by Sarah Dunn
Where old-fashioned “open readings” were seen to foster mediocrity (coffeehouse poets falling prey to the flop sweats only to be greeted by polite applause, members of the lunatic fringe spouting obscenities onstage only to be greeted by polite applause, etc.), the slam was designed to reintroduce an element of objective judgment to the poetry scene proceedings. The slam was created, it would seem, so people could boo mediocrity right off the stage.…
“…Last week I asked myself, ‘What is poetry?’…”
All too often people make the mistake of going to poetry slams looking for good underground poetry. What they eventually learn is that the ideal slam is made up of the following components:
A) BITTER INFIGHTING AMONGST THE LOCAL POETS, CULMINATING IN
B) A FISTFIGHT ON STAGE.
SADLY, NOT EVERY SLAM ENDS IN A BENCH-CLEARING BRAWL. BUT EACH AND EVERY ONE HAS AT LEAST ONE POET WHO ASKS THE QUESTION “WHAT IS POETRY?” AND THEN READS A POEM THAT PROVIDES THE ANSWER. THE TRULY AMBITIOUS GO EVEN FURTHER AND ASK, “WHAT IS ART?” AND THEN READ A POEM THAT PROVIDES THE ANSWER. THIS, OF COURSE, GIVES THE IMPRESSION THAT, RATHER THAN A BUNCH OF POSTURING SEMI-TALENTS WHO WRITE POEMS ON BUSSES AND THEN READ THEM TO A DRUNKEN AUDIENCE STOCKED WITH THEIR CLOSE FRIENDS, THEY ARE INDIVIDUALS WHO HABITUALLY WRESTLE WITH IMPORTANT AESTHETIC QUESTIONS.
“… These next few poems have, I like to believe, a very postmodern twinge.…”
Go to a few slams and you will realize that the only thing more fun than reading a poem in front of a large audience is expounding upon a poem in front of a large audience. Possible topics include:
a) What the poem is about
b) Why you wrote the poem
c) When you wrote the poem
d) Where you were when you wrote the poem
e) Who you were thinking about when you wrote the poem
f) How you wrote the poem
The opener can be as short as a dedication to Blake, or as long as a detailed description of your psychological state following your most recent drug binge. Ideally, it should function as a little window into your tortured soul, just in case your poems aren’t doing the trick.
“… And the winner of tonight’s slam is (drumroll, please)… “
The scoring of a poetry slam follows a very complicated point system wherein the judges, who are members of the audience selected at random, assign a point value for each poet’s work. Poets score points for things including how good their poems are, whether their facial expressions are convincing, whether they shout the loudest, whether their body language looks like they practiced at home in front of a full-length mirror, whether they seem dangerously intoxicated, whether they look at the words instead of reciting them from memory, and, finally, whether or not they sometimes seem to be making things up as they go along. All of these elements are carefully rated and assigned points, which are then tabulated, just like at the Miss America Pageant, and then whoever happens to be best friends with the judges is selected as the winner.
“… By the way, my chap-book is on sale in the back for only three bucks….”
*All quotations 100 percent genuine
THE FIVE-MINUTE POET
BEGIN WITH A LOADED IMAGE YOU ENCOUNTER WHILE TAKING A WALK:
Moth upon the asphalt, fluttering
Wings encrusted with time, disturbing
BE PLAYFUL WITH YOUR SYNTAX:
my daydreams, both transient and bold, unduly.
THREE WORDS: ADJECTIVES, ADJECTIVES, ADJECTIVES:
With mock grim intensity and solemn joy,
Your incandescent and somehow fleeting hopes scatter
among the damaged ruins, which
REMEMBER, ALLITERATION IS YOUR FRIEND:
Tumble headlong gasping, groaning into the abyss.
Gaping.
WHEN IN DOUBT, EMPLOY THE DASH:
If with each labored breath begins—
a monsoon in Japan? a famine in
Tibet?—what happens when—
WHEN TRULY IN DOUBT, RUN WITH ALL CAPS:
SPLAT!
FOR ADDED IMPACT, STRING YOUR LINES ARTFULLY ACROSS THE PAGE:
I silence your still small voice with the heel
of my
recently-reshod
boot?
THE ART OF FICTION: SHOWING OFF YOUR SUBURBAN CHILDHOOD SCARS
THE NICE THING ABOUT FICTION IS THAT MOST OF US LEARNED HOW TO WRITE SENTENCES IN FOURTH GRADE WHETHER WE WANTED TO OR NOT.
INDEED, WRITING IS THE ONE CREATIVE OUTLET THAT QUITE OFTEN SEEMS TO BE THE PROVINCE OF EVERYBODY. ONE SIMPLE FACT CANNOT BE AVOIDED, AND THAT IS THAT SITTING DOWN WITH A FABRIC-COVERED BLANK BOOK AND WRITING A TENDER PARAGRAPH ABOUT AUTUMN FOLIAGE IS MUCH EASIER THAN ATTEMPTING TO WRITE, PRODUCE, AND DIRECT EVEN THE LOWLIEST OF LOW-BUDGET EXPLOITATION FLICKS.
IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO GET STARTED ON A DAZZLING CAREER AS A SHORT STORY WRITER. HERE’S HOW TO GET STARTED:
TIP #1: CULTIVATE QUIRKY WRITING HABITS
There is nothing quite so boring as a writer who wakes up in the morning and writes for a few hours and then wakes up the next morning and writes for a few more hours and then does it again each morning for years until he has completed a substantial piece of work worthy of the attention of a major publisher. The path of genius was never meant to be trod at a slow, laborious plod. Besides, if you were good at waking up in the morning and working for extended periods of time you would be a banker and drive a nicer car.
You must determine early on in your career that you need to lock yourself up in your apartment for four days, disconnect the phone and pull down the shades, strip naked, and play Dinosaur jr. over and over while you ingest performance-enhancing drugs in order to really get moving on a new short story. Not only is this infinitely cooler than the method outlined above, but the sheer number of hurdles that must be overcome (finding four back-to-back days unbesmirched by the responsibilities of gainful employment, financing the drugs, etc.) goes a long way toward explaining away your remarkably low productivity.
TIP #2: CHOOSE YOUR INFLUENCES WITH CARE
As a general rule of thumb, the more nonlinear, experimental, misunderstood, and nonsensical the better. Bukowski is the obvious choice, but any of the Beats will work. And if you happen to have a few literature courses under your belt, you might find yourself leaning toward Beckett, Joyce, Faulkner, or Pynchon, any of whom will work just fine.
TIP #3: NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE ARTISTIC VALUE OF EXPLICIT SEX
TIP #4: YOUR OWN LIFE IS AS INTERESTING AS ANYONE ELSE’S. FEEL FREE TO WRITE ABOUT IT.
Of course you’ll want to change everybody’s name. And you probably ought to make your mother a blonde rather than a brunette, who grew up in Oklahoma City rather than Phoenix, and who beat you over the head with a wooden spatula rather than just annoying you occasionally with her demands that you clean up under your bed.
If you make your central character a person who lives your life, thinks your thoughts, and views the world exactly the way you do, you won’t have to waste so much time making things up. That, and you can carry around a little booklet in your back pocket at all times, so you can while away the duller moments of your life scribbling sentences that can be sandwiched into your fiction at a later date: (“He thinks silently while at work, ‘I’d like to come in here with a machete and hack them all to pieces.’”)
TIP #5: EMPTINESS IS ALWAYS A GOOD THEME
The emptiness of popular culture. The emptiness of casual sex (explicitly presented, of course). The emptiness of life in the suburbs. Not only does this theme so accurately capture your mind-set at the moment, but it also functions as a built-in excuse for any apparent lack of depth or purpose within your story itself.
TIP #6: A BIZARRE, APPARENTLY MEANINGLESS DEATH IS OFTEN THE PERFECT ENDING FOR AN UNWIELLY PIECE OF FICTION
TIP #7: ALWAYS KEEP YOUR FICTION CLOSE TO YOUR CHEST
Your fiction will always be thought better by those who have not read it than by those who have.
This is always true. There are no exceptions.
Do not, in a fit of self-doubt, hand the first twenty pages of your novel to a close friend, seeking affirmation. You have nothing to gain and everything to lose. Your reputation as an undiscovered genius will suddenly be up for grabs, and your tirades about being a victim of a hostile literary establishment will begin to sound like excuses rather than the lamentations of a tragically misunderstood visionary.
The Slacker’s Copyright
Afraid that someone might steal your work? That some envelope-opening, butt-kissing Ivy League intern at The New Yorker might come upon your latest loosely structured, poorly disguised piece of autobiographical fiction and try to pass it off as her own?
Well, first get that paranoia in check, then stick a copy of your story (or poem, screenplay, comic, etching, zine, song, or photograph) in an envelope, address it to yourself, and drop it in a mailbox. When it arrives at your home, resist the impulse to open it. The date on the postmark will generally stand up in a court of law as proof that you thought of it first.
CREATIVITY: THE DARK SIDE
Match the following artists, writers, and musicians with the appropriate description of their suicides (hint: one individual listed did not take his own life):
1. Mark Rothko a. Jumped overboard and was drowned in the Caribbean while returning to the U.S. from Mexico.
2. Diane Arbus b. Discovered lying face up in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor; apparently did an amateur job of self-sedation, then slashed arms with a razor, severing an artery at the elbow.
3. Hart Crane c. Donned mother’s fur coat, poured a glass of vodka, and retired to a closed garage and started up an old red Cougar.
4. Sylvia Plath d. Victim of self-inflicted gunshot wound; corpse decomposed for weeks in a house in Bolinas before it was finally discovered.
5. Lucretius e. Automobile was discovered abandoned on the northern approach to the Golden Gate Bridge; body was never found.
6. Kurt Cobain f. Discovered lying on side in an empty bathtub with slit wrists; body was already in a state of decomposition and journal was open to a page dated two days earlier, across which was scrawled the words “The Last Supper.”
7. Ernest Hemingway g. Although a patient and prisoner of the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C., 12 years, failed to take own life.
8. Virginia Woolf h. Body was discovered by an electrician hired to install a security alarm; shotgun was still pointed at chin, and a suicide note written in red ink apparently ended, “I love you, I love you.”
9. Ezra Pound i. Brought two sleeping children glasses of milk and bread and butter, then put towels under the kitchen doors, taped up the cracks, turned on the oven, and head on open oven door.
10. Weldon Kees j. Continued to write during periodic lucid intervals after becoming insane after taking a “love philtre.” Died “by own hand” at age 44, with a famous major work uncompleted.
11. Anne Sexton k. Put rocks into pockets and then walked into a river near Sussex.
12. Richard Brautigan L. Put on the red Emperor’s robe and went into the foyer with a double barrelled Boss shotgun that had been used for years of pigeon hunting. Lowered the butt to the floor, leaned over and rested the twin barrels on forehead, and pulled the trigger.
Answer: 1b; 2f; 3a; 4i; 5j; 6h; 7l; 8k; 9g; 10e; 11c; 12d
THE “START YOUR OWN ROCK BAND” KIT
HOW to name Your Band
SADLY, AS THE LINE BETWEEN IRONY AND STUPIDITY GETS PROGRESSIVELY FINER, IT BECOMES MORE AND MORE DIFFICULT TO COME UP WITH NEW BAND NAMES. EVERYTHING HAS BEEN DONE. TONGUE-IN-CHEEK RETRO POMPOSITY? FAUX-NAIF FOLKSY STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS? WHOLESALE APPROPRIATION? NAMES THAT CHANGE SLIGHTLY EACH TIME YOU PERFORM? NAMES THAT CHANGE TOTALLY EACH TIME YOU PRACTICE? COMPLEXITY? RANDOMNESS? SHEER IDIOCY? BEEN DONE.
SO RELAX. STOP THINKING THAT YOUR BRAIN CAN COME UP WITH A NAME THAT OPERATES ON ITS OWN METAPHYSICAL PLANE, A PLANE HASN’T ALREADY GIVEN RISE TO THE NAMES OF THIRTY OTHER BANDS IN TWENTY DIFFERENT CITIES. DON’T TRY SO HARD. YOU KNOW, SLACK:
- Consult the back of a cereal box
- Flip open Hop on Pop and use the first two words you see
- Crank-call someone at 3 A.M. and employ the most creative of their expletives
- Ask a veterinarian for an obscure phrase of insider’s lingo
- Drink a bottle of Nyquil and allow it to come to you in a vision
Choosing Your Influences
BEFORE YOU GET MOVING ON THE GRITTY BUSINESS OF ACTUAL CREATION, IT’S A GOOD IDEA TO NAIL DOWN PRECISELY WHO YOUR INFLUENCES ARE GOING TO BE. NOT ONLY WILL THIS HELP YOU TO SHAPE YOUR AESTHETIC WITHOUT ACTUALLY DOING ANY WORK, BUT IT WILL ALSO GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO ARGUE ABOUT WITH THE MEMBERS OF YOUR BRAND-NEW BAND. PICK THREE FROM EACH COLUMN:
Column A Column B Column C
Tom Waits R.E.M. Nirvana
Joy Division Led Zeppelin The Pixies/Breeders
KISS Pavement Brian Eno
Volcano Suns Galaxie 500 The Rolling Stones
Barney MC 5 Roxy Music
Jonathan Richmond ABBA Schoolhouse Rock
The Stooges/Iggy Pop Neil Young Yo la Tengo
Elvis Daniel Johnston Echo and the Bunnymen
Parliament/Funkadelic David Bowie John Zorn
James Brown Frank Zappa The Doors
Ornette Coleman Van Morrison Jimi Hendrix
Mose Alison Nick Cave P. J. Harvey
Sonic Youth Up With People Captain Beefheart
Camper van Beethoven Sebadoh Elvis Costello
Big Star/Alex Chilton Dinosaur jr. “Free to Be You and Me”
Sly and the Family Stone Pink Floyd The Sex Pistols
The Fall Cowboy Junkies Mission of Burma
The Velvet Underground The Velvet Underground The Velvet Underground
Lyrical Obsessions: What’s Hot, What’s not
While thinking about getting started on hammering out those lyrics, you might want to keep in mind the following trends:
Hot Not Hot
Apathy Suicide
Cynicism Hope
Irony Abject meaninglessness
Hate Love
Alienation Peace
Confusion Harmony
Anxiety Bliss
Pain Romance
Man’s inhumanity to man Teaching the world to sing
Obsessive, ill-fated infatuation Muskrat love
Paste Your Face Here: The Promo Shot
The Film School Dilemma
In many ways film is the ultimate slack art form. The vast number of hurdles that must be overcome, the godlike strength of will that it takes to complete even the lousiest plotless 16mm short means that failing to finish is the rule rather than the exception. Everyone knows that dozens of months and thousands of dollars stand poised like the Great Wall of China between your initial wisp of idea and the finished product, which means you can comfortably remain at the idea stage for years, decades even, without ever having to come up with anything even remotely resembling an actual movie.
Alas, this tack is not for everybody. Some of you actually want to make films. You want to be independent filmmakers, steadfastly rejecting the stranglehold of Hollywood, refusing to sell out even if your work is never seen by anybody other than your immediate family and a few close friends, all of whom, unfortunately, will say to you, “I don’t get it.”
You folks have two options. You can either take the autodidact route—marked by years of couch surfing, mountains of credit card debt, and the occasional moral victory in the form of cables and/or expensive equipment stolen from Kevin Costner vehicles shot on location in your town—or you can try film school.
Something about film school is decidedly un-slack. It costs a lot, quite frankly, and people try to tell you what to do. But film school can give you aspiring slack filmmakers a few things you can’t find at home, even in your parents’ homes: namely, access to expensive equipment, exposure at student film festivals, and in
troductions to powerful alums.
Choosing the right film school is as important as choosing to go at all. USC, for example, is not a slack film school. Any school that tries to make films the Hollywood way—high on bland committee consensus, low on fierce independent genius—will crush your spirit. And if, like eight out of ten slack filmmakers, you are heavily into images of rape and violence right about now, the last thing you need is a feminist critique, a Janet Reno Arm Twisting, or an unwelcome reminder of the rating system. Instead, pick a little-known school with renegade profs who are into explicit clay-mation epics and soundless existential art flicks, and then get to work.
If you go and discover that you were doing more meaningful work with nothing more than your father’s old camcorder and special effects scavenged from your refrigerator, well, then you can be the ultimate in slack: a film school dropout.
Qualities of a Good Screenplay Writing Partner
-thinks that you’re a genius
-lets you be “the concept guy”
-doesn’t mind writing the entire first draft while you watch and critique
