The Block NZ held a slam poetry competition last night with a jaw-dropping cash prize. Alex Casey speaks to a slam expert about what this means for the future of the form.
Poets of the nation: put down your quills and pick up a hammer because one of the biggest poetry prizes in the country can now be found on a home renovation show sponsored by Starbucks. Replacing the annual Block Stars talent competition, which was mostly a chance for bald cap sales to skyrocket and radio hosts to tolerate a deeply creased table cloth, The Block Poetry slam made its debut last night with a whopping cash prize of $10,000, the same amount as the prestigious Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry handed out at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Given the theme “Block Life” and a time limit of 90 seconds, our reno junkies got to work showing off their poetic chops. Chloe and Ben tried to distract from the fact they rhymed “smiling” and “winning” with 35 costume changes and endless innuendo. Stacy and Adam dressed as the Cat in the Hat to do the world’s pussiest roast. Maree and James cosplayed as spiders and Quinn and Ben risked a Will Smith slap for plagiarising the Fresh Prince theme.
But was any of it actually any good? And what do real slam poets think of their form making it to a home renovation show? Ben Fagan, the artistic director of Motif Poetry, is responsible for the biggest slam poetry competition in the country. He says that slam came from the United States in the 1980s with the aim of democratising poetry, but is often misunderstood. “It is one of these things that has become a bit of a misnomer – people think it is a rap battle or all off-the-cuff.” Some (me) thought it was entirely this poem from So I Married An Axe Murderer.
But slam is not a genre of poetry, but simply a format, Fagan explains. “For something to be a slam it has to have five random audience judges who are picked voluntarily out of the crowd on the night, and they score the poems from one to 10 to one decimal place with Olympic-style scorecards.” The idea is to make a “crazy” competition out of art with the hopes of reaching a broader audience. “It has this big secret at its core which is that you can’t judge and score poetry,” says Fagan. “But it gets a lot of people involved in poetry who wouldn’t otherwise.”
Surely then, it is in the spirit of slam for the form to reach something as broad and accessible as The Block NZ? “Depending on how cynical you are feeling at any given time on any given day, you could say a lot of things about the performance on The Block,” Fagan muses. “If you weren’t feeling very cynical, you could say that absolutely, what a wonderful platform to introduce this to people and seeing these people who are not creatives giving it a crack.”
In terms of critiquing the actual performances themselves, which The Spinoff forced him to watch, Fagan was equally as diplomatic. “The performances struck me as more a cabaret style where anything goes, there was drag and comedy and storytelling and you might call it poetry. It was more of a variety show.” Having never watched the show before he described many of the jokes as “impenetrable”, but gleaned that there was a lot of humour in “past tasks and tradies”.
What was not in the slam canon was the use of costumes – one of the central rules of slam is no costume and no props. “They were a surprise,” Fagan laughs. “They didn’t seem completely necessary but obviously we need a bit of TV pizzazz.” He singles out Stacy and Adam’s Seussian homage in particular – “I didn’t understand why they were dressed as Dr Sueuss [characters] but they had a cat in the hat, bow tie and then Resene tops?”
Tonight viewers will find out who takes out The Block NZ’s first poetry slam, but Fagan was happy to weigh in on which team he thought performed the best. He enjoyed Ben and Chloe’s innuendo-laden performance – “he abuses his hammer… and that’s not all” – but said Maree and James’ bedtime story-inspired spider tale was his favourite. “There was a lot of authenticity as well as plot and characters and some really lovely storytelling elements.”
While whoever wins tonight will come away with $10,000 to spend on their reno. The next biggest slam poetry prizes pale in comparison. “I can pretty confidently say that no other slam in New Zealand has awarded that much money,” says Fagan. Previous NZ Poetry Slam prizes have ranged from $200-$500, while past competitions like Poetry Idol and The Going West Poetry Slam have topped out at $1,000 max. But Fagan is not bitter, instead seeing it as a positive cultural moment for the form.
“Look, if slam poetry is at a point in New Zealand where it has enough market penetration where it’s not the most crazy baffling thing to appear in such an accessible show like The Block then great, I guess that means we are doing our job right.” He hopes that it might encourage people to get involved in poetry in their area. “There are so many events out there, there are so many great poets who deserve our support and also deserve $10,000.” Just leave the novelty wigs at home.
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