My friends, I am sad to tell you all that I will be missing the National Poetry Slam this year for the first time since my first NPS is 2008. My schedule and budget this summer just did not permit it. I will miss all of my friends who I usually only see at NPS. I will be following online and rooting for you all from afar. For those of you who have been around the national slam scene for a little while, I want to offer you a thought: The best part of my first couple NPS experiences was the late night ciphers. Hanging out and sharing work with other poets is an incredible blessing. When I started going to NPS only a few years ago it was always possible to catch somebody well-known and well loved in a cipher. I remember sitting outside until five in the morning with at our first NPS and seeing poets who we had loved from afar for years standing right there, in front of us, performing their work. And then, when they were done, they stayed. And they listened. And they hung out. At the most recent NPS I saw almost none of that. When I checked out ciphers at NPS 2013 I was often the person there with the most NPS events under their belt. Given that I only started going in 2008 and many people attending NPS that year had been going for decades, that feels really sad to me. At NPS 2013 I saw some truly amazing rookies throw down in ciphers but I saw most of the veteran slam poets who had bothered to show up either sitting far away and not listening or hanging out in their hotel rooms having invite-only ciphers. Ive been to some invite-only hotel room ciphers. It was a really cool, very different experience. But if that’s all you do, if you don’t go down outside to the open ciphers and read with everybody else and listen to everybody else, then you are not helping the slam community. I believe you are hurting it. Slam as an art form evolves and improves because the people who have been around for a while are present and are available to up-and-comers for advice and role modeling. I owe any meager success I have had as a spoken word poet to the people I met through the national slam scene who have helped and mentored me. I believe that if you are a successful slam or spoken word poet then in almost every case you have also been helped along and mentored by members of the slam community. I believe that it is your obligation to pass that mentorship along. I believe that experienced slam poets should go to ciphers at NPS and check out the rookies and encourage them and offer them advice. Yes, some of the poems you hear in ciphers are really, really bad. You’ll be OK. I promise. Also, there is a really good chance that you have read some really, really bad poems in ciphers at some point and the people listening stayed and encouraged and helped you anyways. If what you need to be able to do this is to view it as penance for your youthful poetic indiscretions, so be it. But also, I believe you shouldnt need that. I believe you should want to help. Poetry is a gift. The ability to write poetry is a gift. The ability to listen to and read poetry is a gift. The ability to help and love young poets is a gift. The ability to listen to bad poetry and hear the potential for brilliant work coming from the poet is a remarkable gift. I hope that this year at NPS all of these gifts get used. I hope you all have fun, I hope you all learn. Love, st
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 20:34:13 +0000
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