Improv Poetry

Inspired by Tony Brown's reading in Manchester last night, I suggest a variation on something we used to do weekly at Revolution Cafe in Bryan, TX - improv poetry.

By this I don't mean the whole night should be improvised, but perhaps a ratio of 8 "prepared" poets followed by 4 poets who agree to do work written that night, based at least in part on the poems that precede them and/or input from the audience.

The concept here is to reinvigorate old hands. You have to listen in a very different way if you know you're going to riff on someone's material, and so there's a level of both respect and playfulness that comes of this activity. It also can provide some indirect feedback for the first eight poets, insofar as lines remembered by the improvisers are often some of the best ones from a poem. Lastly, if you have any poets in your venue who come back and do the same poems week after week, this is a way to find new life for those creations, essentially remixing them.

Also, and this is where the inspiration from Tony's rip-up-reading comes in, it gets back to one of the (core) tenets of slam, that it's about giving something to an audience. If you improvise, there's a very good chance that this will be the only time a particular piece is heard. It's a gift to the audience, whether it works (in which case the gift is the poem/performance itself) or doesn't (in which case the gift is opening oneself up in a way even slammers rarely do).

[cross-posting this to the What's Next for Slam Poetry group on Facebook]