Grand Slam Review

A while back ago, I attended the preliminary rounds for the NYU Poetry Slam team, the competition that would decide who made it on the team and would compete at the CUPSI tournament that I wrote about earlier in the semester because of how amazing it was. This took place at the beginning of the semester and was held at Palladium on the top floor right around the corner of where I eat brunch every Sunday (because the brunch is amazing. They got a cake bar, yo.) The competition was divided as one would expect a Poetry Slam competition to be organized, each poet would have 3 minutes to perform a spoken word piece and the randomly chosen judges (selected based on their lack of affiliation with anyone competing) would throw up their scores at the end of each poet. They scorekeepers drop the lowest and the highest and tally them up and at the end of the round the poets are arranged by score and proceed the next round in that order. These are the rules of Poetry Slam (and no props. Or talking about Poetry Slam, but that's the third rule) So, this particular slam was actually one of my favorites because the two poets I enjoy the most performed (one of which actually went to attain the highest score at CUPSI Finals), Conner Sampson and Joe Amoedi (I am not spelling his name right). Conner's poems discussed the darker sides of relationships, but in a way that denotes a sense of perversion and betrayal where the speaker carries with them the trauma of things that could not be unseen and undone and settle the reader with not just amazement at his wordplay but also the unsettling feeling he leaves us with. His delivery is charming, boyish almost, but his voice carries such a poignancy. Joe, my personal favorite, is a social intellectual, his two poems decrying the porn industry and Occupy Wall Street movement in a way that infuses effective references and honest phrases that are delivered with simplicity and eloquence all at once and the slight slick of Italian hot blood is noticeable in his voice when he speaks. I wish Joe had made it to CUPSI. Of course, there were a good amount of other fantastic poets, others who I felt were partially cheated, but that does not mean I disagreed with the team's composition by the end of the night. Some of these poems were beautiful, haunting and mesmerizing all at once, some crafting images I would consider downright inconcievable, and some actually sang, but it was good (even though I think singing is gimmicky).
So, yeah. I present to you another wonderful Poetry Review by yours truly. Arrivederci y'all. Have a good summer (P.S. you, those that read this, are all my Workshop crush...in a not weird way.)