The Gift of Slam Poetry
A short history of a misunderstood literary genre and the world it created.
the greatest Americans
have not been born yet
they are waiting patiently
for the past to die.
—Saul Williams
Joshua Benett
April 26, 2023
Harold Bloom once stated in an interview with The Paris Review that poetry slam is “the death of art.” I like that. The gravity of the statement feels like its own commendation. But I would like to offer here that poetry slam is more accurately described as the art of death—the art of dying to oneself. You can hear the resonances of this approach in some of the descriptive terms of the slam, nowhere more vividly than in the role of the sacrificial poet: the first writer to touch stage during a slam.