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Eye on Life Magazine is a Lifestyle and Literary Magazine. Enjoy articles on gardening, kitchen cooking, poetry, vintage decor, and more.
Artwork by Greg FallonDaniel Batten is a New England poet. He is fond of ancient literature, hiking, and smoking cigars. Daniel has spent most of his literary career printing homemade pamphlets of poetry, satire,philosophic prose, plays and various other genres.
Read Daniel’s poetry:
After her interview on Eye On Life, Simone Beaubien, Host City Director for the National Poetry Slam 2011 in Boston, was interviewed by DJ Matt on BreakThru Radio.
To hear the interview CLICK HERE.
In addition to the interview, you’ll have an opportunity to hear some fine music and poetry.
Andrew Oerke was a Peace Corps Director in Africa and the Caribbean, and for many years president of a private and voluntary organization, working in and visiting more than 160 countries. Mr. Oerke was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His work has appeared frequently in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, and in many other publications in the U.S., England, France, Germany, Lebanon, Malawi, Kenya, the Philippines, Jamaica, and Mexico. In 2003, he was given the award for literature by the UN Society of Writers and Artists.
Read Andrew’s Poetry:
William is a television writer and director based in New York and Spain. He has directed news programs for CNN and Bloomberg Television, winning the prestigous Dupont and Peabody Awards, and his short films have been screened in 24 countries. His latest feature film, “The Laureate”, starring Orlando Bloom, will begin production in the Spring of 2012. “The Laureate” is a based on the life of British poet Robert Graves.
Read William’s poetry:
Photo by Eboni Hogan A decade-plus-veteran of the New England poetry scene, Simone Beaubien makes her home in suburban Massachusetts, working as a paramedic and hosting the weekly Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge. Simone has performed her work in colleges, bookstores, theaters, and bars on both coasts of the continent and all over New England. She has competed at the National Poetry Slams in Seattle, St. Louis, Albuquerque, Austin, Madison, and St. Paul; coached her 2008 National Poetry Slam team to a fourth-place Finals finish - Boston’s highest rank since 1995; was sole emcee for the finals of the 2007 Individual World Poetry Slam in Vancouver; and is Host City Director for the 2011 National Poetry Slam in Boston/Cambridge.
Interview:
How did you come to be Host City Director for NPS2011?
I’ve been interested in bringing the National Poetry Slam to Boston since I attended in 2004; it’s an amazing series of shows, poetry parties and community-building events. As the SlamMaster for the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge, I submitted a bid to our parent non-profit, Poetry Slam, Inc., back in September of 2008.
Can you describe the process for selecting a host city for the NPS?
Anyone can bid for NPS— a SlamMaster, a poet, an individual event planner, or even a city official. The bid process is fairly informal, but it helps if PSi knows you. I’ve been a member of PSi for more than a decade, and the Boston Poetry Slam has a great reputation for poets and audience, so they were very happy to see a bid from Boston.
What does it take to get a slam team into the NPS?
Only a venue certified by Poetry Slam, Inc. can send a team to NPS. That means a venue has to prove that it has enough audience to sustain a slam, and show that they have at least six slams per year that are open to anyone who wants to enter. Once a venue is certified, they must represent at the annual SlamMaster meeting and are encouraged to participate in regional matches. The whole process takes about a year, so now is a good time to start planning for NPS 2012!
In looking over your impressive history as a major player in slam poetry I did not see the Women of the World Poetry Slam mentioned. Care to comment?
Actually, I haven’t participated in the Individual World Poetry Slam, either, an amazing annual event that even came to Worcester, Mass. as recently as 2005. Being a SlamMaster, performance coach, and organizer for a large event doesn’t always leave me the time I’d like to compete and write for myself.
I have heard of some gender bias in slam poetry. Coincidentally, for the Eye On Life Poetry Contest last year, most of the judges were women and all of the winners were women. Just sayin’. Anyway, do you notice that folks tend to favor poets of their own gender when judging poetry in a slam?
I am pretty sure that the gender bias you have heard of in slam is the same gender bias you see every day at work, in the bar, and overall in artistic industries and communities! Judges in a poetry slam are always randomly selected, so what they are judging on can be hard to determine, but it’s of course made up of a combination of life experience, the pressure from the audience in the room, and just however the judge is feeling on that particular day.
Like any listener, judges respond to a number of superficial and societal cues from the poet that have nothing to do with poetry, often without even knowing what they are doing. Some of those cues might be volume, power, vulnerability, or how attractive they deem the speaker —which could go either way for men or women.
[Editor’s note: Just for the record, the judges at Eye On Life did not know the name, gender or anything else about the poets whose poems they judged. When I said ‘coincidentally,’ I meant it. I do not believe our judges had any bias except their personal preferences for poetry itself.]
Do you try to balance the demographics of slam judges for race, gender, or other criteria? If so, what is your thinking?
The official PSi handbook actually recommends finding judges in a range of demographics, in the spirit of finding judges from all walks of life. Ideally, our judges would represent every gender, race, age, sexual preference, and walk of life, in order to give every poet a chance to be heard by someone who can identify with their story. Realistically, though, we are always limited by who is actually in the room to listen.
How would you describe the difference between slam poetry and poetry read by a featured poet, or by a poet reading at open mic?
One is scored, one is not! Sorry, that’s a bit of a smart-mouth answer; but I do believe that slam is poetry, and any poetry can be slammed.
I’ve heard you say that when a poem is read out loud, it gets a whole new life. Were you quoting somebody? Would you care to elaborate?
I wasn’t consciously quoting anyone when I said this, although it’s a concept that’s well-known in the poetry world. I probably learned this from my own performance coach, the Boston Poetry Slam’s original SlamMaster, Michael Brown. The way a poem engages the ear is very different than the way it engages the mind’s eye, and even the poet may discover something about what the poem means and how it moves when it leaps from the page to the stage.
I’ve seen slam teams perform some unison pieces on YouTube. Is unison team performance a particular style that has a name? Is unison team performance an option that many teams choose?
What you’re talking about is “group” or “team” pieces, where poets perform a poem together by exchanging lines or speaking them together, or by creating a conversation or “skit” to bring a poem to life. It’s something you can only see at a team slam, like the National Poetry Slam. There is actually even a prestigious group piece Championship title, where the top teams at NPS advance to a separate Finals competition just for team pieces!
Press release from NPS 2011:
The story of how one determined woman returned the Boston Poetry Slam to glory.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — To be fair, it was snowing. And her featured performer was not a household name. But as she looked around the almost empty bar, Simone Beaubien felt a knot in the pit of her stomach. “Oh god,” she thought, “I’m going to be the SlamMaster who killed the Boston Poetry Slam.”
That was in 2004. Flash forward to April 27, 2011. The downstairs of the Cantab Lounge is, as it often is these days, so packed that they’ve had to lock the doors. Usually, some of these people would have cleared out after the open mic—but not tonight. Tonight is special. “Tonight,” Beaubien tells the crowd, “we are going to pick the five poets who will represent the hometown team this year at the National Poetry Slam right here in Boston and Cambridge.” The applause is deafening.
There was no small amount of pride in her voice. She had almost singlehandedly convinced Poetry Slam Inc. to host the 2011 National Poetry Slam—its flagship team championship competition—in Boston. And to hear her tell it, it wasn’t that hard. “It didn’t take much convincing,” Beaubien says. “We’re one of the oldest slams in the world, and we have a great reputation both as writers and listeners.”
Indeed, the last time Boston hosted NPS was in 1992, when slam was young, and Beaubien’s predecessors—Michael Brown and Patricia Smith—had just founded Boston’s venue. It was the third NPS ever held, and only 16 teams competed. That event is often credited with being the first to focus national attention on a slam outside of the medium’s Chicago birthplace. “We made a conscious decision to send the slam to Boston, to free it and let it grow,” slam inventor Marc Smith once remarked. Soon after, slam exploded in New England, with a number of readings cropping up in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Some of those slams have disappeared in the years since, and several others sprung up, but the Boston Poetry Slam—which won the title that year, and the next year, and finished in the top four the following two years—was on the map and here to stay.
Beaubien first stumbled on the venue in 1999. “I actually found my way to poetry slam through one of Boston’s most famous slammer-storytellers, Jack McCarthy, who ran into me at a library poetry reading in my hometown of Chelmsford,” she explains.
McCarthy remembers the reading well. “She did a poem that had elephants in it, and I was blown away,” he recalls. “Chelmsford held that slam twice a year, and every time I’d see and hear Simone, I’d tell her she belonged at the Cantab. She and I argue about how many Chelmsford slams it took to get her to Mass. Ave, but once she got there, the rest is… poetry.”
“It only took one night and I was hooked,” Beaubien recalls. Still, she never expected to wind up in charge of the place. But when first Smith and then Brown departed with no obvious successor, she stepped up to the plate. “I looked around and said, ‘Someone has to keep this place going, and I think it has to be me,’” she says.
And that’s how she wound up presiding over that empty room that dreary night in 2004. “We were a divided community for a while,” recalls Cantab bartender and veteran poet Adam Stone. “There were people who left because they didn’t like the previous organizer, and there were people who left because they didn’t think anyone else would be as good as the previous organizer.” But then a funny thing happened: “Simone ended up being one of the best organizers in slam,” Stone says. “When I went on tour last fall, every host of every venue I featured at said something to the effect of ‘I think tonight’s show went really well. I mean, it wasn’t Simone good, but it was close, right?’”
Brown too was pleased with the results. “When an old man looks for someone to take over his labor of love, he hopes for a son or daughter who can exceed what he has accomplished,” he once remarked. “That is what I found since Simone Beaubien took over the Cantab. She has created a persona beyond anyone who went before her.”
Beaubien quickly developed a knack for booking top talent, and a reputation for running a tight ship. Before long, audiences returned, and with them a new generation of star slammers. At NPS 2008 in Madison, Wisconsin, Beaubien led the team to its first Finals stage appearance since 1995. And this time, the number of teams they were competing against had ballooned to 75.
At the same time, Beaubien was bringing New England’s venues closer together. She founded and ran the New England Slam League, a recreational summer slam league. In 2008, that spun off and became the annual NorthBEAST Regional Poetry Slam, riffing off the name coined by Providence’s vibrant youth scene. Today, there are nine teams in the NorthBEAST collective, including slams in Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and, of course, Massachusetts. Cambridge actually has two slams—the second, the Lizard Lounge Poetry Jam, was founded in 2000, and will also be hosting events at Nationals this year.
These days, the Cantab is filled to capacity nearly every Wednesday night, the open mic list fills up as soon as the doors open, and Beaubien is focused on running the biggest show in slam. Poetry Slam, Inc. is once again expecting over 70 teams from across North America. “If anyone can do it, it’s Simone,” says Cantab coach Brian S. Ellis. “What she’s done for this community is absolutely amazing.”For Beaubien’s part, she thinks the community itself deserves the credit. “Poets who come here are always amazed at the quality of Boston audiences,” she says. “We’ve been in this game longer than just about anyone, so we’ve got a tradition, we’ve got a voice, and we know how to listen.”
Mock Interview With Simone Beaubien
*For the uninitiated, what is Poetry Slam?*
Our hosts often introduce the poetry slam as “the art of competitive performance poetry,” which is the simplest way we can think of to explain it; poetry slam is a fast-paced competition where poets have limited time to the impress judges we randomly select from the audience. Spectators will see all kinds of work they might never have imagined, poems that sound like storytelling, songwriting, and stand-up comedy, political posturing or personal affirmation. It’s a little theatre, a little rap battle, and a little stand-up-everything.
*For the uninitiated, just what is NPS?*
The National Poetry Slam is the biggest poetry slam slam in the world. Unlike most poetry slam tournaments, it’s a team event, so it’s a great chance to see coaches and all-stars strategize to bring their best work to the stage for maximum effect against their opponents. The event is also a huge festival and gathering for a community that only gets to meet once per year to compete, listen, and crown the ultimate champions.
*What is this Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge I keep hearing so much about, and how is it related to NPS?*
The Boston Poetry Slam is a two-decade tradition that calls the Cantab Lounge in Central Square in Cambridge home; every Wednesday, we hold an open mic, featured poet, and open poetry slam where anyone may compete. We’ve attended the National Poetry Slam every year since 1991, and can claim two championships and a total of six Finals stage appearances. The BPS will act the official host slam for NPS, which means that our home community will be putting in the work to bring the national event right to our own backyard.
*What is the NorthBEAST collective?*
The NorthBEAST is our name for the collective of local slams who represent New England at NPS every year. Right now, we are nine slams strong: two in Cambridge, two in Western Mass, two in Providence, Rhode Island, and one each in Lowell, Portland, Maine, and Manchester, New Hampshire. The NorthBEAST slams have a reputation as very strong opponents at the National Poetry Slam, in part because we compete against one another fiercely here at home, but support each other just as fiercely at NPS.
*How is slam different now than it was when Boston last held the event in 1992?*
The basic rules of slam haven’t changed a bit since Boston last held NPS: it’s still no props, no costumes, no musical accompaniment, and poems are still three minutes or less. The major difference is how popular the movement has become; the event has swelled from sixteen teams at NPS 1992 to seventy-six at NPS 2010, and we’re expecting up to eighty-four this year in Boston.
*What would you say to someone who said slam “isn’t really poetry”?*
I might ask someone who posed that question if they think jazz is music, or modern art is, indeed, art. It’s a matter of taste if it connects with the listener, but it’s firmly in the genre, and here to stay. When I perform at high schools, I like to remind students that poetry comes from the oldest of oral traditions; poets began as storytellers, actors, and myth-makers. Harold Bloom may have called slam “the death of art” back in 1991, but both art and poetry slam seem to have survived just fine.
We are very happy to welcome Deanna M. Jessup back to Eye On Life Online Magazine. Please read her newest poem:
Joseph Dionne has a BA from Michigan State University and a MFA from the University of Oregon. He has published a novel: ”The Broken Places”– Harper & Row, a Chapbook of poetry: ”The End of the Prairie as I’ve Seen It”– Hudson-Browning Press, and has had a One-Act Play produced: ”A Breakfast of Oranges and Blue Shade.”
He is also a founding member of the Group Artist –Kenny La Roche.
Joseph taught Weapons Familiarization courses in the U.S. Army, Composition and Drama at the Oregon State Correctional Institution, and Communications at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy. He has also taught at the University of Oregon and Northwestern Michigan College. He lives with his wife on five acres of woods with a lake and divides his time between Europe – where he researches the Semiotics of Urban Spaces - and Northern Michigan where the artist Kenny La Roche has been building the first Post-Postmodern Cathedral along the 45thParallel North for the last 20 years- this link will take you to Kenny;
http://www.larochestonebook.com/
Read Joseph Dionne’s Poetry:
Simon returns with more of his wise imagery and intriguing form.
We welcome back 2010 EOL Poetry Contest Winner Kelly Cahill to help us wrap up Poetry Month with her new poem:
Click here to read Kelly’s bio and her other work on Eye On Life.
