The National Slam Effect

So it’s that time of year again. And no, I don’t mean the tinsel and eggnog time, I mean National Slam Final time. It’s the National Slam’s second birthday and I reckon it’s looking: well, like a two year old: charming but filthy, full of irrationally unpredictable tantrums, totally disloyal and like you’d wheelie-bin it if it wasn’t so goddamn adorable. Personally, I’m prepared to put up with it so long as it grows up one day, though God knows what trials puberty will bring.

Now first up, let’s get this straight: I didn’t enter the National Slam this year. Can’t quite say why. That five thou cheque is quite a hook, but somehow, my heart just wasn’t in it this time. One of my loyal blog - spies (and here I should confess that I have, in fact, enlisted an army of underground stooges to facilitate the shocking spoken word expose` that is this blog. Any poet you encounter could be undercover, so if you thought you’d avoid blog-scrutiny by avoiding me, forget it folks) reported to me that the Victorian State final was a great night, but yawningly same-same: lots of the usual suspects, pulling out their best, but tried and tested…

And there lies the thing about the National Slam. With stakes so high (including a debaucherous Sydney weekend for State Finalists and $5000 for the winner), who the fu*k would want to risk new material? I wouldn’t, so don’t get me wrong I’m all for word conservation. Hell, I say let’s re-think, re-cycle and re-use all the poems we have – they’re a precious natural resource. It's our responsibility to be sparing: if we use them all up at once, what will be left for our children? Personally, I’d be happy to slam the same poem at every gig, several times in a row, and have almost been known to do so (thank F*ck Obama got it, now I can recycle that crowd-pleasing swan-song for another four to eight years. Kerching!). Maybe slam poems should become like pop songs, where people in the audience can slam along with you. We could even throw in a bit of audience-participation by way of air guitar.

I say f*ck the National Slam: for the end of this year, and the start of next, I’ve got my eye on a new-comer. One that has you slamming before Buddhist Monks in the grounds of a Temple where a giant smiling Buddha overlooks a sacred Aboriginal meeting place in the Maribyrnong Valley. A slam that has you on the Baptist Church pulpit (oooh yeah, move over Jeremiah Wright...and the Lord said “let there be SLAMMING, and there was”) and greening with the trees in an environmental sustainability centre.
Much as I’ll get slammed for saying it, I reckon us slammers have become predictable creatures. For the most part, we find our groove, and bloody well stick to it. Last year I met this random stalker-slash-groupie at a slam (and if you’re reading this, you psychopath, please avoid the urge to turn up naked at midnight outside my bedroom window covered in Nutella, wildly screaming my name in the middle of my quiet suburban street like last time. I might find it flattering, but it kind of unnerves my partner and small child). The stalker-slash-groupie came up to me and said.
“I’ve seen you slamming quite a few times now and I really like your stuff”…
(at the “quite a few times” point, I slowly started to back away)
“but the thing is….”
(there’s always a ‘but’ with stalkers)
“Your stuff is like…kind of dark sometimes. It really moves me but sometimes I just go home and get so distressed about things that I want to kill myself…”
(and here, I painfully resisted the urge to suggest this might not be a terrible idea)…

What to do? When I thought about it, it was true. I’d kind of become the this-world-is-f*cked-and-all-I-can-think-to-do-about-it-is-lay-the-shit-on-people-about-it-at-slams champion. And let’s not be coy about it, I had become a bloody awesome this-world-is-f*cked-and-all-I-can-think-to-do-about-it-is-lay-the-shit-on-people-about-it-at-slams champion.

But I couldn’t let this I’m-so-depressed-all-I-can-think-to-do-about-it-is-kill-myself psychopath ‘type me like that. So I knuckled down and did the unthinkable: wrote a funny poem. And I mean side-splittingly, undergarment-soaking, drink-snortingly hilarious. Only in my mind. Until I slammed it in front of people. What the hell do they know anyway?

So… my wishes for the festive slam season? New slammers with new material, old slammers with new material, an unlikely winner for the Nationals*, and an awesome start to Geoff Fox’s revolutionary roaming inter-faith, cross-cultural 2009 Melbourne Slam**.


* Notwithstanding my loyalty to capable and deserving Melbournites Ezra and Si, who will ably and dynamically represent our perverted little Melbourne slam-cult at the National final in Sydney on Dec 4th.

** Geoff Fox runs the new Melbourne Slam 2009, and can be contacted through the Melbourne slammers Facebook chain. Heats run monthly at venues open to poetic voices across Melbourne. There is an optional theme for each heat, no entry fee, and the heat prize is $100.

There Are Dead Poets Hanging in the Dan

So…I know this is supposed to be a slamming blog, but this is kind of relevant, in a round about not-really-relevant-but-I’ll-post-it-anyway way. Last night I had this awesome wet dream: the end of Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White’ video clip meets a Black Panther meeting meets Def Poetry Jam meets The Secret Life of Us (only watchable & without the try-hard camera zooms and Big-Brother-dairy-room-style confessional narrative).

So in this dream I left my funky warehouse in Brunswick. You know the drill, an achingly hip pad with several mezzanine levels, sound-system sub-woofed to the max, framed vinyl on the walls, one of those curvy chrome seventies fridges. Presumably, in the world of my Rogan Josh induced dreams, I lived there as an unemployed yet somehow independently wealthy so-hip-it-hurts young baaad thing.

So anyway, during the course of my dream I travelled, or rather, jive-walked, from the door of my cruisy pad to the door of the Dan O’Connell Hotel in Carlton**. Ok, so that doesn’t sound so slammer’s-wet-dreamish. But the thing is, during the course of my journey I morphed into several people. For the ten minute jive-walk to the tram-stop I was Gil Scott Heron (“the revolution will not be televised, will not be television, will not be televised”), with a four foot afro and these unreal royal blue flares. Once I bought my tram ticket from the machine one the tram, I morphed into Jamaican dub-master Linton Kwesi Johnson, thoughtfully stroking my pointy black beard as the tram rumbled along (“fascists on the attack, we will fight them back / we’re gonna smash their brains in, cause they ain’t got nothing in em”)…then as I walked toward the Dan, I became Ntozake Shange (“It hasn’t always been this way …Ellington was not a street”), and finally, with my hand on the door-knob of the Dan, I became Nikki Giovanni (“If they take his life, it won’t stop the revolution”).

Then when I opened the door of the Dan, a blinding light flashed into my eyes. End dream. What the f#ck? I mean obviously, this fantasy was just super-wishful thinking, but it doesn’t escape me that yesterday afternoon was Dead Poets Day at the Dan – where everyone comes as their favourite dead poet and reads the work of said poet-ghoul. As I’m in Sydney this weekend I haven’t been able to go, but after last night’s dream-shenanigans I’ve started wondering: who would I have gone as, when the vast bulk of my literary heroes are alive and well.

It also got me thinking what a culturally deprived and ego-centric moron I am*** to be getting down with so much retro-Panther and dub spoken word stuff of my own without attempting to start a dialogue with these greats. Ok, they might well laugh down at me from underneath their tiger-skin robes, flashing gold-covered teeth and shaking their silvering afros in contempt, but at least I’d have tried.

I guess by way of excuse I live in this cultural-desert of a country that is Oz. I’d have to cross oceans to access most of these prophets in person, but in the digital age, that’s hardly a plausible excuse.

It also got me wondering how many of my contemporary spoken word heroes: Stacey Ann Chin, Saul Williams and the like, have harangued and hunted down their own heroes. I’ve had the mind-blowing privilege of seeing Kwesi Johnson live at the Basement in Sydney about four years back. Why didn’t I stalk him? Find out where he was staying? Sidle up to him unabashedly with a dictaphone? If need be, hold him at gun-point – use pepper spray and poetic brutality to get him so sit through my shit*. Heaven knows, compared to his encounters with the Special Patrol under eighties London’s SUS laws I’m sure he’d have handled me just fine: the resulting nostalgia might even have been a great in-road to an explosive interview…or to my incarceration for GBH.

Either of which would have been great future subject matter.

Stay tuned to my spoken word-ster stalking.


* ‘Shit’ here is not intended to mean painfully cringe-worthy, so-bad-you-feel-embarrassed-just-listening-to-it spoken word. It’s intended to mean ‘poems’. Maxine has it on reasonably trustworthy authority she doesn’t write bad ones.

**Melbourne poet Cam (‘strictly-speaking-not-a-slammer’) Black runs poetry sessions at the Dan O’Connell Hotel every Saturday afternoon from around 2.30pm: One feature reader plus open mic.

***Although I was thinking about my egocentricity, which implies an acute awareness of it, I make no apologies for this quality, which is an invaluable poetry slamming tool, and, I find, a useful personal quality in general.

So Slammers...I'm Blogging About You All.

So I've been thinking

I haven't let anyone know about this blog, except my one loyal follower who I forced into 'subscribing' so I wouldn't be a complete Nigel (and here my apologies to all the Nigels out there who don't conform to the friendless stereotype which must surely have haunted them their entire lives) .

Here's the thing

The slam scene, like any other scene in Melbourne, is kind of incestuous. Oh, it's lovely and all once you're there, but getting into it is a bit like gaining access to a gated cult community, minus the group sex and statutory rape, but with loads more weird chanting. There's trust to earn, initiations to overcome.

The first slam I attended in Melbourne was the annual Doris Leadbetter Poetry Cup

in 2007: Two rounds, one minute to slam, $2000 at stake. I'd been to all of one poetry slam before (the Gleebooks Poetry Sprint run by the NSW Writers Centre at their Christmas party each year). I was nervous. I think I might have even weed in my pants a little bit when they called out my name. I didn't know anyone in the audience, and had come with three friends who were not part of the 'scene'.

I came second. It might just have been our collective four-fold imaginations, but in our recollection, the win went down like a sack of very heavy shit, and probably stank just as much:

An iconic Melbourne slam.

Second prize a not insignificant $300 (for all you working people out there, this may n0t seem like much, but for us* authentic 'drop-out' poets who are so committed to our artform we are forced, by the governments continual non-recognition of our potential as state-supportable modern griots, to dole-bludge, beg and barter our way through this blissful bohemian lifestyle, it's like winning the f*cking lottery). $300 would fund our Maggi noodles and notepaper for two months. There might even be enough left over for a small bottle of cough medicine or a new acrylic blanket for down at the squat.

And there I was: a scene imposter from who the f*ck knows where, waltzing in and elbowing my way to the front of the line. If some unknown fly-by supposed 'poet did that to me now, I'd have no hesitation in dragging them into a back alley to show them what slamming's really all about.

So back to this blog

Will my comrades feel that there's an imposter in their midst? Will they avoid me at all costs for fear I broadcast the innermost secrets of the scene? Once this blog gains the world-following it's sure to attract on account of it's universal relevance, and my insightful social observations, immeasurable wit and easy jocular way with words, will I stop being invited to readings?

Not worried.

By then I'll be famous and I'll extract the ultimate revenge by getting really bad or caricaturic Hollywood actors to play them. Cam will be Jack Black. Geoff Lemon will be the guy out of Napolean Dynamite whose actor-name no-one remembers so they always refer to him as 'the guy out of Napolean Dynamite'. Pobjie will be played by that really enormous black guy from that Stephen King movie (Green Mile is it called? Who knows?), but in white-face make-up. Testart would be the Jurassic Park guy (Geoff Goldblum?), only twenty years ago in that movie where he turns into a fly and still has crazy hair...I'm thinking Halle Berry might just be available to play me. Sophie, we're collaborating so you can be Angelina Jolie.

So the question begs: how best to announce this blog?

So slammers... I'm blogging about you all.

* The term 'us' is used loosely here to mean 'some'. Maxine really has a quite pleasant white collar day job, but likes to maintain the starving artist illusion.

Germany Slam

So there’s this monthly slam at Bar Open: Babble. Run by Joey Kurtschenko aka Crazy Elf, and his side-kick, a crazy masked poetry ninja. Runs at Bar Open in Melbourne on the first Wednesday of every month. Open slam, loose theme, one feature reader. The stakes are huge: $10 to be exact – which in my case is a quarter of the taxi –fare home to the other side of Melbourne (I know, I know, as another slamster once asked me in awe when I admitted to eastern suburban living: “You live where? Who crosses the river these days? Eeeew. Once you get past St Kilda it gets all like, clean and unbohemian”)

Anyway, so Elf asked me to feature read at the October slam but I was heading off to the National Young Writer’s Festival the same day, so had I to reluctantly decline – and it was going to be zombie-themed and all. Being an ever-enterprising slammer, I politely informed Elf that I’d love to read the following month. Roll around last night and Ben Pobjie, who’s taking over the December slam while Elf is overseas, accosts me at the Human Rights slam and asks me to read at the upcoming end of year Germany themed Babble. I agreed, then on the ride home, realised my fatal error.

Dogs Bollocks. This was the Germany slam, and Ben Pobjie we were talking about (http://benpobjie.blogspot.com/ blogger, writer, satirist extraordinaire: the same Ben-Pobjie who roused an infuriated silence from the sours in the audience when he referred to ‘reverse racism’ as ‘backing the car over an Aboriginal’ at the Human Rights Slam on November 18).

Hmmmmmm. Pobjie. Germany. Alcohol. Lot’s of it. Pumped audience. Cue very dubious, but cleverly side-splitting retro-Nazi not-really-humour-because-it’s-so-f*cking-wrong-but-you-laugh-your-dinner-up-anyway-because-it’s-so-wrong-it-has-to-be-funny-and-probably-is-funny-even-though-it-shouldn’t-be word-smithing.And he’s asked me, a black female poet, of all the poets on the unreal but not-so-diverse Melbourne slam scene, to read not as a feature but as a sacrificial poet (note to non-slammers: a sacrificial poet is the god-forsaken soul who first wets the stage with their blood before the slam officially opens.) I must have been out of my mind. The cringe worthily WRONG material the guy is going to get from this…comedy bloody gold. This’ll teach me to accept any gig going.

Pobjie, I’m fu*king on to you

Maxine is terrified of sacrificing herself at the Germany slam but even more terrified at the jokes Pobjie would be able to make if she chickened out.

'Oh My God I TOTALLY got SLEDGED at the Human Rights Slam' or 'A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Human Rights Slam Final'

So check it out

I didn't start this blog to air grudges, but a funny thing happened to me last night at the Melbourne Human Rights & Arts Film Festival Slam - so bizarre & bemusing I had to share it

I got sledged

Only I didn't know it was called sledging, cause I'm not exactly a cricket fan, but here's what happened. It was the end of the second round. First Melbourne Human Rights Slam ever: at cruisy bar venue red violin in Melbourne city, human rights theme, seven hand-picked poets slamming, two eliminated in the first round, another two in the second round. I'm left standing, ready to go head to head in the final three & this person accosts me on the way out of the ladies.

Now, I won't say who it was

He or she, poet or audience member...it doesn't really matter. So what this person did, was politely inform me that at the Northern Notes Poetry Slam, run the previous weekend in Northcote as part of the Northern Notes Writer's Festival, in which I had won People's Choice as well as taking title, 'many' audience members had apparently informed this person that they voted for me not because they like the poem best, but because they didn't want a 'woman' not to walk away with the prize. I gave a cest la vie shrug & proceeded on my merry way to my seat.

'Oh my god, you totally got sledged' was the reaction from my supporters corner. My response?

'What the fu*k is sledging?' Apparently it's that thing in cricket where opposing players heckle the batter under their breath to off-put them like: 'Your mama's so big she could sell shade for a living.' 'Know where your daughter was last night? In my bed' and so on and so forth.

I cracked my knuckles. I was totally excited. Should I have been appalled? Indignant? Defensive? Should I have thought about the content of the comment, wondered whether my win was justified, torn my hair out? As if. Everyone knows that most slam wins are at best, grain-of-saltish. You hope the best poet wins on the day. You know they probably won't. You bring your shit as best you can and get over it. So I was kind of in awe. 'Oh my god, I did. I totally got sledged.'

Now I've written on slamming in Australia before as a journalist and slamster (The Age and The Big Issue http://www.bigissue.org.au/2008/05/19/whats-up/ ) and mused on the phemonenon of poetry becoming a performance sport: the ego and seriousness of sport in this country merging with perhaps one of the most non-competitive artforms known to man & here the oxymoron was, come to life and sledging me right in the face. It was all I could do to jump about boasting 'I totally got sledged. Someone sledged me.' I pulled on my knitted hot pink performance poetry glove.

Ok, it's ON. F*cking bring it.

Maxine Clarke came second in the final of the first Melbourne Human Rights Arts & Film Festival Slam. The victory was shallow compared with the fear of her which was glimpsed in her first sledging incident.