Browse the Online NewsHour's arts and entertainment coverage and poetry index . The 1999 National Poetry Slam Contest. More than 200 poets from dozens of U.S. cities gathered in Chicago last week for the Tenth Annual National Poetry Slam. Stop tormenting your sister, boy, Little Cass. You will never be bigger than Big Cass.
Slammers mix verse and performance art.
They are usually, but not always, young. Poems can't be longer than three minutes, and contestants are judged numerically, like Olympic ice skaters. Teams from San Francisco and San Jose tied for first place in Chicago. San Francisco's Ariana Waynes' poem started out critical of the United States. To the patriots and the activist poets, I sit here in the audience, reeling from the words of the soft-spoken revolutionaries, wondering if I should hate my country as I am strangled by my stars and stripes, Mexican, Armenian, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Yugoslavian, Bosnian children cry for inclusion.