A modest proposal for Victor Infante and Michael Paul: formalized literary poetry slam a la DANCING WITH THE STARS.

One more encore in combating literary poetry fatuousness, keeping the ad hominem-osity to a minumum.

Here's a link to a recent Victor Infante blog post regarding slam poetry:
http://ocvictor.livejournal.com/779074.html

Finding a rare moment of common ground with Victor, I agree with him on the point that some slam poets (eager for high scores) engage in " simplistic statements of political positions for easy audience reaction."

But this sentence--All of it slides away when I put what good writing there is into focus.--makes me think....uh-oh.

Before I go further, I'll reveal my limited knowledge of/experience with slam. I've been to a few slam events over the years--mostly in Austin, TX (during the AIPF in 2001, 2002 and 2007) and in the Bay Area. And I've been there solely as an audience member.

After reading Victor's blog post, I had a flashback to something Michael Paul (former Orange County gasbag literary poet who is now operating out of Northern California) wrote for Poetix.net about a slam event he once attended (highlighting by me):
There were 10 teams fielded by 10 towns, which represented the cream of the crop, slam-wise, for those cities, and on Saturday, in two five-round bouts, those ten teams were competitively skimmed down to the four finalists, who would contend for the big bucks and big honors on Sunday, the day we attended. The reports, from informed and discriminating sources, were not too encouraging in terms of expecting artful poetry; in fact we were forewarned that the kind of angry, loud-voiced, typical rants and screeds which we have come, unfortunately, to expect, would be the order of the day.

So it was quite refreshing when, instead, the four final teams trotted out their best work to vie for the final honors. Instead of the frighteningly homogenous hip-hop we have seen in slams (skinny white boys and little old ladies from the old country attempting to conform to and perform in the cadence and body language of African-Americans, which does not ring true) there was diversity. There was originality. There was some real poetry. And there was a redemptive and life-affirming quality to much of the work.

Mr. Paul's complete column can be read here:
http://poetix.net/Paul_essay.htm

Here's my modest proposal: I'd prefer proponents-of-poetry-as-literature to engage in the act of separativeness, instead of trying to silence poetic voices they consider to be too informal and frighteningly inferior in craft and remake slam into nothing but their own self-image.

Once this separation has occurred, then the literary poets can have their very own slam contests a la DANCING WITH THE STARS with three appointed judges (this avoids the selection of audience members at random who may not appreciate their genius, their MFA degrees and magazine/small press/anthology/application-for-poet-laureate -of-their-state credentials).

Michael Paul can be Len Goodman.

Victor Infante can be Bruno Tonioli.

And I'll leave it up to you, the reader, to select an appropriate equivalent of Carrie Ann Inaba.