Keeping the western word-slingers in the poetry fold

Slam events, where poets compete for the approval of live audiences, are gaining ground in the west. But is it good for poetry, asks Rachel Dugan

The cosy wine bar is unusually busy, and an expectant buzz pulses through the small venue. There are no cosy couples sharing an intimate moment and a bottle of Rioja; instead there are people trying desperately to study a page of foolscap in the candlelight, beads of sweat glistening on their foreheads.

Everybody else is waiting. A spotlight finds an empty space and a man steps into its glare. He starts speaking in the style of an adrenalin-fuelled sports commentator, but he is talking about modern art. It's hard to keep up. It's exhilarating. It's in your face. Welcome to slam.

Slam poetry, as the competitive forum for performance poets, is dramatically at variance with traditional notions about poetry readings. According to the Galway-based poet and 2005 Hennessy Award nominee, Kevin Higgins, slam poetry is everything a bad poetry reading is not.

"It isn't a glorified book-signing," he says, "which the worst mainstream poetry readings can be like, where you get this kind of mumbling and lots of 'oh, will I read from this one? . . . oh, where is it now?', that kind of thing."

Higgins believes that the ability to pack out a venue on the same night Seamus Heaney is in town, with audience members for one event hurrying down Shop Street to make it to the other, is not only a testament to the strong foothold slam has gained on the wider Galway literary circuit, but also an accurate indicator of how the genre has established itself in the west.

"It just shows the way poetry works here," he explains in Cafe du Journal on Galway's Quay Street, where patrons can test their literary prowess by identifying the opening lines of various novels painted on the walls. According to Higgins, there is, in one sense, no such thing as a slam scene in Galway, but simply a large and all-encompassing poetry scene.

"The bottom line is that there is no such thing as a performance scene here in Galway that is isolated from the rest," he says.

It is the fluidity between all styles, and the seeping of influences from one type of poetry to another, which has fostered the burgeoning slam scene in the west. In the UK, poets and writers have been busy drawing invisible lines in the literary scene, and a gaping chasm has emerged between performance and traditional page poetry.

With the support of Galway Arts Centre, slam poetry has become an important part of the annual Cúirt festival, with qualifying heats taking place from September, leading up to the Grand Slam final in April. The monthly North Beach Nights, named after the San Francisco suburb where Allen Ginsberg first performed his poem, Howl, in 1956, take place throughout the year in BK's Wine Bar, providing a forum for page and performance poets alike to try out new material on the by now slam-friendly Galway audience.

According to 2004 Cúirt Grand Slam winner Trish Casey, the ghettoisation of performance poetry is something to be guarded against vehemently if the emerging voice of slam is to find its most authentic and distinctly Irish accent.

"It is not black and white, and any division between performance poetry and page poetry is a synthetic one," says the Gaiety School of Acting graduate, who refers to herself as a performance writer. "Slam has limitations, and that's if it starts moving into a corner and becomes separated from a broader literary scene. If slam remains grounded in performance poetry and in a wider literary scene, it will remain open to a lot of new styles and diverse subjects."

Slam is frequently slammed. The template on which the competition is based involves an extreme level of audience participation, with judges being selected randomly and instructed to deliver their marks out of 10, Olympic figure-skating style, on white boards. In the Cúirt Grand Slam final something along the lines of an audience clapometer is used to evaluate the performance of the poets. Understandably, this can cause dismay among more traditional poets, who see it as a trivialisation of their art.

The Galway Advertiser recently published a piece by poet and one-time slammer Maureen Gallagher. The local writer dismissed slam as a "sad and tired art" that has "saturated" Galway, and suggested that the reliance on audience appraisal at the competitions resulted in poets becoming comedians, writing for laughs. The format carried a danger that "we end up on a thin diet of anecdote in rhyme".

Joe Woods, director of Poetry Ireland, admits there are serious questions to be asked about the validity of performance poetry and believes that some slam offerings "do not live up to the page if you look at them in the cold light of day". In some other countries, performance poetry has developed into something of a cult, with some of the great poets of the canon entirely devalued and subsequently ignored. If the Irish performance poetry scene can develop without this literary inverted snobbery, then Woods believes it can be a healthy addition to the larger poetry scene here.

"Poetry is a broad business that allows for a lot of diversity," he says, before warning established page poets who choose to dismiss the style entirely that "if you completely ignore it, you do so to your own detriment".

"As poets, we must always be listening into other conversations," he adds. "There is no point in working in isolation, and any crossover that occurs is very healthy."

But not all those involved in slam are interested in literary squabbles. For example, Galway city performance poetry and the slamming format are being used by one Leaving Cert teacher to bring poetry to life for her fifth-year English class. Elaine Feeney, a teacher at St Patrick's College for boys in Tuam, has piloted the scheme since February and is busy preparing for the fifth-year Grand Slam Final.

This deviation from the standard syllabus came about after the class read the stream-of-consciousness narrative of Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Feeney explained to the class that, like the Holden character, their writings could be infused with the rhythms and vocabulary of their own colloquial speech. From this initial and tentative foray into prose, the idea of developing performance poetry, something Feeney had recently become involved in, took hold.

"I felt the lads had lost their voice," Feeney says. "I had noted the emergence of some rap and hip-hop influences in their writing, but I see these voices as false. Tuam has a very good tradition of colloquial language and it is language that is about the here and now. Their voices do come from the street or, as I like to tell them, it's more like the boreen."

In the classroom, just as in the wine bar in Galway, people are quick to tear down any false barriers being erected between traditional and performance poetry, and the emphasis is placed on the mutual benefits.

"What we do does not at all take away from classical poetry," says Feeney. "But ultimately we need a way into it, and an avenue into all the social change around the students."

The technical structures and devices of poetry are brought into the equation as they are encountered or required, and as a result are being received in a much more positive way, according to Feeney. Students have started lingering after class to get advice about their work and discuss possible editing or additions. Confidence has been boosted and creative minds awakened.

Feeney believes that her students are now sufficiently engaged with poetry to tackle the Leaving Cert course. Several intend to introduce their poetry to a wider audience through a teen slam, which will be staged as part of Project '06, Galway's alternative arts festival, next month.

Like the students at St Patrick's, slam poetry in Galway is still finding its own voice. It is often loud, it is sometimes brash and it is certainly not to everyone's taste, but it is an emerging voice and it is there to be listened to.

• North Beach Nights is held once a month at 9pm in BK's Wine Bar, Spanish Parade, Galway. The next North Beach Night will be held on Thursday, June 22nd, with featured guest Emer O'Toole, and MC Stephen Murray (Cúirt Grand Slam winner 2005). Admission: €4

• As part of Project '06, a teen slam will be held in Galway City Library on July 19th at 5pm. Admission is free