The Best American Poetry

Forsooth, I have no idea what forsooth means. (By Janice Erlbaum)

Well, now I do, because I looked it up, and it's an archaic term for "in truth." Another handy fact I learned during this very poetic week, during which I've been blogging here at BAP, or BAmPo, or whatever you want to call it, as well as judging a poetry contest for public high school seniors, one of whom used the fucking word "forsooth" in her poem (entrant's names have been blacked out, but I'm going out on a limb to guess that this poet is female, or a transgendered person, because the narrator of the poem is a girl – or, rather, "a maiden").

I took a point off for "forsooth." I’m sorry. I know it's just me exercising my own poetic prejudice, but "forsooth" can not possibly have any personal meaning to this young poet, unless that personal meaning is "if I use this word, I will sound poetic." It stinks of shortcutting, to me; it stinks of fancypants bullshittery, and that is one thing this judge will not tolerate. I say: Write from the goddamn heart, or go home.

I am also taking points off for poems where the speakers kill themselves at the end, and there are a bunch of those. It's never too early to teach kids that poetry doesn’t have to end in suicide.

The poets who get the best scores from me are the ones who obviously love language, the ones whose rhythms have me nodding my head from the first line, the ones whose rhymes beat the shit out of Eminem's, or any of the other rappers who have the gall to rhyme "me" with "me." The kids you can just see, slumped against their locker in the hallway, scribbling something down on a notebook balanced on their knee between classes. They didn't write a poem because their teacher told them about this contest; they heard about the contest, and they ran home and sifted through pages of their best work, their hearts beating so hard their tongues throbbed in their mouths. These are the ones I want to call on the phone and say, Hey, you made me gasp, you made me well up with tears, you made me well up with pride. Hey, teach me what you know; I'm afraid I've forgotten it.

Of course, the top score goes to the kid with the sestina.

I told you I was prejudiced.

-- JE

The life story of the death of art by Janice Erlbaum

The critic Harold Bloom famously called slam poetry "the death of art." And homeboy never even had to sit through a slam! I sat through my share back in the early '90s, as a slammer, a judge, and an audience member, and while it could be excruciating at times, listening to variants of the same three poems over and over again (those three poems being "I had it hard in life," "Racism is bad," and "We all like sex, right?"), slams were just as often exhilarating and mind-blowing. And, twenty years after the first slams were held in Chicago, it seems that art has somehow managed to survive them.

Now Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz has written a book about the history of poetry slams called Words In Your Face. I asked her three questions about slam poetry and its history.

This is for the Best American Poetry blog, and poetry slams are all about judging what poems are the Best. Are the criteria for Best-ness similar in both cases, or not? Who do you think gets it right, slam judges or anthology editors?

It's funny, one of the poets I interviewed for "Words In Your Face" -- a former slammer and current tenure track professor -- said that he didn't think there was much difference between having your poetry judged in a poetry slam and having it judged for a fellowship, first book competition, etc., except that in the slam, you get to see who the judges are, you know, look them in the eye when they put up their scores.

Everybody has their preferences, everyone has their biases, and there are always going to be cases of dumb favoritism, whether it's a slam judge rewarding a poet just because he's cute or a series judge rewarding a former student, and thus leaving a more deserving poet on the cutting room floor. I'm not sure if seeing the people judging you makes it easier or harder, but I think in both cases who is chosen to reward the work (judges, editors) makes all the difference.

So in the end, you just got to hope that the people calling the shots know what they are doing, that they don't concern themselves about what people "think" should be rewarded, but instead trust their gut, their heart, their ear and sometimes their funny bone too.

How have you seen the slam scene change over the years you’ve been involved?

The first Poetry Slam held in NYC happened in the late 1980s; in the nearly two decades since, the scene has changed a lot. My book is actually broken down into three distinct Waves, described as "times when the attention paid to the slam surged or waned, when certain styles of poetry were favored or discouraged, when certain factions within the community got along or were at one another’s throats." Additionally, the opportunities and projects that the slam attracted, and the type of people who might make up the audience have all wildly vacillated over slam's long history.

One of the more interesting end products (to me, at least) of this constant shifting is that poets in the slam always worry that something -- a style, a project, a poet -- will become so dominant that it will kill the scene, but it never does. Ranting hipsters, freestyle rappers, bohemian drifters, proto-comedians, mystical shamans and gothy punks have all had their time at the top of the slam food chain, but in the end, something different always comes along and challenges the poets to try something new.

Having been in slam for nearly a decade myself, this is the thing that keeps me coming back: what is going to hit next? who is the voice that I never saw coming? what poem is going to break my heart tonight?

You cover the last two decades of slam poetry, and that includes twenty years of gossip. Was everybody a total drunk slut, or what?

One of my favorite moments interviewing for the book was with the poet Maggie Estep, when she recounted her time on the Lollapalooza tour in 1994 (the one year they had a "Spoken Word Revival Tent").

In the middle of dredging up the specifics, she suddenly remembered that during the course of the tour a totally wasted (and recently widowed) Courtney Love approached Maggie, said, "So you're Maggie the Poet?" and proceeded to shove her tongue down her throat.

I had, however, heard this story before -- my very own boyfriend Shappy (emcee for those Lollapalooza slam, and current bar manager of the Bowery Poetry Club) had the exact same experience with Miss Love: "So you're Shappy the poet," tongue et al. He said her kisses tasted "like cigarettes and sad."

We slammers certainly have our times of debauchery, of drunkenness and wanton lust, but the lesson I learned is that our percentages would shoot up dramatically if only Courtney Love would frequent more slams.

(Note: I did the St. Louis to Detroit leg of that tour, and Courtney Love never tried to ram me with her tongue, because I was so obviously second-rate.)

(Oh! Also, Cristin will be reading from Words in Your Face, AND hosting a poetry slam, with poets including Taylor Mali and John S. Hall, and young-people poets Urban Word, on April 14 at 7pm at The Strand on 12th Street and Fourth Ave in New York City. Facebook says I'm attending!)

-- JE

Let Us Now Praise People We Want to Have Sex With by Janice Erlbaum

The praise poem was all the rage in certain circles in 1993. Kathy from Pussy Poets started it; she wrote a praise poem for Bobby Miller, and one for me, called “Mary Jane Girl.” “Mary Jane Girl” was all about how I would get her high and listen to her relationship problems with DC, and how awesome of me that was. I loved Kathy, too, but I never wrote a praise poem for her.

I never wrote a praise poem for anyone. The closest I came was a poem I wrote for Eliza, which wasn’t written so much for her as it was written to impress her. The poem was named for my old friend Melissa, and it implied that Melissa and I had slept together; in fact, we had not. But I wanted Eliza to think I had some credibility as a lesbian so that she would like me, and isn’t wanting someone to like you one of the highest forms of praise?

Eliza didn’t have any praise poems, though she had a response poem, which was kind of the same thing; just another way of flirting. Maggie Estep had a poem called “Fuck Me,” so Eliza wrote a response poem called “No, Fuck Me,” and of course Maggie heard about it and was flattered, but she didn’t swing that way, so Eliza read it to me, dancing ahead of me on the sidewalk on Allen Street, really performing the hell out of it. I was dying to swing Eliza’s way, and I almost did, for a few weeks there, after which she dumped me in the middle of Tompkins Square Park. Then I wrote a poem with Eliza’s name in it, but it wasn’t a praise poem.

I started dating Paul, who put me in just about every single one of his poems, which was his way of paying me back for letting him live with me and supporting him while he smoked all of my weed. He read one on stage at the Nuyorican one night – “And Janice will fill you up! And Janice will set you free!” – and I cringed, ashamed. Everyone knew how cheap I was, that I could be bought for the price of a few lines of not very good poetry.

In the meantime, DC wrote a praise poem for me. It was called “For J.E.,” and the word “genius” was used. This caused me to think about dumping Paul for DC, who had his own apartment, and a job, and was also a much better poet than Paul was. So I wrote a poem dedicated to DC. This caused Kathy to retire her praise poem for me, and to change one of the characters in the screenplay she was writing from a wonderful best friend type to an inane slut.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that no poem will get you laid faster than a praise poem, but if you use one to sleep with another poet, you’re either going to wind up supporting them while they smoke all your weed, getting dumped in the middle of Tompkins Square Park, or alienating your best friends. Probably safer to stick to limericks.

-- JE

Best American Neurotic Poetry by Janice Erlbaum

I barely slept last night. I kept waking up and wondering, what am I going to post on the Best American Poetry blog? I never should have accepted the guest blogging assignment; now everybody is going to know what a fraud I am, how incapable I am of saying anything new or relevant about poetry. I mean, when was the last time I even wrote a poem, anyway? Unless you count the many stupid songs I sing to my cat, Minky, songs that invariably rhyme Minky with stinky, and mention his tongue so pink-y, as well as his habit of climbing into the sink-y to get a drink-y. But that's not poetry, that's doggerel, or catteral, at best. God, this is already a failure. I'm a disgrace. I bet Lehman's going to yank my poem from the Erotic Poems anthology; he's just going to go around town ripping the page from the book. You wrote a fucking poem to your cat? I...I tried to think of something better! I tried to write another sestina, or a pantoum, something high-falutin', something profound that illuminates one of those interstitial emotional moments you can't ever seem to capture in prose, the pang of sadness that hits me when I see too many stuffed animals in a store window and I wonder who's going to love them all, the fear that sometimes grips me on the precipice of sleep that this is it, if I let go I'm going to die. But all I came up with was this couplet:

Every time I walk in the door,
I expect to find the cat dead on the floor.

Which...I don't know. I mean, at least it's a start. Maybe I could flesh it out, right? Maybe I could make something of it. Maybe we could have a new anthology, Best American Neurotic Poems, get another Em Dickinson poem or twelve in there; god knows that chick was crackers. And when you think about it, which poet isn't a total nutball? In a good way, of course; a way that makes them that much more capable of transmuting pain into art; a way that probably means they should up the Klonopin, but whatevs. Listen, Lehman, I think I'm onto something here. I'll expect my royalty check as soon as Scribner says go. And if you could staple my poem back into the Erotic book, I'd be mucho grateful. Thanks.

-- Janice Erlbaum