New Skool Slam
July 2005

In a shift from the past series of neighborhood-based reportage, students from the spring session of the Brooklyn Rail/Urban Word NYC New Skool Journalism Workshop covered the city’s annual Teen Poetry Slam championships. Over several months the teens explored their own subject matter and their voices as reporters without limiting themselves to what might be considered the parameters of traditional journalism. Special thanks to Poets & Writers—for without its support, this ongoing collaboration between Urban Word and The Brooklyn Rail would not be possible.

—Knox Robinson and Meghan McDermott, editors

Nigger
by Alisa Umanskaya

I  watched each poet, learned from each poet, slowly felt each poet, but became just one. I hadn’t slept so I couldn’t focus except then, when she was crying, I was crying. Raw passion was onstage, surging from the face, hers. Her body became her vessel; she smacked my brain across the face, Maya’s. Maya Williams.

“I don’t understand how these kids can do it today, call each other NIGGERS as if it’s their names! Do they have any idea what the word means? If they had to pick cotton, scrub floors on their knees … And answered only to Nigger because they had no identity, they would think differently.”

Her body jerked violently as her raging, piercing voice filled the auditorium. Her anger, frustration, vivacity surged from inside through her energy systems to her organs, bones, muscles. Her hands flew up in the air, her torso swung around and around and she became

“Nigger, clean my house Nigger iron my clothes Nigger get my kids ready
it’s time to go Nigger water my plants Nigger do that dance called
hambone… Nigger lay D - O - W - N so I can have sex with you Nigger
you’re the scum on my shoe… Now hang that Nigger from that maple
tree...”

became nigger—slave, white man, nigger—now, judge.

I’m white and Jewish and from Brooklyn. I have sympathy but lack empathy for nigger: the word, the era, the existence. It’s not me, but it was for that night, for the five minutes through which I became Maya Williams and every ancestor from which she rose.

She is quiet. She carries a scowl on her face always, except when she smiles. She carries a book and writes in it and rereads what she wrote, sometimes mumbles, sometimes mouths the words to herself, and that night she thrust me into Maya’s mountain of dissatisfaction with her race and showed me her “beautiful black heritage” in its purest, least meddled—with form. She is tiny and thin and
When my brother was born and hungry for my mother’s breast he used to
cry. His eyes closed and his mouth opened. He let out a quivering wail
and his lower jaw shook violently.
and when she said her poem, she was starving for change, breast
milk. Change, vibrations reverberated from her inside to her outside to my mind. She smacked my brain across the face.

Rebel Music
by Nicoletta Bumbac

This down to earth hip-hop appeal is what draws us to their spoken declarations. Teens can relate to other teens. The peer-group mentality of hearing a poet break down their life’s worst and best chain reacts an “I feel you” vibe that suspends the poet-audience bond with the life of shit we go through. Even if you can’t relate, an open-mind will liberate a sheltered soul from ignorance, the poet’s greatest enemy.

But when the liberal mind of poetry plays into the politics of poetry slam ideology, some unclear questions are posed about the realness of slams. How can you equate scores with words? The judges are just people and people are permeable with error, so therefore the scores they give really are just numbers that happen to be in their head at the time they fill out score sheets. Often times the poet you enjoyed most will not make it to the next round. Like Anthony McKoy.

Anthony’s an Urban Word veteran whose poetry deals with quality of life issues such as politics and stuff that bothers an everyday teen. Now a youth mentor with the non-profit organization, he focuses teens to hone their writing skills in the free creative writing workshops Urban Word offers to NYC youth. A former Knicks Poetry Slam Winner, Anthony participated in this year’s Poetry Slam. He made it to the final round as he did last year, but in the end Anthony didn’t hear his name as one of the winners representing NYC at the national championships in San Francisco.

“That’s it with poetry,” he half-jokingly protested. “I’m joining the Army.” Not making it proved his poetic argument that so many youth have a voice and aren’t able to use it. Even if you do have a voice, you’re not being heard.

A quote from Anthony appears on the back of an Urban Word t-shirt: “Spoken word is our generation’s rebel music.” Poetic-performance has been made popular by Russell Simmons’ televised Def Jam Poetry Series and tons of documentaries and books, including The Idiot’s Guide to Slam Poetry.

Type in “slam poetry” on Amazon.com and you will find 21,451 results. But while spoken word provides an opportunity for youth to speak up about issues that concern them, the consequences of the slam’s competitiveness should not be overlooked. Even if the point really isn’t about the points, the truth is that points will be attached to the poems. And that could be a way of silencing future poets who aren’t competitive in nature.

Slammed
by Tamara Leacock

As the series started, teen poets and the all-ages audience were entranced by the romantic allure of teen slam poetry. The slam appeared to be a time where young social geniuses would be given the stage to reveal the meaning of life in tight, urban prose that would leave all metaphorically lifted—poets could showcase their lyrical talents in front of a panel of top exec judges and leave the night with a record contract and royalties for their freestyles.

But that made-for-the-movies scenario is romantics, not teen poetry. The first afternoon at the Dance Theater Workshop in Manhattan turned into a drawn out, monotonous drone of enigmatic, repetitive profanity, performance gimmicks, and beat-less freestyles. The audience initially appeared packed, but one soon realized over eighty percent of them would be rocking the mike in the competition that day.

Nonetheless, a few heartfelt pieces received well due ovation. Maya Williams’ piece “Niggah” put youth “revolutionaries” in check with the derogatory-turned-colloquial term, while other memorable performers were Tusawn with his “rap in a poem form” and Antonio’s unclichédSpanglish piece.

Though few were memorable, all but two poets advanced from this lucky seventh prelim to the finals-hackneyed prose and all. (The majority of the other prelims followed the same pattern of advancing amateur poets). With an overflowing pool of poets advancing to the semifinals, the Theater of the Point in the Bronx fumed with Bic ink and nervous souls: many of the poseurs were about to be cut. This was a night of creatively composed violence that followed with lyrical tales of the hood, rape, ex-girlfriends, no-good boyfriends, curses, quicksand, blood, crack pipes, and HIV. One poet spit, “Baptized with blood, I was, ‘cause I’m a child of disease, now a symbol of a teenage love gone wrong.” Another shouted, “Poetry is my bitch.”

Another semifinal night at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café showcased the same tension of the Bronx: one poet illustrated intently a young guy who catches his girlfriend cheating, shoots the other man, beats his girlfriend senseless until her jaw breaks off just before the dying girlfriend picks up his pistol and sends five straight to his chest, then falls dead with the complications of her trauma, all wrapped up in a nice even rhyme emitted from the lips of a stuttering young boy no taller than five feet.

It was another night of creative violence or disturbing truth.

Keep Writing
by Ujijji Davis

I watched the dream begin as the competition started with roughly 500 poets: teens from all over NYC who shared their stories through their poetry. Some shared thoughts on abstinence, stereotypes, identities, and poetry releases, while others shared stories of people they knew, deceased loved ones, and dark secrets that had poets shedding tears. Like Hannah, a teenager who wrote a poem about her dreadful encounter with an older boy in a janitor closet. I was a part of the teary-eyed crowd when she read it.

The semifinals brought the poetry to a higher level as many strived for a spot in the Grand Slams. There was poetry about HIV, self-esteem and other countries’ distresses. It was amazing to see how aware today’s youth are of the world and their surroundings. The decisions on which poet to keep became harder and harder and when some poets did not make it a few of them cried. Other poets, judges, and people from the audience came to console them and the only thing they could say was, “Keep writing, you hear?”

The Grand Slam was out of this world. Backstage I found poets reciting performance pieces together, receiving positive feedback and helpful suggestions. Obviously it was about the poetry and not the competition. When I asked one poet, Laura, about her feelings at that time, she answered philosophically, “There is no time left for doubt, I just have to believe.”

Soon the poets had to slam, and their confidence filled the room. There were numerous topics and the audience loved it all. When the slams were over and the six poets were chosen, the crowd cracked windows with applause. Brian, Aja Monet, Maya Williams, Kesed Ragin, Erica Buddington and Jaylene Clark were to represent the teen poets of New York at the Brave New Voices national championships in San Francisco.