Martin signed up for the Poetry Slam at 10. So, after the Irving fiasco, it was just about that time. I had never been to a poetry slam of any kind at any place. It's like March Madness with words, the U.S. Open in verse, getting to the Super bowl without cheating...uh reading the other poet's works first.
Personally, I was fascinated at how popular the genre is. It's not like the New York Time's is running a best seller list or anything for hot poets. And, I was also surprised at how well defined many of the images were. But the most enjoyable part, besides Sully trying to keep the judges moving along, was the passion in the work. I also picked up that the more you slam as a performance instead of a reading, the better you will do, even when the judges are using their fingers and toes to count the score.
All we needed was matching t-shirts with “CCP’s The Family Woo” emblazon across our backs. We came ready to “represent” and a fine job of representation we did. It ended up being about four rounds. And as with all contest, it got really interesting with each advance of our favorite.
I don’t know if Martin came with four ready-to-read poems or if he came with a couple and wrote a few more. I do know he was awesomely prepared. He ditched us to get ready.
The readings went faster than the vote tallying. The audience offered the judges calculators. Then it occurred to me that these were literary people. They probably spent most of their adult life avoiding math of any kind. Finally, despite our attempts to speed up the process, there were two finalists: Jeffrey Stump and CCP’s own Martin Wiley.
Now, to tell you the truth, I was pretty tired by 10 pm but I was alert enough to know the difference between poetic imagery and performance visuals. In this forum, performance visuals won out and, guess what; the winner was a performance artist. Not at all implying Mr. Stump was not good. Martin read his poetry the way we had been seeing poets read their works all day. Mr. Stump performed and in the end the judges were mostly watching, not listening. As is evident when you consider they were having severe difficulty averaging sixty points. (It’s almost impossible to divide other people’s fingers and toes.)
None the less, Martin and Jeff hit it off wonderfully and I have the picture to prove it (although, this was the day after :-)
Martin and Jeff Stumpo
The All Collegiate Afterhours Poetry Slam Winners
With our winner in tow, we left the arena and made our way to the neon decorated streets of New York determined to find something for Sully to feast upon, again. (We had found a pizza parlor earlier.)On the corner of 7th Avenue and 57th Street, Thom sent us looking for BB King’s Restaurant. And although I was pretty sure skunk was not one the menu, I got an address. Tiff figured out how to enter the start and end points. The directions returned and we headed down 7th Avenue after having left a pretty memorable mark on the All Collegiate Afterhours Poetry Slam at the 2008 AWP Conference in New York.
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While Martin and others were reading, I was in my hotel room. I'd turned down the invitation to eat with Pat and Tiffany, and was too jaded to go hear John Irving. If I'd known that our crowd was going to participate in the slam, I would have been there and then some!
I'm not sure that slams are quite as popular as they'd been a few years ago, but given that most of the folks that AWP things of when they say the word "Collegate" are grad students in MFA programs, it's actually pretty stunning that Martin came in second. That is, unless you know Martin's work (he was my student in Creative Writing a year and a half ago). Then, it's stunning that he didn't come in first.
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