Another pinched-nose, hysterical article complaining about slam poetry--this one from UK.

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!"

Victor Infante explains how the artistic selection process can sometimes be arbitrary and subjective in a good way.

From Victor Infante's eulogy blog entry for the late Jack McCarthy, a poet whose undeniable talent and grace Victor and I can both agree on.  The selected passage is interesting for its insight into how unconventional poets can sometimes be blessed with academia approval.  NEC refers to New England College, where Jack sometimes taught.

It was after his first reading at NEC -- to a packed house, I might add -- that I had one of my favorite conversations about Jack and his work, with poet and NEC professor Carol Frost. Carol is always an outspoken sort, and when we encountered him in the hall afterward, she was clearly wrestling with Jack's poetry.

I confided that Jack does a lot of things in his writing that normally drive me crazy, but when he does them, they all work. That's what makes him such an amazing artist. This answer seemed to satisfy Carol, but it also crystallized a lot for me, too. A lot of people treat poetry like it's a math problem, an equation to be solved. Jack put the lie to that in poem after poem. The "rules," such as they are, are there to help the writer coax nuance, meaning and emotion out of the poem. They're not an end unto themselves. And Jack could use any of the tools in the poet's toolbox with skill and precision -- his smaller lyrics, the ones that rarely made it to slams, are gorgeous -- but he always knew he didn't have to use any artifice if he didn't need to. Jack could just craft a story, and it would inevitably be a poem, would always be something a bit more than a jumble of sentences and sentiment. Because Jack was a real artist, and any arbitrary rules only applied when he found them convenient.

RIP Jack McCarthy, storytelling poet extraordinaire.

I was blessed with seeing and hearing two fine storytelling poets in my lifetime--the late Jack Shafer and the just-departed-today Jack McCarthy.

Jack was a legend in the slam poetry community, or to be more accurate, to anyone (poet and nonpoet alike) who experienced him onstage-and-off.

He was kind and gracious to me in late 2006 when I came to Seattle (he and his wife Carol lived in Washington in recent years) to do a couple of featured readings.  I was also glad to go with him to one of his features in the area, plus a Seattle Slam reading.

My all-time favorite Jack McCarthy poem is "The Walk of Life"; here's the link: http://www.standupoet.net/Poems/Walk_of_Life.htm

Here's video of Jack's poem "An Evening of Television":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50n5HHnakAE

Jack McCarthy performs "Careful What You Ask For"

One of the legends of slam/performance poetry; happy to have encountered him and his wife Carol at certain times in the past when he came to SoCal.  Also remember seeing him in Seattle in 2006.

More adventures in "How to REALLY be a poet!" courtesy of Alvin Lau.

Although Alvin Lau's article/exhortation has to do with slam poetry, it's applicable to nonslammers as well: http://kneepits.tumblr.com/post/433710836/poets-read-this

Two particular passages to point out:
1. Here's Lau at his nose-holding worst--"The biggest critique that needs to be given is going to be the most difficult to swallow: not all spoken word is poetry. Not everything read in a poetry slam is poetry. As Regie Gibson said at a Brave New Voices workshop, “most of what you hear in slam is not poetry, but short, rhythmic essays.” I couldn’t agree more. Here, the slam purists will throw up their arms in outrage and call me an elitist disconnected from slam’s roots. They will argue that to exclude any work from the boundaries of poetry is to sit in the same ivory tower slam originally was designed to demolish. But where do we draw the line? Do we really put Jamie Kilstein in the same genre as Rachel McKibbens? Is there any writing, condensed to 3-minutes, we will refuse to label as poetry? If we loosen our standards to include absolutely everything, with disregard to craft, then why do we even call it a poetry slam?"

2. And here's something a little more thoughtful--and with resonance for those on the MFA/prestige workshop trail feeling like they have to homogenize their work to please fellow poets/professors:
[Here Lau refers to why the slam poetry of 2000 and 2002 was better to him than current examples of the genre.]
People weren’t overly influenced by their surroundings—today, you can look at a lot of Denver poets and say “Oh, you sound like a Denver poet” – but look at old school poets like Daniel Roop and Al Letson from Atlanta, or Beau Sia and Celena Glenn from New York, or Dennis Kim and Kevin Coval from Chicago. All of these poets, living alongside other brilliant writers and performers, refused to heavily borrow from each other’s styles and be influenced by the dominant mode. They each had very clear voices and talents. Our current iWPS champion Amy Everhart, while talented, is a good example of a slammer who lacks inevitability, that is, you can’t look at her work and say “Oh, clearly Amy wrote this,” because much of the structure and imagery are borrowed from her region’s style, rather than a unique, crafted voice. We need to reject this, rather than elevate it to the top of our ranks."