It's Not Just What You Say, It's How You Say It

By Deborah Edler Brown/Austin

Even at 8 in the morning, Austin, Texas, is as hot and sticky as a locker room. I am on the hotel patio, waiting for the lineup for tonight's semifinal bouts to be posted, wondering how long we can stay in the saddle of this bucking bronco called Slam. "We" are the Los Angeles team--Thea Iberall, Poetri (yes, his name is Poetri), Jerry Quickley and I--four poets, linked by a love of words and a passion for competition. We are in Austin to sling verse and reap scores in the ninth--and largest--National Poetry Slam in history. Forty-five teams and 14 individuals are here from 26 states, the District of Columbia and Canada, all vying for cash prizes of up to $2,000 and yearlong bragging rights.

A slam, for the uninitiated, is a kind of poetry Olympics in which poets perform their work before a panel of judges randomly chosen from the audience. Each performer is rated on a scale of 0 to 10; the highest cumulative score wins. It is poetry as team sport; Emily Dickinson vs. Langston Hughes on the wrestling mat. It is not for the faint of heart.

Slams started in Chicago in the mid-1980s when Marc Smith, a former construction worker and a published poet, created them to revitalize poetry readings and reach new audiences. I first heard about them in 1991, when I reported on the growing phenomenon for TIME. Like many poets, I was suspicious of the concept. How could you judge poetry? Why would you want to? But when L.A.'s first team went to Portland, Ore., in 1996, I tagged along with some friends. While not everything I heard fit my definition of poetry, it was a Woodstock of words, images and rhythms that stayed with me for weeks. I got hooked. Now I am defending my title as 1997 Head-to-Head Haiku champ.

The haiku competition is on Friday afternoon. I lead off with a favorite: "Eyes locked. Soul kissing./ Exchanging tongues. I awake/ Singing in Spanish." I win the match. Then I win the bout and advance to the next round. Poet after poet takes the mike. Haikus float by like snowflakes--lovely and fleeting, hard to hold onto. I win my second bout, my third, and suddenly it's the final, and I'm still in. My opponent is D.J. Renegade, a wonderful poet from D.C. Best 9 out of 17 will win the title. He offers social consciousness. I counter with childhood innocence. I serve inner wisdom, and he parries with the same. We are tied at 7:7. Then he pulls ahead by two and wins with this: "Old man on steam grate./ Frozen rain coats city street./ Footsteps whisper past."

I still have a chance for glory in the team competition. In our first bout we had faced Detroit and Salt Lake City. After an intense show, with poems on topics ranging from racism to date rape, a Detroit poet rocked the room with a sharp, stylized jazz piece, pushing her team ahead by 0.3. But my teammate Jerry pulled out a powerhouse finale about his cousin's death, and we skated into first place by a scant 0.1. We also won the next two nights, moving into the Final Four with Dallas, Cleveland and New York.

As we pulled up to the 1,300-seat Paramount Theater, where the main event was held, a sign at the box office read SOLD OUT. Later we heard that tickets had actually been scalped out front. Inside, all previous scores and rankings have been dropped. Everything now depends on which poems the judges like tonight. We draw first up; it's disappointing, but we're confident. We wait through the band and featured poets. (During the slam, a slam veteran, Patricia Smith, the columnist who was forced to resign from the Boston Globe for fabricating stories, had brought an audience to tears when she concluded a reading with the lines, "Man did not give this gift to me. Man cannot take it away.")

Finally, the team competition starts. We each get just three minutes onstage. Poetri leads out with Preacher, a soul-stirring pitch against hypocrisy. I'm next. I've never faced a crowd so big. I like it. And they like me. My score of 28.9 pulls us into second place behind New York, where we stay until the last round. Dallas needs a 29.4 to tie. It's not an easy score to get. Backstage we assure one another that we've won second place. Then Dallas sends off a raucous group piece about wanting to be a black, gay, redneck superhero. The crowd goes wild, chanting "10! 10! 10!" Dallas gets a perfect 30 and knocks us back to third. It's over.

The next day we board the plane for home. Three young men are sitting in our aisle. One wears a slam T shirt, and we assume they're poets. But they're not. It turns out they read about the competition in the New York Times and flew from San Jose to check it out. "Hey, you're the L.A. team," they greet us as we move to our seats. "You were great last night!" And you know, we were.