The slam's about what goes on every week, about someone who realizes that their voice can be weighed, counted, and heard. While both cultures draw people from all parts of the USA, The Circus itself is localized to a single site and a specific time of the year, and the participants are primarily writers with established national recognition. Each culture has ensconced its high competition in an annual gathering. It may be worthwhile now to take stock of how poetry and the public have engaged each other this time around, and be mindful of the phenomenon's cause. An analogy for slamming might be made with the invention of calculus, which is credited to both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Newton is held as the primary inventor, the man who created and employed calculus first.
The calculus simply exists, and it works. We might substitute Al Simmons for Newton, Marc Smith for Leibniz, and see the story all over again. The socio-cultural stigmas which daunted poets trying to assemble a public reading encouraged Simmons to create a literal Poetry Circus. His was an effort to re-assert attention on poetry and to demystify the poet. But attention runs counter-flow to transmission.