The Superbowl of Slam and other musings

I’ve been hard on the slammers, I know. And while I don’t feel particularly bad about it, our local performance poets deserve a shout out for their hard work last Friday at the Bridge Café in Manchester. The New Hampshire team, named Slam Free of Die, will be one of 7 teams throughout New England heading to St. Paul in August for the National Poetry Slam.
The HippoPress's readers’ third favorite poet in the state, Mark Palos, aka The Colonel, will be coaching the five-slammer team and I’ll let him describe the atmosphere at the Bridge as the competitors vied for the five spots:
“As far as how finals went, it was one of the closest bouts I've ever seen. You could not have predicted who was going to make the team at any point. There were a couple of people who took a strong lead at the beginning and then fell back to eventually not make the team at all and two people got terrible scores in the opening round and then had huge come-from-behind recoveries to end up making the team. Very exciting. The judges were consistent (which is good) but also consistently gave low scores (which makes a loss all the tougher for those that didn't make the team). The spread between all the people who ultimately made the team was mere tenths of a point. This was one of the most blood-and-guts slams I've ever seen. Every poet had to work incredibly hard for every point. In the end, we also had to have a tie-breaker for 6th place, which is the alternate spot (since we are probably actually going to need to utilize the alternate and we didn't want the two people who were tied to have a tie-breaker later with a different panel of judges, that would not be fair). All-around, it was an edge-of-your-seat night from beginning to end. Everyone brought their very best work and the poetry as well as the performances were all top-notch.”
I like Mark Palos. I like that he came in third in the voting of state’s best poet behind Robert Frost and Donald Hall. He competed in the national competition in 2008 and 2009, and I like that he has friends on his Facebook page named Damage Manch-Vegas, and Jazzman Lewis and Laura Yes Yes. It’s all very exciting and creative.
So, kudos to the new team. You can check out updates on their Facebook page, Bridge Poetry, and once The Colonel works out the details, we’ll feature some of the winners in this column and see if their work is as interesting as their names.
In other reward-driven poetry news, the Library of Congress just this week announced that nominations are open for the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize. I know what you’re thinking, who the heck is that? She was LBJ’s daughter, and she liked poetry and she worked at the Library of Congress and blah, blah, blah... who cares. The point is that every two years the library gives $10,000 to an American poet for the best book published in the last two years.
Sounds great right? Well, the nominations have to come from publishers. That’s a ton of money for poets, and it seems a little disingenuous to put those choices in the hands of the publishers who will likely use the notoriety of the award as a way to push an author they want to sell more books. Asking a publisher to nominate the best book is like asking a dad to nominate a favorite child. What do you think the odds are that the dad is going to pick somebody else’s kid? Seems a bit obvious.
On the other, any reward is a good reward to a poet.