University Writing Center

December 2007

MEGHAN: Good morning College Station and welcome to “Write Right” the University Writing Center’s student podcast.  I’m your host Meghan Wall and in today’s episode we are delving into the world of slam poetry.  Slam is a form of poetry designed to be read out loud to an audience and has gained widespread popularity over the past 20 years.  A poetry slam is a competition where poets are evaluated on their work by audience members who act as judges.  Since 1990 a National Poetry Slam has been held each year where around 75 teams have competed to become the National Slam champions.  Many slam poets use the vocal delivery style of hip hop music and a rhythmic quality to their voice.  Slam poetry is known for passionate and in your face.  Poets use body language to tell a story and vary the volume and speed of their voice and use dramatic pauses for emphasis.  To find out more about slam poetry I’ve brought in Evan Schulman, a freshman political science major here at A&M and slam poet from Monroe Township, New Jersey.  First of all Evan, how did you get started writing poetry?

EVAN: I started writing poetry when I was about six years old.  I took a construction paper pad, and it had all these multicolored pieces of paper on it, and I took it to school with me and I started writing poetry on the playground.  It was more of a song but it was poetry.  And I thought I was really weird, so like I hid it from everybody.  I hid it in my toys, whatever I wrote, kept it from my parents because I really thought I was a strange kid.  And then one night I had a complete breakdown, in tears, like I was fearful that I was extremely weird.  So I took this paper down to my mom, and I was like ‘look mom I wrote this,’ and she read it, and of course it was a half an hour passed my bedtime so she was like ‘oh…here…take it back and go to bed,’ and that was it.  I have sporadically written since then, but I became a serious poetry writer probably towards the end of my high school career, about junior year.

MEGHAN: How did you become a slam poet?

EVAN: What happened was one day I sat down at my computer and I just started writing, and I didn’t know what I was writing.  I just had a bunch of stuff on my mind, and I just put it all down on the piece of paper and just kind of put it to the side, didn’t really think much of it.  And I went to school one day and the poetry club ended up bringing in some of these slam poets, the Mam poets, that was the name of their group, and they were out of New Jersey.  And they came, and they did their performance, and it was very upbeat, very passionate, very in your face kind of stuff.  And to get a whole entire school, and in our auditorium it was like a 1000 people, and  they completely enraptured their audience, and I thought it was absolutely incredible.  And then I looked at the stuff I was writing, and I thought to myself that’s what I’m doing and I didn’t even know it, just the flow it was there.  I didn’t have to do anything, it was just the natural flow that just makes it very easy to present in the slam style.

MEGHAN: What are some key elements to writing slam poetry?

EVAN: In slam poetry you’re going to find something that rhymes, but most of it’s the flow, so you’ll have the ending words of one line [rhyme] with the word in the middle of the next sentence. You don’t have to stick to the structure to the patterns of poetry. Feel free to write whatever you want.

MEGHAN: Why do you write poetry and what do you write about?

EVAN: For me it started as an outlet.  Stress, and school, and life, it was there, no matter where I was poetry was always, I guess you could say in back pocket.  It’s a hobby.  It’s part of my lifestyle.  My poetry is an analysis on my daily life, whether it’s love or trying to start some kind of revolution.  There are a lot of poems about fighting racism and bigotry and bias and all sorts of stuff like that.  A lot of my poetry is about inner strength, pushing myself through the day.

MEGHAN: So how do you get started when you’re writing your poem? How do you go about it?

EVAN: My process is: I start with one really profound line, just whether it’s in my daily life or I’m sitting down and I say I want to write something, you know this is what I’m going to write, but I’ll never write anything on paper.  It’s the hardest thing for me to write something on paper because I think so fast, and a slam piece it has a very distinct flow, so when you’re thinking of it your thinking of how you would slam it, so I always have to type it, so I can type faster than I can write.

MEGHAN: So Evan, where do you like to write your poetry?

EVAN: My best poetry was always written when I was by myself in my room. I remember writing pieces in the shower.  Whenever something comes to me I run to a computer type it down or if it’s something really good I would write it down, but I wouldn’t write the whole piece on the paper.

MEGHAN: And how important is revision in your work?

EVAN: I revise my poems constantly.  The stuff that I’ve written a long time ago, I go back and I revisit just trying to make it better.  I make sure the whole vision I had for the piece is actually there, and I’ll revise it until it’s perfect.

MEGHAN: Have you ever written specifically for an audience?

EVAN: I did  that once.  I geared my poetry to a certain audience, and it was at this one venue, and then I went to a different venue and I performed my slam, and people just looked at me like ‘what are you doing, you’re coming off completely fake.’  It just wasn’t sincere anymore; I wasn’t writing for myself; I was writing for an audience.  Slam is meant to be spoken, and  it’s the poet’s decision whether to take the audience into consideration. I’m going to speak; I’m going to say what I want, no matter who the audience is.  So that was a lesson that I learned.

MEGHAN: What kinds of techniques do you use in your writing?

EVAN: I like to make simple references. I take everyday life, like the one line in the poem: “I prayed to God, yeah I prayed to God, but these days I’ve been praying to my sun visor cause I’m not sure what I believe in anymore.” Sun visor, that’s something everybody looks up at every time they get in their car.  So it’s just taking simple objects like that and just bringing them into real life instead of making it so supernatural or so just not tangible; it makes the reader or the listener feel very distant.

MEGHAN: Next, Evan his brought a poem he wrote several months ago that he would like to share with us…

EVAN:  Shower isn’t going to clean you up if you’re thinking dirty thoughts
We can kick around the cobblestone but these pebbles won’t budge
We can say we are kings but once we were pawns
We can curse like sailors cause Mom’s not around
I’ll burn photo albums in attempts to scorch memories
But forgetting bikes with training wheels and romance and memoirs
Is making today easier but yesterday harder
I keep more dust in my head than I do in my pockets
Tease more thoughts than I actually entertain
Sprain my ankle trying to jump out of a bad couple days
And we can kick around this cobblestone but these pebbles won’t budge
If I remember love for what it is I’ll never sleep tonight
And if I forget her lips the sunrise of another day won’t sit so heavy on my heart
If I send a letter with no return address I’ll never know how she’ll respond
But I’ll never know where she is
I’ll kick around the cobblestone but these pebbles won’t budge
I’ll say sweet dreams to my thoughts and tuck myself in with own two arms
And read stories of the sky and kiss the stars goodnight
I’m flirting with fire
I’m following neon signs north looking for an open to exit melody
This melody, that has this flat note
My footsteps are music, music of glory in the making, in the making, in the making
Not quite there yet, but I’ll make it, and that’s fine
I’ll add the gasoline to the fear of being burned
Being scarred is for better and for worse
And I’ll play the blues on my guitar so I can let my fingers bleed
As I lay on top of horizons and tree branches
Testing the ferocity of gravity, hoping time will stop me before blues become sorrows
I just want to kick the rocks out of cobblestones so they can just be free
So I can walk the street with the ground settling softly underneath my feet
As I make footprints, we make footprints, whether I like it or not I’ll be there tomorrow

MEGHAN: What motivated you to write this poem?

EVAN: I wrote this when I first came to college when I was just trying to find my place, and it wasn’t a smooth transition, coming from New Jersey, and this was like my transition poem.  I wanted to plant my feet firmly here and kick the rocks out of the cobblestone, and  I found my groove here just like anybody else.

MEGHAN: What advice can you give to the aspiring poets out there?

EVAN: The first problem that comes to somebody who wants to write poetry is that their first poem is probably not going to publishable. People, they’ll tell me that they love poetry but they can never write it themselves, and whatever they write it’s junk, and if you only write one poem and you look at it and you don’t think it’s not good then that’s   just going to discourage you from writing again.  I write about my daily happenings, my daily thoughts, ideas, and there’s no reason why anybody else couldn’t do,  it just how much time you want to put into it to make it the way you want it to be.

MEGHAN: And, finally Evan, what are your future plans with slam poetry?

EVAN: I’m actually planning to go to Slam Poetry Nationals, which is actually up in Wisconsin.  First I’m working on getting on to the Revolutions team out of Bryan or maybe one of the teams out of Austin; there is plenty of teams across Texas to get involved with.  And to get on a team you have to win a slam so I’m working on that.

MEGHAN: If you’d like to hear more from Evan Shulman and see some other great slam poets in action just go to Revolutions Café in downtown Bryan.  There they have poetry open mic night every Sunday from 9-11pm and poetry slams once a month on the same night.  I encourage you to not only support our local poets but try your own hand at writing, you never know what your hidden talent might be.  And don’t hesitate to bring your aspiring works of art here to the writing center, on the second floor of Evans Library, where our creative consultants will help you sort out your ideas and form your own flow.  Furthermore if you are interested in taking creative writing courses here at A&M, English 235 introduces you to writing prose, and English 236 is an introduction to poetry writing.  Well thanks for listening and as always, I’m Meghan Wall, hoping you’ll tune in next time to another exciting of “Write Right.”