Poetry slams, where aspiring writers try to out-perform each other on stage, are capturing the attention of a new, and livelier, audience, poets at Galway's Crane Bar tell Georgina O'Halloran
YOU COULD HEAR a pin drop as the first of 11 people taking part in the poetry slam made her way purposefully to the mike. Seconds earlier, MC Brendan Murphy had welcomed a small but enthusiastic crowd to the intimate upstairs room in Galway's Crane Bar.
"We judge our poets not only on their poetry skill, but also on what they are like as a person," he joked. And with that the North Beach Poetry Nights slam began.
The Crane is first and foremost a pub for traditional music, but the monthly slam, which sees up-and-coming poets battle it out with more established ones in a bid to be named best performer on the night, is growing in popularity.
Part of the attraction for the poets is the opportunity, however nerve-wracking, to test their work in front of a live audience. The winners on the night (who are chosen by a panel of judges selected from the audience) go through to the Grand Slam in December and the possibility of a publication deal if they win.
"It's being able to take an idea and develop it and being able to put that message across," says Miceal Kearney (28), a farmer from Ballinderreen, Kinvara, Co Galway, who won the Grand Slam in 2007 and recently published a collection of work called Inheritance.
Having written poetry for eight years and performed it for three, he is the only contestant who has the nerve to take to the mike without the help of a written version of his work.
His poem, When an Oak Tree Falls, documents a close friendship between two boys who, while growing up together, "practice having sex with a bag of cement", a line which guarantees a big laugh from the audience. The friendship breaks down in adulthood, but, years later, the death of one of the men brings home its significance.
At the end of the night, it is Denise Heneghan, from Castlegar, Co Galway, and NUIG student Liam Duffy, from Terryland, Galway city, who are proclaimed joint winners. Heneghan's prize poems deal with the effects of poor planning in Galway and with the teenage mortification of dropping music sheets during a concert broadcast by RTÉ.
The highlight of the slam, however, is a guest performance by San Francisco-born poet, Raven, who performs on a monthly basis at Rá in Dublin's Cobblestone pub in Smithfield, along with fellow artist and performer, Tipperary man Noel Sweeney.
Raven holds the crowd captivated with his rhythmic, rap-like work, including In a Stringent Joy, a poem telling of a house his grandfather built that was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
WHILE GALWAY APPEARS to be the home of the poetry slam in Ireland, with another slam event hosted by the Galway Arts Centre in the Ruby Room of the King's Head pub on the last Tuesday of every month, these events - which put emphasis on the spoken performance of a poem rather than on the written form - are thriving across the country.
Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Belfast also have vibrant spoken-word poetry scenes, from organised events to the more spontaneous open-mike nights where anyone can get up and perform their work. Some events involve music and comedy, as well as poetry.
Part of the attraction of slam poetry is the emphasis on capturing the audience's attention, says John Walsh, founder of North Beach Poetry Nights. "It brings poetry alive," he says. "Quite often there is relevance - the poetry has a topical, political or social relevance - or it's humorous, and it's put across in a way that's lively rather than a deadpan poetry reading. You have people that come in and have no interest in poetry and they think, wow, I didn't think poetry could be like that. It's breathing new life into the whole scene."
The Belfast-based performance poet and founder of the Love Poetry Hate Racism group, Chelley McLear, says that for the performer, the attraction of this type of poetry is its energy and the immediate reaction from the audience. "You have to communicate it to the audience the first time. You don't get a second chance. I enjoy the immediacy, the reaction and the buzz," she says. As well as performing, McLear coordinates poetry events and workshops for schools and community events with New Belfast Arts.
Audiences here are quite respectful at slams, unlike in the US, where there is more cheering and jeering from the floor, but the organisers of Rá (which is technically not a slam event) encourage heckling.
"Otherwise, you might as well be at a funeral. You want to shake up the staid atmosphere which surrounds poetry and bring it down from up there," says Raven, who moved to Ireland three years ago. Initially, he was shocked at the absence of a spoken-word scene in a country with such a rich literary tradition, compared with San Francisco, where "you can probably find a poetry reading just about every night of the week".
"Our aim is to put a different face on poetry and to open poetry to a larger audience," he says.
Mike Igoe, one of the founding members of Naked Lunch, a new open-mike night (for poetry, music and singing) at Anseo, on Dublin's Camden Street, believes people come along because it's a fun, social night out that's a bit different, as well as an opportunity for poets to get their work out there.
"If you're just writing on your own, no one gets to see it," says Igoe, who first became interested in performing poetry when he went to the Sugar Club and saw Tommy Tiernan performing a version of Allen Ginsberg's poem, Howl. "I was really impressed. Seeing that, I wanted to give performing my poetry a go," he says. "A lot of people just come down to watch the open mike and they end up writing on a beermat and then get up at the end of the night. Then you'll see them another night and they'll perform a poem they wrote during the week."
