This fabulous blog posting over at the Ploughshares site is a must-read. Although Alicia Jo Rabins, the author, doesn’t mention performed poetry or the slam at all, I think the article applies perfectly to performed poetry and highlights two aspect of performance that I think are part of what makes it essential for to my writing process:

enacting writing community as a team sport–another performative act which is by nature imperfect, lived out in time and through bodies, more analogous to writing a poem than to having written one. Some poets retain a vivid sense of live performance even on the page; Allen Ginsberg is among them. Perhaps partly because he structured his line-lengths in “Howl” according to the length of his breaths, you can feel the physicality in the poem; you can feel the poem breathing on the page. It doesn’t feel like an artifact.

This is something I’ve been stressing to a lot of the “page” poets I know — that imperfection is what marks really interesting and powerful writing. I read an interview with Thom Yorke of Radiohead in The Believer recently in which Yorke describes Jonny Greenwood’s role in the band, which includes encouraging the band to “add some wrong notes” to the music. One of the analogies I like to use is of a cubic zirconia — being synthetic, a cubic zirconia is flawless, and it’s this lack of flaw that makes one distinguishable from a diamond to the naked eye.

Then there’s this:

Witnessing the real risk of process is one reason why artistic community (the workshop, the residency, the collaboration) is so important. We celebrate each other’s successes, but we also observe the fruitful disasters, the failures that inherently attend real risk-taking. Through thoughtful critique, we help each other to consider those failures without attachment–simply to compost them and harvest the richness they contain, to deepen the process, and refine the work.

The “risk of process” is something I think slams especially bring to poetry. Of course it doesn’t always work, and of course, people who are there to win instead of the have fun and learn will miss out on this and end up making poems that game the system more than they do any of the things I find most interesting and useful about poems, but for myself, I find that putting a poem in front of an audience to be judged by non-experts often highlights that risk. There are other kinds of risk. I’d never substitute a slam for an actual critique from a trusted critic or for a good workshop. But it becomes another, very gritty arena in which to take risks with my poems, and it becomes a location for the community. There are other arenas, of course. Shows like The Encyclopedia Show emphasize the communal aspect of creation. The show’s curators prescribe topics and give writers a month to compose their poems. This simple restriction requires the writer to step outside her usual subject matter, often resulting in really powerful, interesting writing.

The whole thing is really quite insightful, and there’s a great video interview with Allen Ginsberg posted in the article. Go check it out.