Slam Stories

In the mid-1990s, Christine Toole was 24 and attending poetry readings at the Rainbow News and Cafe on Brookstown Avenue. "I happened to be at that age when we all write poetry and hang out in coffee shops being cool," she said recently.

Then a friend dragged her to something new called a poetry slam. Toole planned on just watching. But there weren't many people signed up to perform, so she did, under the pseudonym "Xine."

Suddenly poetry -- sedate and solitary -- became competitive. It lit a fire under Toole for the next 12 years.

Bill Abbott's new book, Let Them Eat MoonPie: The Southern Fried Poetry Slam From 1992-2000, sketches the history of some of the South's most decorated competitive poets, particularly in the Southern Fried, a quirky regional poetry slam held annually in cities around the South. Two have been held in Winston-Salem.

MoonPie refers to one of the prizes that winning poets took home -- a year's supply of the Southern sugary snacks, with RC Cola to wash them down.

Abbott is a Tennessee writer who participated in the Southern Fried as an organizer and competitor from 1993 to 1999. He now lives in Dayton, Ohio.

A few years later, Abbott was reading some posts on a list serve for Southern Fried when he noticed that someone from Charlotte had posted a note about them sending their first team. But that wasn't correct, Abbott remembered.

"I thought someone better write this down, someone who has the history, and I figured out it was me," he said.

So he began getting in touch with all the old slammers he could track down, including Toole.

The result is an oral and somewhat insider history of a competition that's as much about performing as it is about writing, eight years of Southern poetry slamming stitched together by the colorful memories of creative people. Like poetry and performing itself, it is sometimes bawdy, sometimes piecemeal but a celebration of an activity that prides itself on being on the fringe.

In 1994 and 1995, Winston-Salem was host to the third and fourth Southern Fried competitions. The town apparently lived up to its reputation as the Camel City. Abbott titled the two chapters on the Winston-Salem slams in Let Them Eat MoonPie "Slam in the Land of Cigarettes." The poets performed at such since-closed bohemian hangouts as Penny Universitie on Brookstown Avenue, and during one round, even the smokers had bloodshot eyes, Abbott remembers.

Poetry slams generally have simple rules. The poem can't be longer than three minutes. The work has to be original. No props or music is allowed.

Poets compete in teams of four and as individuals. The judges are usually a few people pulled from the audience who award each poet points from 0 to 10. "We're not bringing in the English teachers and say let's say grade this," Abbott said.

The poetry itself can be about anything -- car crashes and heartbreaks, the usual politics and love and ennui.

"You'd have the loud and angry spoken-word rants," Abbott said. "Of course, as Southerners, you might run up against cowboy poetry. Boston doesn't have a lot of cowboy poets."

Toole is still living down her reputation as a poet who skewed toward erotica. "I wrote about the politics of feminism. I wrote about loss. If I had to pick my top five poems, only one would be that sex poem," she laughed.

Slam poetry is sometimes also called spoken word. Slam poets credit a Chicago poet, Marc Smith, with beginning the movement in the 1980s. Interest in slam poetry led to the creation of the HBO show Def Poetry Jam and national and regional competitions.

Competitive poetry turns traditional reading on its head, Abbott said. "You suddenly have feedback. You've got more dialogue between the poet and the audience, which was really what was missing from poetry readings at that point."

"We thought we were sort of changing the face of poetry from being an elitist venture," Toole said. "It took poetry out of being a solitary thing and then you go into a coffee shop with a shaking piece of paper."

During those early years, Southern Fried was not only a literary competition but also a free-form show where the emcee occasionally entertained the crowd with Eastern-European gypsy dances.

"It was a pretty exciting time. There were a lot of strong performers," Abbott said. "It really seemed like poetry was exploding all over the place. We really took it pretty seriously, or as much as you could."

Still, Southern Fried introduced Winston-Salem poets to other writers. And it gave birth to a local fledging poetry scene, said Linda McCorkendale, one of Southern Fried's organizers in Winston-Salem and the onetime local "Slam Master," in charge of coaching and organizing the local team. "That was the beginning of the heyday of slam, and it opened up a tremendous world," she said.

Toole was on a team of poets from Winston-Salem who won the Southern Fried in 1996.

But though Southern Fried continues today (this year's competition is being held through Saturday in Tallahassee, Fla.), local slam poets have had trouble finding places to perform in recent years. Winston-Salem isn't represented at this year's Southern Fried.

Winston-Salem slam master Bob Moyer said he hopes to find a home for local slam poets by September in order to revive monthly competitions.

"It was a bunch of people who never fit in anywhere else," he said of the poets.

■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.

■ Let Them Eat MoonPie: The Southern Fried Poetry Slam 1992-2000 is published by The Wordsmith Press. For more information about, visit
www.thewordsmithpress.com.