http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/poetry-slams-do-nothing-to-help-the-art-form-survive-8475599.html
A few prize quotes from the above article by Nathan A. Thompson:
"Poetry is dying. Actually, it's pretty dead already for all intents and purposes and the rise of performance poetry slams is doing nothing to help matters. I know, I used to be a performance poet."
"[The early slam poets] demanded, along with Bukowski, that poetry “have guts”. They wanted to democratise poetry and drag it from the academic ivory tower.
But there never was an ivory tower. There was no cabal of posh people who had purposely made poetry unintelligible. Poetry has always been words on a page, open to anyone. The politicisation of art and the drawing of sectarian lines continues to damage poetry to this today."
"A further nail in the coffin is the rise of poetry slams. I have performed at many slams and the audience is almost always half drunk and if you want to win you have to pitch your poem pretty low. The result is a scene rife with the poetic equivalent of nob jokes – and plenty of actual nob jokes.
The only division in poetry is between those people willing to take the time to read it and those who will not. When Emily Dickinson said only “the fairest” may enter her house of “possibility”, she wasn't being elitist –she was putting up a barrier against the lazy.
Most slam poems are not strong enough to be published in even minor poetry journals. And that's fine; maybe they don't want to be. Then why attack the poems that do? It's like there is an oedipal urge to kill the art that made it. We cannot allow slam poetry to replace the role poetry plays in our lives. The threat is there."
As SCTV's TV horror host/film reviewer Count Floyd (look him up on YouTube) used to say:
"Oooooh! Scary stuff!"
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