Yeah, yeah. I did Slam.

It's doesn't define me. I am not a "slam poet".

I also worked on Shakespeare shows, musicals, Black Box Theatre.

Improv.

I acted in films, did some commercials, had a voice over here and there.

So, why do I return to slam?

It's an easy hit, if you hit right.

It's earned merit with difficult audiences.

It's not just scholars - it's blue collar work-a-day people on the stage and in the audience.

You never know who could be the one who hits the target.

Slam and Stand-up (which I also did for about seven years) have the same crushing blow. Only, stand-up will let you know if you have talent. Slam will let you know you have good marketing. 

Slam has access to a public nearly no other literary genre has - well, until the Moth and This American Life because household words. They upped the narrative game, and slam needs to follow. There were old guards before I came around - I want to get back to those roots, bring in the originals of Seattle Slam, give them stage time, let them stake their claim again. Many are getting older, don't have time to perform, or are dying before our own eyes - from age, from cancer, from a hard life, from other factors like time.



They were poets before the Slam came. I want to see them up there, taking the 9.6's with the 5.5's like professionals. Because they know it doesn't matter.

They are writers and poets first.

They say -Fuck your clocks.

This is my stage.

My words.

My time.-



Performance is about the space and use of all of it, not just the seventeen inches surrounding a mike comparing a litany of "I"'s to a recent tragedy to garner points in the guise of being sensitive and politically conscious. Performance is about the response to the space, listening for the rooting around of sentences not yet written, laying foundation to those that were 600 or 6000 years ago. Performance is the make of the writer, a writer like me. Without performing it, it feels unfinished. Reading it out loud is one thing, pushing it our of my hands and feet onto boards is another. Poetry, for me and maybe for you, is a golem. It awaits the breath of life, sitting on the paper, running on the hamster wheel of my head. Performance is letting it shift in its weight and move about, to guard its own. I perform my writing. I read it when I am working on it, I perform it when I need it to get through to itself and decide if it wants to live or die or shape. 



So, I'm not a slam poet.

I'm a performance writer.

And until there's a better phrase, that's who you're getting when I come to town.