by Paul Klemperer

Those of you who followed the recent Poetry Slam Nationals held here in our noble little city may still be, as I am, a bit groggy from ingesting so much spoken word. It was both a grand and simple thing, reaffirming that poetry doesn't have to be elitist and stuffy, but at the same time it can move us beyond the ordinary, opening small windows on transcendent visions. There was wonderful stuff and lame stuff, light stuff, soul-wrenching stuff. A lot of stuff.

The lasting impression for me was of the democratic character of the event, and of the general effect when you create space for any and all people to put their thoughts and experience into words. I am not speaking so much about the democratic structure of the slams, the internal politics which are continuously being hammered out. That structure mimics the issues and imperatives of progressive political change in this country, and is thus not unique. Confronting the contemporary issues of inclusion, providing space for all the many types of community which have asserted themselves (e.g. Third World, Feminist, Gay, etcetera); these are part of a necessary if difficult process of sorting out the social contradictions we have inherited.

Closer to the point is the issue of what I call multiple aesthetics. Inasmuch as a community is defined by shared experience, this experience contributes to a particular aesthetic perspective. Thus the coming together of poets from multiple communities resulted in the (often messy) coming together of different aesthetics.

But this is still not the main point. What struck me most was the power of each voice. Every day we are inundated with words, with voices trained by various interests to preach, sell, placate and sway us. Words are the medium by which we are organized (often unconsciously) to be productive, obedient cogs in the machine. Of course that's much better than a poke in the eye, which is readily available to back up those words.

In our highly rationalized, commodified, over-determined social world, it is rare to hear an individual voice, a voice that isn't vested in some power group, or constructed by committee. This is what I heard throughout the slam nationals -- individual voices. Certainly they reflected the communities to which they consciously or unconsciously belonged. There were middle-class white male voices, young angry lesbian voices, African American activist voices, and so on. But what gave these voices power was not a social or emotional agenda. Rather it was the desire to crystallize and transcend experiences in the act of fusing words into a poetic unity, which might hang in the air like a small gem, or melt away like a chunk of ice under the lamp of attention.

The poetic voice asserts the primacy of the individual's perspective. For a brief moment a social space is created where it is okay to be subjective, eccentric, irrational, to be a dreamer, if these things give impetus to your voice. For a diverse congregation of communities to come together with the expressed goal of creating and honoring that social space is an important thing. It creates more room for further creative expression, both in the mind and in the world.