But not all poets agree that this movement is necessarily true to poetry as art. I love performing and I would be a hypocrite to say you shouldn't work on your performance. But situations like slams where poetry is put into such a firmly capitalistic economic model and people are winning by writing a poem about their sock with a hole in it and running around screaming, because you only have three minutes, people are performing and being extreme for extreme's sake. Michael Datcher, director of the World Stage Anansi Writer's Workshop in the black arts enclave of Leimert Park, agrees with Gilbert's sentiment of the need for an awareness of poetry's history and tradition. Like most things subjective, there are few standards in the poetry world.
Slams are an ill concept.
Poets compete to impress judges who aren't even poets themselves. And what that lends itself to is a hyper-concentration of performance above substance. Even competitors themselves find the atmosphere of slams to be contradictory of the purpose of poetry as a unifying mode of expression. Ellen Maybe, a semifinalist for the Austin, Texas team in the poetry slam nationals and employee at Beyond Baroque, L.A.'s Westside literary arts epicenter, has mixed feelings about her slam experience. I've been to these slam festivals and it's a strange feeling to see how competition brings out pain in people, especially in poetry where there are a lot of vulnerable people putting out their work.