Poetry Slam - Responses To Slam

Responses To Slam

Non-academic responses to slam have included the Anti-Slam, begun at Collective:Unconscious on New York's Lower East Side. At an Anti-Slam, all forms of expression are given a six-minute set and all participants are given a perfect ten by the judges.

Academic responses to slam have varied. In an interview published in the Paris Review, literary critic Harold Bloom called the movement "the death of art". Kip Fulbeck, who teaches Spoken Word at the University of California, Santa Barbara, responded to why he steered away from poetry slams in his classes: "I don’t like the idea of competition and art being put together. I think it often distills the quality of work down to a caricature of itself. Seeing poetry slams often reminds me of watching American Idol. You’ve got a series of judges, an audience that comes in looking for a certain shtick that they want to see and that’s what they’re going to cheer for."

Academics are not the only critics of slam. Poet and lead singer of King Missile, John S. Hall has also long been a vocal opponent, taking issue with such factors as its inherently competitive nature and what he considers its lack of stylistic diversity. In his 2005 interview in Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, he recalls seeing his first slam, at the Nuyorican Poets Café:

One of the most recent appraisals of slam comes from the poet Tim Clare. He offers a 'for and against' account of the phenomenon in Slam: A Poetic Diaialogue.

Conversely, Slam poetry movement founder Marc Smith has been critical of the commercially successful Def Poetry television and Broadway live stage shows produced by Russell Simmons, decrying it as "an exploitive entertainment diminished the value and aesthetic of performance poetry".