BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – When one thinks of traditional poetry courses, quiet classes spent analyzing meter, form, and imagery come to mind. However, there has been a relatively recent movement to educate people on contemporary forms of poetry, such as slam poetry.
Slam poetry, or the competitive art of performance poetry, originated in 1984 when construction worker Marc Smith started a poetry reading series at a Chicago jazz club, looking to breathe life into poetry. The experiment spread to other clubs in Chicago and eventually to Ann Arbor, San Francisco and other major cities with nation-wide slams throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Slam has been well publicized in the media through television shows such as HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and the 1998 film, Slam. Some people think slam is brash, perhaps even abrasive, but others find it moving and persuasive and “the obvious power of slam poetry puts to the test the power of other kinds of poetry,” said Associate Professor of English Michael Theune.