Slam Poetry or Brave Writing

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example: obtaining knowledge, exploring our territories and practicing English using our life stories.

If for teaching, self-knowledge is very important, because we teach who we are, then

“knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self-knowledge. When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are” (Palmer, 2007: 22). So it becomes very important to reflect on ourselves, to always be open to new ideas and to travel the path of our teaching profession with excellence. Self-knowledge is a very important component for Palmer, just as it is for the study of humanities and literature.

I am interested in Palmer`s proposal, because he affirms that the teaching and learning processes are about self-knowledge. They are never-ending and always present. He affirms that the way teachers see themselves is the way they will see their students. He identifies three important components for successful teaching: the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual.

According to Palmer:

By intellectual I mean the way we think about teaching and learning–the form and content of our concepts of how people know and learn, of the nature of our students and our subjects. By emotional I mean the way we and our students feel as we teach and learn–

feelings that can either enlarge or diminish the exchange between us. By spiritual I mean the diverse ways we answer the heart’s longing to be connected with the largeness of life–

a longing that animates love and work, especially the work called teaching (Palmer, 2007:

22).

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I discovered Emily Bronte, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, Paul Auster, Henry Miller, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, Gloria Anzaldúa, Charles Baudelaire, Marguerite Duras, and Anais Nin, among many others. Since I started to read them I admired each of their unique ways of conceiving the world. They communicated their deep thoughts and feeling; they let me see aspects of their cultures and the habits of those times and places. Literature has no end; it is comprised of a variety of movements, times, authors, styles and languages.

Literature is one of my passions as well as artistic body expression. Since I was a child I had a close relationship with dancing—my grandmother, my parents, siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins all dance very well. I can say ours is a culture of music and dancing. I participated in every dance program my school organized. At the university I studied acting and I started to write and act in a local theatre group. I also practiced contemporary dance as a member of a literary research group called Lenguaje y Paz. I learned a great deal through our Friday sessions of reading, writing and performing. I met with young women of my age and our teacher to read, to experiment with different writing techniques, and to plan our research projects. There, I came to understand that literature is very close so many other disciplines such as photography, performance, painting, history, philosophy, anthropology, and education.

At that time, when I was about to finish my studies, my literature teacher shared a wonderful method to include words and movements in my exploration. Up to that time I had found a wonderful path in books, theatre and dancing, but this time I discovered something more. My teacher organized the first slam poetry contest to end the semester;

for me this was the beginning of a brave, poetic practice in literature.

I began researching slam poetry and I realized it is a spoken style of poetry based on free verse, created in the United States in the 1980’s by Marc Kelly Smith, a poet from Chicago, who thought the academic context was too rigid for poems. Since then, slam poetry or open microphone sessions began in cafés in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Austin.

Slam poems are performed. The words in slam poems are chosen for their meaning but also for the way they sound when they are read. Rhyme and rhythm are used to give slam

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poems a beat. However, these are not formal structures and there are no rules. Imagination is required to invent a new style, and freedom is what many slam poets find inspiring.

Since the voice is one of the main tools for slam poetry sessions, it can be used with many intonations, rhythms and speeds.

Slam poetry began in the context of a competition, where a group of poets read or performed their poems in a café. In the session there was audience and a group of judges who evaluated the performance of each poet. Slam poems are designed to provoke, to get emotional responses from a live audience. Costumes are not permitted, but acting is welcome; body movements and facial expressions add meaning to the performance.

Some people read the poem with emotion; others memorize the poem and perform it.

Some poets sing it or find different sounds with the voice or with their bodies. The topics tend to treated politically but they are very varied and include race, gender, class, sexuality, discrimination, war, religion, and love. There are no strict rules concerning the topics.

After being a slam poet I wanted to share this experience and recommend it as a methodology to be used in teaching and learning English. I identified in slam poetry a kind of literature that engages my students in their process of reading, writing and thinking critically. This is a type of literature which allows students to practice the English language and permits them to participate as creators of their own masterpieces. Those are powerful reasons for focusing on slam poetry.

From my personal experience, slam poetry is a creative methodology to develop linguistic as well as communicative skills, imaginative abilities and critical thinking. A collective pedagogical process in slam poetry encourages:

1. Strengthening of the correct use of the English language 2. Increasing self-confidence

3. Developing body language communication skills

4. Using people´s stories, experiences and ideas as material to create, propose and socialize

5. Maintaining the teacher’s methodology fresh and interesting

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In the short video, “5 steps to slam poetry,” Gayle Danley shares a strategy to write a poem, emphasizing five points:

1. Write it all down: do not leave anything out, explore your memory as if it was a new land

2. Read out loud

3. Eliminate the unnecessary 4. Read out loud

5. Add flavor: power and movement

As an example of rhythm in slam poetry, I include a fragment of the poem What Teachers Make, by Mali Taylor:

“You want to know what I make? I make kids wonder, I make them question.

I make them criticize.

I make them apologize and mean it.

I make them write.

I make them read, read, read.

I make them spell definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful”

(Taylor, 2002).

As an example of personal experiences and language games, this is a fragment of the poem Hands, written in 2015 and performed by the young slam poet, Sarah Kay:

People used to tell me that I had beautiful hands. Told me so often in fact that one day I started to believe them, until I asked my photographer father, ‘Hey daddy, could I be a hand model?’ To which he said ‘No way!’ I don’t remember the reason he gave me, and I would’ve been upset but there were far too many stuffed animals to hold, too many homework assignments to write, too many boys to wave at, too many years to grow…

Hands learn more than minds do. Hands learn how to hold other hands. How to grip pencils and mould poetry. How to tickle pianos, and dribble a basketball and grip the handles of a

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bicycle. How to hold old people and touch babies. I love hands like I love people. They are the maps and compasses with which we navigate our way through life…

Many schools organize slam poetry contests every year. It is a very special event.

Teachers and students work strictly on preparation, writing, correcting, learning, planning and practicing. The following is an example of how to include poetry in a class session:

Working on pronunciation

It can be enjoyable to get students to rehearse and perform a poem. I read the poem to them or play a recording, and they identify the stresses and pauses.

 We take a small part (usually a line, sometimes two) at a time, and one half of the class claps out the rhythm while the other half beats the time; then they exchange activities.

 I recite while they mumble rhythmically, and then, as their confidence grows, they can chant in a whisper, a shout, or show a range of emotions. In my experience, this tends to work best when it is improvised. I keep up a fast pace since it is a high energy activity, and the people involved have to know and trust one another!

 I sometimes do intensive phoneme work centered on the rhyming patterns in the poem: Some poems are susceptible to being used in this way. I elicit possible rhymes before revealing the poet's choice, and discuss which suggestions have exactly the same sound and which do not, leading to a minimal pair activity (British Council BBC, 2013).

Rubrics to evaluate slam poets