving, to smooth over the awkward pauses between speakers and events, but these two instead took turns bringing the action to a grinding halt, often wondering aloud what they should do next, how scoring should be conducted or how to pronounce things. During one surreal moment, one of the MCs shattered the momentum of yet another great poem and thunderous round of applause by asking the audience if they were getting tired and then pondering on what a long evening it had been.

But the poetry and the poets dominated the atmosphere. It was short, dark-haired Zilla McCue versus stooped, grizzled old man Jack McCarthy in the final round, edging out the shaggy, bulging-biceps St. A's grad Brian Comiskey and the strangely-wriggling Geof Hewitt. McCue's poem about stripping naked, slathering herself in oil and quitting her job had been a crowd pleaser but it was hard to match McCarthy's series of poems about owning shitbox cars, and in the end the veteran poetry machine that is Jack McCarthy won out over the youthful stand-up-comedy-like delivery of McCue.

Although a runaway success, the New Hampshire Writers' Project has no plans for Slam-O-Rama 2. Marzloff explained that Slam-O-Rama was meant to be a seed event, bringing the idea of competitive performance poetry to Manchester so that other people or organizations might be inspired to hold their own poetry slams.

We can only hope.

Dave Karlotski can be reached at hippo@hippopress.com.