It all began with Monday Night Poetry Readings at the Get Me High lounge in Chicago in 1984. Marc Smith, the father of the slam movement, a construction worker for most of his adult life and a poet, started performing his poetry. Though his initiative to reclaim and re-humanise poetry received a lot of flak from poets in the academia, the interactive and passionate style managed to engage younger audiences in particular.

In a way, it was an attempt to go back to the times when poetry was sung or performed for an audience. Many poets were very critical of the movement but it continued to grow because of its cathartic nature.

Slam poets choose from a wide variety of themes for their work addressing racial, gender, ethnic and economic injustices as well as contemporary world events. The work in itself is judged on not just the content and style of expression but also the enthusiasm and passion with which it is performed.

In February last year, a Delhi-based slam poet, Shivani Guptas moving performance titled, Dear Girl from Pakistan exploring India and Pakistans turbulent relationship and the desire to connect on a human level made its way into everyones hearts. It even got a heart-warming response in the form of a slam poem from a Pakistani girl, Fatima Khan, expressing the same wish to establish bonds beyond political borders. And that certainly did not mark the end of it; there was a deluge of responses from both sides of the border a wide array of poems and prose by ordinary people reiterating the same yearnings growing out of a feeling of a shared history and ethos.

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Slam poetry is being used today as a means to vent out since it allows greater fluidity and does not have the same structural constraints as traditional poetry. Because of the theatricality of this form of spoken word poetry, it is simultaneously exciting and therapeutic and a more alive strand of the oral tradition.

Owing to its easy relatablity, it is powerful as well as resonant. This explains the interest in the rising phenomenon with not just more educational institutions holding slam poetry contests across Pakistan but cafs alsohosting slam poetry nights to provide entertainment.

Slam poetry is being used today as a means to vent out since it allows greater fluidity and does not have the same structural constraints as traditional poetry.

Nevertheless, there is the concern that whether slam poetry even qualifies as an art-form to begin with. Given that more people today can write if they choose to and the novelty of writing is dead, it is debated whether art on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy often a pivotal argument in the case against slam poetry.

It may be true that given the more inclusive nature of art today, quality and meaningful work may be harder to come by. But then, art-forms evolve to reflect the zeitgeist, get influenced by pop culture, and some become redundant with time. Inevitably, new means of expressing ones passion will always emerge to fill up the spaces. For traditionalists though, the nascent slam movement, as envisioned by Marc Smith is still a shock.

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Slam a poem - The News on Sunday