I'm on my way to Indianapolis and as you can tell I'm frantically rehearsing something. I've been asked to be a feature slam poet and while I can't wait to show you the slam poetry performance itself, first I have to show you the steps I took to get there. Like I really like the facts here. Yeah, that almost make it really cool beginning. Oh yeah. It all usually starts with something like this. Hey, I'm Michael and sitting next to me is my buddy Dan. He's a fantastic poet and we often peer review, collaborate and brainstorm together. Rico Sheng ideas off of one another inventing, sharpening, germinating and definitely laughing. You're only plagiarizing yourself at this point. In this case, we're talking through a few new ideas that I have literally brought to the table. I haven't written anything new in a while because you know grad school so I have this idea for a new poem about bodies and lighting and rhetoric and all kinds of shit but I just don't know how to smash it all together yet. And that's where Dan comes in. Once I've talked through these ideas with Dan, it's kind of set up my writing space. I need to check email, blackboard, google drive, facebook and then find all of the writing music. Sometimes I drink coffee and other times I drink not coffee. First, I write out this huge messy crude constellation of ideas by hand several times. There's just something about the written page I think because I grew up with that medium that helps me to think and map and plan. And sometimes I get distracted. You can thereby something that cracks me up or by texting or taking Snapchat selfies. Or by making eye contact with this mega hot guy in a coffee shop. And then side eyeing him again when I slightly take a drink. But I think there's something important about all these distractions, these embodied moments because they impact the writing process. Anyway, now it's time to type by outlining, cutting and pasting, opening new documents to work on a section in isolation before inserting that section back into the main file, adding line and stands of breaks working on different sections, intro, middle and conclusion and queered chronology, opening several tabs at once, performing research and folding that research into my pros and poetry. And when I need a break, I play the piano, which lets me take a break and stimulate other parts of my brain while I let my ideas incubate a little. But eventually it's back to work. I add and subtract a little bit, I add some line breaks and some final touches and then I've got a completed poem. In the context of slam poetry, the writing process is not complete. This, this. I still have to perform this piece. So hours and hours and hours and hours of excruciating memorization. With my pen in hand, in case I need to revise any lines or rhythm or rhyme or cut sections for time, slam poems can only be three minutes long. Here I'll add pace and movement and stage directions in hand gestures, all of which I fully consider part of the text of a slam poem. Then it's time to hit the road. Where my jams are, I have to sing on the way there to pump myself up and also to practice various rhythms and movements that are important for a slam poem. Plus it's really fun, obviously. And when I get to the performance venue itself, it's game time. And I include these moments of performance because the composition process for a slam poem also happens on the stage as you react in the moment to an audience and the audience reacts to you, helping you to co-compose a text to perform it with you as they boo and laugh and snap, adding modalities, meaning text, movement and subtext. So there you have it, from brainstorming to writing to typing to memorizing and all of the distractions in between. And finally getting up there on the stage, that's my writing process for a slam poem.