It”s coming down to the wire for the several hundred poets across the nation who are gearing up for next week”s National Poetry Slam Finals in Austin, Texas. In Richmond, poets gathered at ComedySportz Improv Theater for a practice slam Sunday night. On Monday night in Kalamazoo (yes, Kalamazoo!), the Kalamazoo Slam Team hosted a special show to raise money for their trip to Austin and debuted their new team CD. Pacific Northwest poets gathered at the Cafe Deux Soleil the same night for the annual Salmon Slam, where Seattle, Vancouver, Bellingham and Eugene, Oregon competed in a self-styled regional slam for bragging rights to Best of the Northwest. And in the Northeast, there have been multiple practice bouts and regional competitions, including last Wedensday night”s Big East at the Cantab Lounge in Boston (Boston”s Lizard Lounge team took the honors) and the North Beast Regional Slam at the AS220 in Providence, RI last night (with the Cantab Lounge waltzing off with bragging rights).

AS220 is not my usual Providence poetry haunt, but the chance to see five local teams going head to head was too good to pass up. The Providence Slam hosted the event at the downtown performance space that has been home to Providence Slam for over a dozen years. Teams traveled from Boston (two teams, one from the Cantab Lounge and one from the Lizard Lounge), Worcester (the Poetry Asylum), Portland, ME and Hartford Connecticutt to face each other in two rounds of bouts and a final face-off. The Providence and Connecticutt Youth slam teams also represented – and represented very very well.

The co-hosts for the evening, Sage Francis, Tom Inhaler and Jared Paul, kept the crowd humming and energized, but it was hardly necessary. The room rocked with a standing room only crowd who energetically applauded, encouraged and even joined in with the poets on more familiar pieces. This is slam at its happening best – high-energy, fast-paced, emotion-packed – where the keen edge of competition adds a spicy edge to the art. This is an audience in love with its performers, not afraid to shout back at them , hug them when they bolt offstage, high-fiving them all the way back to their seats. This is poetry as a performing art and audience participation sport. What I saw at the North Beast Regionals last night was what Marc Smith must have envisioned when he hosted the first-ever poetry slam at the Green Mill in Chicago – an audience so thoroughly involved with the work being presented that they were moved to cheers, jeers (to the judges) and tears, all in the space of a three minute poem – with no props and, to quote nationally known slam-master Bill MacMillan, NO DANCING HIPPOS.

The festivities got started at the fashionably late poet”s time – 8:30, half an hour after the announced start of the night – but no one seemed to mind in the least. Five judges randomly chosen from the audience sat at tables near the front as individual members of each team stepped up to slam their finest for their teams. Connecticutt and Providence each sent their Youth Slam representatives – who more than held their own against established, older poets from Worcester, two Boston Venues and Portland. The night started off with the expected political and social pieces, slammed hard and hard-hitting – three in a row. The audience, egged on by Sage Francis as MC for the first bout, loudly jeered any low scores and wildly applauded the poets. The poets” performances were punctuated by floor-thumping and shouts of “yes!” as each made telling points or sparked agreement. Worcester”s Jon Wolf broke the trend and flipped the room with a rousing letter to his best friend”s jealous boyfriend… and from there on out, the poetry was a roller-coaster ride of emotion, playing on politics, feminism, love, hate, breaking up, growing old and the horror of what happened to a cactus plant at Walmart.

Worcester knocked the home team out of the running in the first bout, but the Providence poets stayed to cheer and encourage throughout the night. In the second bout of the evening, Boston”s Cantab team took the honors to go up against Worcester in a flat out head to head heat for the finals, where they took the honors of North Beast Regional Slam Champs. All along the way, there were memorable moments – and memorable poems. Listing the standouts is impossible – they all stood out, the best of the Northeast gathered in one room. Adam Stone, Simone Beaubien, Jon Wolf, Erin Jackson, Gary Hoare, Jared Paul, Urban, 1two5 – I know I”m leaving out poets whose names didn”t stick, but whose words did.

If you”re anywhere near Austin, Texas next week, that”s where you need to be. From the 9th through the 14th, over 300 poets from 80 different venues around – and outside – the country will be competing in eight different venues for the National Slam Championship. Besides the slam bouts, the Austin slam community has put together a full roster of poet happenings around the city. Slam has a reptuation of being loud, of cheapening poetry with competition, of fostering bitter rivalries and disputes. Slam has also fostered some of the most emotional and moving poetry being written in today”s world. If you can, be there to see it happen. There”s nothing else like it in this world.

Reported at Happynews.com, award winning poet Paul Farley helped give a boost to a project that supports homeless youth throughout Great Britain. Farley judged a poetry contest sponsored by UK”s Foyer Network, and held workshops for the winning poets. Foyers is a UK based program that gives homeless youth, ages 16-25, a place to call home and the supports they need to step out of misfortune and into adult life with the tools they need to succeed. Founded in 1992, Foyers now has 130 local programs that offer more than just a bed.

The program goes beyond breakfast and a job interview as well. Their web site, giveusavoice.net, is committed to giving Foyers youth – nearly 10,000 of them – a place where they can be heard. The site features a whole section of poetry written by Foyers youth and submitted for the Foyers contest. Farley, at a reading that highlighted poetry by the program”s clients, said, “It is an honour to be part of a poetry scheme which makes a real attempt to offer something back to young people at risk by supporting the talents of a future generation of writers who may otherwise be denied opportunities to find their voice.

“I hope my contribution will attract more young people in Foyers to explore the power of poetry, and look forward to seeing the competition entries.”

Farley has published two award winning volumes of poetry, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998), and The Ice Age (2002). He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1999, won the prestigious Whitbread Award for poetry in 2003, and was named as one of the Poetry society”s “Next Generation” poets in 2004. He has also published a play broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Check out what these young poets are writing about and thinking at Foyer Residents Poetry…. and consider how your own voice can help others be heard. Poetry can help open doors – and keep them open. Helping a young person find a voice and use it can be one of the most rewarding gifts that a poet can give.

The Sweet Verse Spoken Word Tour features some of the hottest names in Spoken Word. Come and check out some of the biggest names in performance poetry !

Featured artists include :

Rene Reyes,
Rachel Mckibbens,
Oveous Maximus,
Big Mike,
Lemon,
Marc Marcel,
Sunni Patterson,
Ainsley Burrows,
Andrea Gibson,
Poetri,
RedStorm,
The 5th L,
Abyss,
Georgia Me,
Jamie DeWolf Kennedy,
Will Da Real One,
Mayde de Valle,
Quiet Rage,
Triple Blak,
and many more! Believe it!

The tour is hitting major cities in the U.s. Here is a breakdown of the tour schedule:

Date City Venue Time
Aug 16 2006 Anaheim, CA Anaheim Convention Center 7:00P
Aug 17 2006 San Diego, CA ConCourse Theatre 7:00P
Aug 18 2006 Houston, TX George R. Brown Convention Center 7:00P
Aug 19 2006 Charlotte, NC Convention Center 7:00P
Aug 20 2006 Washington DC JFK Performing Arts Center 7:00P
Aug 21 2006 NEWARK, NJ Performing Arts Center 7:00P
Aug 22 2006 Miami, FL The Jackie Gleason Theater 7:00P
Aug 23 2006 Nashville, TN Tennessee Performing Arts Center 7:00P
Aug 24 2006 Philadelphia, PA Philly Convention Center 7:00P
Aug 25 2006 Chicago, IL Harold Washington Theatre 7:00P
Aug 26 2006 Chattanooga, TN Tivoli Memorial Center 7:00P

More details on Rene Reyes” Myspace page

It”s up and running! The official web site for the 2006 National Poetry Slam is up, and it”s a doozy. This year, they”re pulling out all the stops to make sure that those of us who are watching from home get to be part of the fun and excitement. There are blogs available for members, community message boards, an events calendar to chart the progress of your favorite hometown slammers to the nationals, photo albums – it”s a true working community site where you can volunteer to work a venue, check the lists of venues, find a hotel or place to crib with other poets on the message boards and jam with other slam poets from around the country.

This year”s Nationals will be held in Austin, TX, August 9-12. The organizers expect over 300 poets from 80 teams across the US and from Europe to converge on Austin and turn the city into a 4 day poetry festival. The NPS is more than a competition, though – it”s a convention of poets that is one of the most energizing experiences imaginable. It is the opportunity to eat, sleep, drink and dream poetry with hundreds of others who are eating, sleeping, drinking and dreaming poetry. It is the chance to connect with poets you”ve read, and to reconnect with those you know. It has the air of a gigantic family reunion complete with regional rivalries (San Francisco vs. Chicago, Boston vs. Worcester, Providence vs. Boston) and hometown heroes coming home once again to their roots. It”s a must-come, must-see, must-be experience for anyone who loves performance poetry – and for those who want to understand what Slam is really all about – community.

Because despite all the competition and rivalry, Slam is about making poetry into community. From the very start, it was about making connections outside the notebook and in the world, and it continues to do that as the Slam community grows and grows. It is about the poetry, and for all the fierce drama that can accompany a Slam bout, in the end it all comes down to the poetry. That”s evident at any Slam venue, but never so much as it is at the Nationals where you”ll find poetry and connections happening everywhere you look. It”s not confined to the scheduled events. For four days in August, poetry will be in the parking lots at 3 a.m., at the coffee shop over a morning muffin and in the hotel lobbies and around the swimming pools. PSi has done a wonderful job of setting up an online forum that can bring that excitement and energy to all of us through blogs and forum postings. If you”ll be at the Nationals, pop on over to NPS and grab a blog, join the forums and share the fun. We”ll be watching!

Last week, we pointed you to Quickmuse, the fifteen minute poem site, and this week they”re proving that they”re going to be fun for a while. This week they”ve added another battle royale, pitting poet/publishers Marge Piercy and Johathan Galassi against each other in an epic fifteen minute race. Piercy and Galassi”s efforts can be read at Quickmuse, both in their entirety and as they unfolded. It”s a rather fun exercise watching a poem take shape and be born – and I find myself watching and composing in my mind as I watch the actual poet write.. pause… erase and write again, sometimes disappointed that the poem is going in a direction other than the one I would have chosen and others marveling at the new directions in which it is flowing.

Quickmuse has already scheduled two more agons for the upcoming weeks: Glyn Maxwell vs. Thylias Moss on June 27 and Kevin Young vs. Carol Muske-Dukes on July 12. The discussion boards are hopping, giving readers a chance to respond, critique and communicate – but I can”t help imagining the place as a virtual coffee bar hosting an Open Mike night with a signup sheet posted an hour in advance of the competition, a virtual online extemporaneous slam starring you and me and Uncle Bud, progressive rounds of matches with 8 or 10 or 13 poets working against the clock to craft tight poetry while the world watches. For the moment, at least, it seems there are no plans to move in that direction. With the lineup planned, it will still be interesting to watch – and maybe if we keep hoping and asking, we”ll get an Open Quickmuse in the future.