Poetry That Pulls No Punches

Poet Josh Millican grabs the microphone stand by the neck, using both hands as though he just wants to snap it off, like an angst-ridden comedian storming the stage or a rock vocalist with some serious, serious attitude.

Pausing for effect, the 24-year-old temporary office worker scans the black-attired, beatnik throwbacks at the Checca nightclub in West Hollywood and launches into a caffeine-fueled, cigarette-clouded barrage of images collected from a neurosis-scarred life growing up in Los Angeles.

Playing the tough little cholo with his gold chain, baggy pants and white slope-necked T-shirt, he talks about ugly arguments with his mother, about cheating on his girlfriend and the gnawed-knuckle terror he feels at one day becoming a father.

The words come in an edgy-metered verse:

I had a girlfriend who was late for every period.

Three times she told me she was pregnant, but get this:

She was never really pregnant and I don’t think

she thought she was.

She just liked to watch me squirm. . . .

Millican is a proponent of the spoken word’s brashest wave: slam poetry. Conceived as a way to make often-arcane verse more accessible to the public, slam poets don’t just recite their works, reading them from the written page; they deliver them from memory, using hand gestures and facial antics in an attempt to score points from judges selected from the audience.

Born in the beer-soiled confines of Chicago’s Green Mill Tavern a decade ago, the slam phenomenon is now the rage nationwide, especially among TV-bred Gen Xers looking for spontaneous entertainment.

The genre is relatively new to Los Angeles, but Millican and five other local poetry slammers hope to firmly establish the city as the West Coast capital of free verse.

They are heading for Middletown, Conn., next month to compete at the eighth annual National Poetry Slam Championship, sponsored by the Connecticut Poetry Festival, vying for a $6,000 first-place check and bragging rights as the country’s best performing wordsmiths.

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Think of a slam poetry competition as the team tennis of literary rap, played on a court where the audience draws the out-of-bounds lines to its fancy.

Together, the L.A. slam team members are the punk rockers of modern poetry--a white guy, a black dude, three chicks and a gray-bearded psychiatrist aiming to show the world that L.A. isn’t just starlets and movie producers, but a lively home for their kicky mix of verse and aggression, rhyme and testosterone. They want to make spoken poetry as audience-friendly as stand-up comedy, to bring their rough poems under the hot lights of hip nightclubs, put them on the street and in your face.

Millican is a self-styled Lenny Bruce for the ‘90s, an angry “virtuoso of neurosis� who says he wants to stamp academia out of poetry, yank it out of the dusty volumes at college libraries, rescue it from what he calls the wimpy domain of coffeehouses and bookstore back rooms.

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“Slamming has made me grow both as a poet and a performer,� said the former UC Santa Cruz creative writing major, who lives in West Hollywood. “When someone reads a piece, they become a conduit for the poem. But when you’re slamming, the person is the poem.

“There is no differentiation between the two. I can be my work.�

But the genre has drawn criticism from more academic-minded poets, who see slam more as cheap entertainment than art, a mix of bad off-the-cuff poetry and theatrical rantings.

Just the idea of audience members holding up placards to judge poets like some beauty contest, they say, takes poetry out of the literary realm and pushes it toward vaudeville.

“In slams, whoever screams the most and performs best, wins,� said local poet Rafael Alvarado. “It’s not the quality of the work. A really good poet could get up there and move people to tears and lose if he or she didn’t perform well. That’s not poetry.�

Alvarado, who often reads his work at coffeehouses, added: “Pablo Neruda or Garcia Lorca would never have been caught dead in a poetry slam. To them, poetry was pure. Slam takes it to the gutter.�

Slammers contend that their art is more accessible than regular poetry because to score well, a slammer needs to immediately connect with the audience, not just impress them with esoteric imagery.

But they acknowledge that judging the competitions--with spectators randomly chosen and asked to numerically grade each performance--is less than scientific.

“Audience members tell us they can’t be judges because they don’t know a thing about poetry and we say, ‘No! You’re the perfect judge,’ � Millican said. “Anyway, if you’re an attractive woman and you’ve got all male judges, you can just about throw all the rules out. That’s the fun of it. It’s all audience-interactive.�

In the raucous, smoke-filled bars where slams are often held, first-timers can be rattled by audience chants of “Virgin! Virgin!�

“Sometimes the judges aren’t even sober,� said team member Jerry Quickley, a 33-year-old writer from Hollywood. “I’ve seen some great poets have some little old lady give them a score of 3 or something. That hurts.�

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G. Murray Thomas, editor of Next, a Long Beach-based poetry journal, said that not only academics but other performing poets disparage slam.

“There certainly is an ongoing controversy,� he said. “On the campus and within the coffeehouse circuit alike, people are totally opposed to any competition among poets.�

But Thomas, who has competed in the nationals, says slamming is good for the art. “For the most part, scores and winners don’t matter,� he said. “It’s more a way to get poets up there and gives the audience something to fixate on, to look at scores and get emotionally involved, not just listen to one poet after another. And it can attract much larger crowds than regular poetry readings.�

Los Angeles slam team member Robert S. Carroll, a Westwood family psychiatrist and UCLA assistant professor of psychiatry, says good poetry matters no matter how it’s delivered.

“If poets say something true, something that resonates as always true, people know,� he said. “In the end, the last judge of good poetry is the ear, not the eye or the mind.�

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On a recent Saturday, the slam team gathered at Checca for a warmup to get the kinks out of their deliveries and test audience reactions without actual judges--just gauging the oohs and aahs inspired by poems that hit their mark.

As they took the tiny stage, one by one, they high-fived and back-slapped one another like Olympic competitors. And the audience ate it up. “This is our third week in a row,� said Hollywood resident Johnny Vergara. “It’s wild to hear these distinctive voices, to listen to the things we don’t say to others. This is what my father must have dug when he went to those coffeehouses in the ‘60s. It’s a trip, man.�

Like the poem by the Hawaiian shirt-clad Carroll, whose work revolves around the psyche of death and dying:

We sit on the bench in the hospital corridor

next to the cafeteria, and we wait.

You know what waiting is.

If you know anything, you know what waiting is,

but this is not about you. This is about

illness and hospitals and life and death

This is about the smell of the disinfectant

that turns your head and the sting

that crying won’t clear. . . .

Taking the stage as the first performer-poet, Millican told the audience they were in for something different than “the average old poetry reading where poets read works like ‘Requiem to a Dead Urn’ and people go ‘Hmmmmm’ and clap lightly.�

Team members say it takes guts to face a slam audience, where in cities such as Chicago the bad poets are booed off the stage. Team member Deborah Edler Brown remembers her first performance, standing on an orange crate in a crowded Hollywood bar, “shaking so much I thought I was going to fall off, afraid to even make eye contact with the audience.�

Millican says slam critics are motivated by such fear.

“They’re scared,� he said. “Here comes something new and exciting and incredibly marketable and these people are scared to do it. A new genre comes along and people say it’s not legitimate just because it has a new set of rules.�

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This year will be the Los Angeles team’s second appearance in the slam competition, according to Mark Pomeroy, a local poet who organized the team. Last year, L.A. finished fifth among 35 teams.

Pomeroy said he attended the nationals in 1995 and was amazed to see Los Angeles did not have a team. “We wanted to show that L.A. was not just another poetry wasteland,� he said.

The six teammates were chosen from 50 who competed in runoffs this year. Two other Los Angeles-area teams--from Silver Lake and Long Beach--will also compete but those were not the result of competition, Pomeroy said.

Team member and Chicago native Monica Lee Copeland says Los Angeles has a long way to go before it matches the support given poetry in other cities. “L.A. has its venues for poets but there aren’t the poetry festivals like in other places. There isn’t the funding for poets.�

Hoping to change that with a good showing in this year’s nationals, L.A. slammers memorize their lines, recite them aloud as they drive the freeways, looking for just the combination of stage presence and poetry, acting a little like the characters in a slam poem Quickley delivered titled, “Loose Cigarettes,� about growing up in New York:

We were like urban Indians

never taking more than we needed

teenage hooligans to everyone but us

cool. . . .

Growls Millican: “We’re not saying slam is the next Beat movement, but it’s genuine. The academics are just jealous and afraid of getting shadowed and eclipsed. I mean, who’s listening to their work?�