Any slammers reading?

Are any of you readers on the East Coast and interested in poetry slams? I'm headed to Boston to slam at the Cantab on January 7. I'm very excited, as that venue contains some of the smartest spoken word performers I've seen. Let me know if you'll be there, too.

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Not a bad article over at GotPoetry.com, but the followup questions and discussion prove quite interesting.

The ideas related to persona pieces are especially interesting to me, as are the ideas about four minute poems. One of the usual rules at a slam is to deduct .5 for every ten seconds the poem goes over the time limit. At Javashock, I'd reduce the time penalty to .1, which did sometimes encourage longer pieces. But generally not good longer pieces.

On a more personal note related to time, I need to clock the new draft of "Wooden Boys and Deadlier Toys" and my fairy tale "The Magician and the Mouse."

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From the days when I edited Wikipedia (used to have my Intro to Creative Writing Students create/edit articles on underrepresented poets), an argument in favor of slam as a postmodern activity:

1) Postmodern art, by and large, is highly self-referential. The poet who slams, in putting a face and body and voice to the verse, makes evident the process of production. Moreover, in a slam, the audience understands that part of the conceit is to convince that audience that one's poetry is better. The rules themselves become a foregrounded part of the artistic production (as opposed to the rules of art that are necessary, but left unspoken, in more classical forms). Yes, I am aware that if this were the only criterion, "postmodern" could be applied to any poem that calls itself "poem" or "sonnet" or whatnot. Thus the need for more evidence.

2) The traditional slam, and by traditional I mean a one-night event that is NOT recorded and re-viewed, exists in a realm of indeterminacy. Whereas the written or recorded poem may be studied, interpreted at length, dissected, etc (these all being hallmarks of Modernism and prior periods), the slam itself exists only in the moment. Once it is over, the performance is but a series of memories and thereby completely subjective, not objective. Yes, a poet can perform the same words on multiple nights, but as the performance itself is integral to the work, each performance becomes a unique, not derivative, experience.

3) An agreement with [another editor whose username is/was] DanteDanti that work produced by a postmodern culture is, whether progressive or reactionary, necessarily postmodern.