Soapboxing and the Cool Kids

Listen to Dessa, she’s one of the cool kids. She knows where it’s at. We’ll get back to Dessa Darling of Doomtree later, as she featured at Monday night’s Soapboxing slam at the AQ.

Monday’s turnout at the Artists’ Quarter is beginning to feel like par for the course at slams in the twin cities, rooms that are crowding more and more, lists of poets that are filling up faster and faster, performances that are becoming more and more competitive. The Soapboxing slam this week was guest hosted by Khary Jackson (also known as 6 is 9 when performing), and featured Dessa Darling and her special guest Shane Hawley. Once again, the list was overflowing, and some of the poets who signed up did not get a chance to compete.

6 is 9 used “slam baby” Ezekiel to charm the audience.

Something that I found really interesting to think about is what each of the poets on stage does when they’re not “poeting”, and how it affects the writing style and delivery of their poetry. A number of the evening’s competitors were hiphop artists, and considering the feature of the evening is a part of a well-noted hiphop collective, as well as being a former slam poet, it makes sense to look at a slam poet’s extra-curricular activities and see how they inform the poetry.

“Homeless” Ryan K’s poetry is dense and lyrical, hefty and emotional. It betrays both his hiphop roots, and his more recent explorations of page poetry. I’m unfamiliar with what Ryan’s style was like prior to his slam hiatus, but his poetry is heavy-hitting now, with lots of rhyme-play and rich language- it reminds me of songs I have to listen to many times to not miss what he’s doing.

Gary Dop returned to the AQ to the welcoming cheers of poets who remembered his win earlier this winter. The poem he chose for first round was a little more daring this time around, treading the line between humor and discomfort, but not always ending up on the easy side of it and ending a little abruptly. The judges did not seem to be into it, and rewarded the more serious poetry of the first round.

Also returning to the AQ was Dylan. His poetry is deliciously academic, returning to symbols introduced at the beginnings of poems, precisely and yet still with the markings of youth heavy upon him. He will be one to keep an eye on in the future, you can count on it.

Mike Mlekoday is a heavy-hitter and obviously comfortable in performance, mixing academics with spirituality in his poetry regularly. Monday’s poems highlighted this, with both a poem about “backwater” religion and a poem about childhood letters to God. Mike writes well crafted arguments into his poetry, presenting one perspective and then countering it with an opposite (though not necessarily antagonistic) perspective.

Pablo is vocally theatrical on stage, and unflinchingly political, his poetry calculated and precisely worded. His time at Berkley definitely comes through in both his writing and performance, eloquent and impassioned. His showed a more personal side on Monday night, and yet his poem to his wife still had that level of “message” which seems to be extant in most of his slam work.

El Guante’s slam pieces are usually well crafted narratives, often politically or socially defiant. In these pieces, he often takes the listeners along the well-trodden path of the underdog before giving it a sudden vicious twist about two thirds the way through. His pieces are as carefully orchestrated as his hiphop songs, and though he says, “This is almost always a bad idea,” I’ve been coming to believe there is a vital crossover between hiphop and poetry that feed into each other in an incredibly productive way. Modern free-verse poetry often doesn’t so much defy the constraints of rhyme and meter as it is just ignorant of them. The careful use of more “traditional” poetic tools often feeds into a more powerful poem.

Though I’ve heard him do more lyrical, rap-based pieces, Ezra’s pieces do not always betray that side of him. Usually wry and sexual, Ezra’s slam poems are often more like hearing memoirs of an unreliable narrator. A little bit of his wordplay sometimes comes through, though often more laid back than in his rap pieces.

Sam Cook displays a frenetic, descriptive style- telling stories with rich details and tangents, getting himself worked up in the telling. He throws himself in with the energy of the poems, sometimes to rock his crowd with the heartfelt energy, sometimes to ricochet out of control and alienate the audience. I’m not sure what influences Sam’s writing style- I can’t tell from watching.

The slam was, as Dessa remarked, of high quality, though she needn’t worry. She and her guest Shane Hawley did have the feature well in hand. Winning the slam was Mike Mlekoday, with Sam Cook taking second, and El Guante taking third. Now, enjoy some of Dessa’s poise and charm.

-Cole