Austin provides stage for professional, student poets
By Kris Seavers
Central Texas is a hub of poetry slam competitions. This podcast tells the story of a national poetry slam held in Austin and a couple of local poets who built a stage for slam at the University of Texas in Austin.
Transcription:
(REPORTER:) The poetry slam is a competition invented in the 1980s by a Chicago construction worker named Marc Smith. So what? Poets have a set amount of time to present original work, and their performance is then judged by five random members of the audience.
(NAT SOUND POP:) Are you ready? [cheering] I’m so ready. Audience, are you ready? [cheering] Poets, are you ready? [cheering] Timekeepers, bell manager, are you ready? [cheering] Adrian, are you ready? Yes I’m ready. Oh my God I’m so excited. Welcome Glory B. to the stage!
(REPORTER:) For four days, 72 of the most talented female poets in the world competed on Austin stages for the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam, nicknamed “WoWPS” for short. From teachers to barbers, these women vary greatly in age, ethnicity and background, but each has a story to tell through her poetry. Finalist Giddy Perez, whose poetry originated as freestyle rap, came from Tampa, Florida to compete.
(GIDDY PEREZ INTERVIEW:) Wow, very interesting experience. I’ve never been around that many women in one room. A lot of talent. The judges were very unpredictable the whole competition… Overall it was amazing and I came with amazing people.
(REPORTER:) Perez was eliminated in the first round, but that didn’t stop her from gaining many new fans at WoWPS.
Closer to home, University of Texas junior Ariana Brown is roommates with the WoWPS head organizer Tova Charles, and Brown volunteered at the event. Brown describes her experience.
(ARIANA BROWN INTERVIEW:) I thought it was dope. I thought all of the people who made it to final stage were very deserving. They really were, I felt like, the best of the best writers and performers… And I thought it was really beautiful that on final stage there were so many women of color, there were queer women represented. There were people who were very deserving of it.
(REPORTER:) Brown and UT senior Zachary Caballero are co-founders of the campus poetry and writing club, Spitshine.
(ARIANA BROWN INTERVIEW:) Well Zach and I co-founded Spitshine in 2011… He was looking for someone to build an online community of poets and writers who could come every week and just sort of be around people who are interested in developing their craft.
(ZACHARY CABALLERO INTERVIEW:) We started our poetry organization — myself, Ariana Brown, and Justin Salinas who graduated were the three founding members of the organization — and essentially, it was fall 2011, my sophomore year, and really we just wanted to create a community on campus… We grew up through this community where writing and being open and honest and telling your story was encouraged. We saw how that molded us into the people we were and it was integral into our identity. So we were like, okay, let’s recreate that, but let’s build it from the ground up.
(REPORTER:) Spitshine hosts weekly writing workshops, performs at various events and mentors youth around the city.
(ZACHARY CABALLERO:) For the past three and a half years, it’s not just us writing poems. It is an opportunity for people to share their stories, for people to have a space to go.
(REPORTER:) In early March, Spitshine sent a team of five students, including Brown, to the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational, known as CUPSI, in Boulder, Colorado. Fifty-two college slam teams came from schools across the country, including Stanford and Berkeley, to compete. Spitshine, the only group representing a Texas school, placed first.
(ZACHARY CABALLERO INTERVIEW:) The team itself is premiere because they want it, you know? For them, they need it. We all start slamming because we have to – we can’t confine ourselves to a room any more. We can’t confine ourselves to our journal. You know, big ideas don’t live on small pages.
(REPORTER:) In addition to the Spitshine team placing first, Caballero won the competition title of “Torchbearer,” or most spirited. UT student Arati Warrier won “Best Poem,” and Brown was honored as “Best Individual Poet.”
(ARIANA BROWN INTERVIEW:) It’s interesting because with slam it’s super subjective. It’s not like, you know, if we were a basketball team, and we were playing a game, it would be very clear at the end of the game who the winner was because that’s the team who scored the most points. With slam, there’s not a set list of rules — well, there is some rules you have to follow — but how well you do in the slam is completely dependent on the opinions of five randomly selected people in the audience.
(REPORTER:) For Brown and many others, slam poetry provides a safe haven to put experiences and dreams into language and share them with an audience. It is for this reason that the Austin and UT slam communities continue to thrive.