UNM is going to get slammed with poetry tonight.
Performance poetry is set to make a riotous stop in Albuquerque when WordCore, a band of national slam poets, kicks off its spring college tour at UNM.
Internationally-known performance poets R. Eirik Ott, also known as Big Poppa E; Buddy Wakefield; and Eitan Kadosh will take the stage in Woodward Hall from 7-9 p.m. to show off their intriguing brand of comedy, flamboyance and deep intensity.
Ott, a founding member of WordCore, was part of the 1999 San Francisco slam team that won the 1999 National Poetry Slam Championship. The event shot him to poetry stardom with his winning poem, the "Wussy Boy Manifesto," which he said "took on a life of its own."
"The Los Angeles Times called 'Wussy Boy' a national men's movement, and I was its leader with a poem, and I was like, dude it's just me, it's not a movement," Ott said.
The aftermath of Ott's poem spawned WordCore. Ott explained that he and a few other performance poets decided to tour colleges. Members include Kadosh, another 1999 San Francisco Slam Team poet; Wakefield, a Seattle Slam Team Poet; Gregory Hischak, the 1999 Seattle Grand Slam poetry champion; and others.
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"WordCore is us forming a band so that we can make a living simply by doing poetry and reaching out and connecting with people directly, live," Ott said.
Wakefield, who tours solo while not with WordCore, said colleges give enough money to performance poets so they can live, when usual slam venues only pay about $50. He added that with WordCore the poets can make a connection with people who might not go to poetry performances.
"We're going to go in and we're bringing the spoken word into schools to show students that there are other competitions out there besides football," he said.
The national poetry slam culture tooks its first steps into the mainstream in 1994 when poets such as Maggie Estep began performing on the Lollapalooza tour. Slams, which are poetry competitions complete with scoring judges and their own set of rules, are the successor of a poetry movement that began in Chicago in the 1970s called performance poetry.
Many poets, in the spirit of the Beats, cast off the academic conventions of poetry and used the microphone as a forum to voice their cultural and political opinions. Poets such as Ana Castillo helped lead the revolution, giving performance poetry the room to evolve into a new setting with slam poetry and spoken word. Now even HBO has jumped on the spoken word bandwagon with the start of its new series, "Def Poetry Jam," where several members of WordCore, including Ott, have already performed.
A group of New Mexico's finest performance poets, comprised of Danny Solis, Kenn Rodr°guez and Esther Griego, will open for Wordcore. All three have been members of a variety of Albuquerque Slam Teams and are strong influences on the Albuquerque poetry scene.
Ott described the Albuquerque poets as very inviting and laidback. The quality of work is still very high, Ott said, but they don't take everything so seriously.
"I really feel like you could just go kick it with Kenn even if you didn't know him," Ott said. "He'd be like, sure man come on over, we're going to go have a party, we're going to go to Denny's afterward. I mean, you also get that about Danny. Danny's really very well-known. I've been to movie theaters and looked up at the movie screen and seen Danny up on the movie screen."
Another thing about the Albuquerque scene, Ott added, is the cohesive group of Chicano poets. He said that not many Chicano poets covering their cultural issues have gained a big profile, but Albuquerque has those poets.
Admission to the WordCore performance is one dollar and two canned goods, which will go to charity. For more information about WordCore or Ott, go to www.wussyboy.org, and for more information about poetry slam, go to www.poetryslam.com.
