This time, last year, Aleph Book Company had brought out a publication of Jeet Thayil’s oeuvre of poetry. For an event of such importance, there was an unsettling sense of finality in the news surrounding the publication. Amidst much brouhaha, Thayil had declared that he would write no more poetry after the publication of this final volume. He reasoned that he could not better his work from a previous collection These Errors Are Correct (2008).
In a different world, with a dedicated readership of Thayil’s poetry, this decision could have been swayed. Unfortunately, this remains far from reality. Sales of published volumes of poetry are abysmally low in India. However, jumping to the conclusion that poetry is dead is sloppy and incorrect. Thousands of young people are devouring poetry. They just choose to do it through a different medium. It is slam poetry that is making poetry relevant again to a new generation. And it might just reinvent the way we understand poetry along the way.
On a late December afternoon, close to a hundred people thronged the Mumbai pub, Khar Social. It is an unusual time for a pub to be so crowded. On that particular day, the basement of the pub, known for hosting a wide range of eclectic musicians, had thrown its doors open to a different kind of crowd. A group of several young people, including but not limited to students, professionals and artists, had gathered to attend the online magazine ArtRefurbish ’s second poetry slam.
Poets took to the stage to perform. A young woman couched the pain of suffering child sexual abuse in her verse. A young man recited a couplet before launching into his poem ‘Mardaangi Ab Khatam Hone Ko Hai’ in Urdu. Members of the audience snapped their fingers in appreciation of certain lines or clever wordplay. There wasn’t a loud or disruptive person in sight. A newcomer to the scene would marvel at the audience’s respectful and empathetic responses to the poetry being performed. But then again, a regular participant would tell you that this supportive environment is crucial to the spirit of slam poetry.
Slam poetry first emerged in Chicago in the 1980s, deeply influenced by Beat and Negritude poetry, which in turn placed a high level of importance on oral traditions. Slam poetry is generally understood to be competitive and performance-based. It stresses on the importance of a poet’s written and oratory skills. It is not enough for a poet to simply read out her work, she must perform it as well. Slam poetry is seen as a radical break from the formalizations of published poetry. Rules for rhyme and conventions of form are thrown out of the window and poets address topics as diverse as sex, gender, race, caste and social injustice in their work.
Slam poetry, like stand-up comedy, is set to meteorically rise in India given its close connections to Indian sensibilities. If stand-up comedy is an organic extension of our skill in political satire and nautanki, slam poetry adds to a strong oral history that includes the Ram Leela. Words escape the stuffy confines of pages and come alive when spoken. The multiple oral versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharat provide testimony to it.
Perhaps the most vibrant characteristic of slam poetry today is the community that grows around it. The medium possesses a degree of openness and intimacy that attracts young people who have a thing or two to say about society. Slam poet Akshita Narayan, 20, says that this quality compels her to perform: “Slam poetry gives me a sense of identity. I’m a part of many communities; I’m young, queer, brown and a feminist.” She adds that she actively chooses to be a part of the slam poetry community because “Someone is always listening”. The stage, quite simply, is open to all.
This is because most slam poetry events use the open slam format, wherein anyone belonging to a certain age group can sign up to participate. Some poetry slams operate only by invitation. The result is that slam poetry is significantly more egalitarian than its sophisticated cousin, page poetry. It is populated by the very folk that the publishing industry chooses to ignore, often including people who belong to marginalised backgrounds. It is possibly one of the few literary genres where women outnumber men. All of this has caused a very progressive, feminist and ‘rainbow-alliance’ tag to attach itself to slam poetry and its audience. It seems inevitable that good listeners will make good allies.
For poet Harnidh Kaur (21), better known by her Instagram handle @PedestrianPoet, slam poetry is a place where “women shine”. She says that “When you’re on stage, it’s very hard to doubt someone’s words. The stage provides such a sense of protection to women who write”. Kaur suggests that that the male-dominated bastion of publishing doesn’t allow for easy access to women’s poetry. In slam poetry, women present their work in an unadulterated form, unencumbered by the biases of editors and literary agents. She feels that slam poetry is a reflection of the times. So when multiple women take to the stage to express themselves, it is a part of a larger gender revolution that began in India after the December 16, 2012 gang rape case.
Nevertheless, none of this is to imply that slam poetry doesn’t come with a set of criticisms. It has been lampooned in the past for its usage of esoteric words and its emotional style of delivery. In the film 22 Jump Street , Jonah Hill’s character is forced to take the stage at a poetry slam due to a misunderstanding. He yells his way through a poem filled with gibberish, only to be met with applause from the audience. But this is an amateur and incomplete criticism. Perhaps it is the clearly powerful nature of emotional performance that leaves people uncomfortable with such poetry. A more pertinent critique of slam poetry is that it is concentrated amongst wealthy, urban youth. It is a critique that event organisers are still responding to, with many making the effort to include poets coming from smaller cities who write in Gujarati, Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu and other Indian languages.
Slam poetry in India represents enormous potential. For one, its practitioners are combining two disparate strands of millennial poetry in their art: slam poetry and Instagram poetry. Very often, a poet taking part in a slam is likely to post her work on Instagram. According to Arya Tiwari, the Mumbai editor of ArtRefurbish, it makes sense for slam poets to publish their work on Instagram as it helps their poetry ‘survive’. ArtRefurbish makes it a point to give out their poets’ Instagram handles before each performance. Tiwari says that this helps audiences appreciate poetry better, as you can always hear an impactful poem at a slam event and then go home and follow the rest of the writer’s work.
Social media is the base from which the art form spreads; across YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, and eventually across regional and national borders. It is the reason behind a much younger group of people flocking to poetry. Social media is a democratising tool that makes poetry accessible to a vast multitude of people from different backgrounds.
And yet, it is interesting to note that the prize given to the winner of ArtRefurbish’s poetry slam was a hardbound volume of Robert Frost’s poetry. Perhaps word, alive once again through slam poetry, will find its way back to paper and demolish the boundaries between what is considered to be high or low art.
