Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 2, 1994 TAG: 9410030023
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-10 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: DAN FERRANTE Special to the Roanoke Times & World-News
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
The poetry slam will take place at South Main Cafe, 117 South Main St., tonight at 8 pm. Everyone is welcome to listen or even share poetry.
Signups and a $2 cover charge will be taken care of at the door.
At poetry slams aspiring poets read their works in front of an audience of critics.
"One of the interesting things about these slams is that the audience gets to determine what good poetry is," said Julia Delbridge, coordinator for the South Main Cafe Slam. Audience members are told to snap their fingers if the reading is bad, stomp their feet if the poet continues, and groan if they deem it necessary. "Sometimes the poetry can be considered so bad that it's even good," Delbridge said.
Delbridge has performed her poetry at such festivals as Lollapalooza in Denver, Colo., and the Poetry Alive Festival in Asheville, N.C. She also is a coordinator for many of the readings at The Iroquois Club in Roanoke.
Delbridge is preparing a chapbook of her poems entitled "The Loneliest Road," which is expected out soon.
The South Main Cafe Slam also will include a reading by special guest Jeffery McDaniel. McDaniel is one of the few acclaimed performance poets to appear in major publications such as "Ploughshares" and "Best American Poetry, 1994." He is working with WritersCorps out of Washington, D.C., performing poetry for schools and theaters. "He rides the fence between performance poetry and page poetry so close," Delbridge said.
"Performance poetry goes back to roots of the oral tradition with people telling stories around a campfire," Delbridge said. Performance poetry, which is more direct than the slow reading page poetry, didn't catch the public eye until the beat generation of the 1950s and '60s.
The idea of holding poetry slams came from Mark Smith, a former construction worker, about 10 years ago. He thought up the idea of a poetry reading with audience feedback because he was tired of the misconception that the only good poetry out there was in English textbooks. The background for the name came from the term "grand slam" in baseball. Smith was trying to make the idea of poetry similar to a sporting event so the average person would want to participate.
Recently MTV's "Spoken Word" has been devoted to the growth of these poetry slams.
Delbridge received input from Smith when putting together the South Main Cafe Slam. "These slams are not meant to put as much of an emphasis on pleasing the performer, but most of it should go to pleasing the audience," she said.
by CNB