by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Poetry's legacy continues at UNM.
There was a revival of readings and performance in the late 19th century, said Aaron Cuffee of the Albuquerque Slam Poetry Team. Then the beats brought it back in the '50s and '60s.
"My response has been it never went anywhere. You just weren't paying attention," Cuffee said.
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The UNM Word Revolution club hosts a poetry slam every other Thursday night at Higher Grounds in the SUB.
Damien Flores, slammer and member of the poetry club, said he has been promoting tonight to highlight the musical act Paperzoo and to bring more attention to the SUB Slams at UNM.
"Poetry's a really good venue to display what you're feeling, to get your opinions known and heard," Flores said.
For the National Poetry Slam this summer, there were approximately 30,000 people at Downtown venues just to listen to poetry.
"The public does like it," he said. "People get tired of doing the same thing of just going home, watching TV, watching movies."
He said the audience has one of the most important jobs in poetry slams: reacting to the poem.
"They're encouraged to applaud, cheer, scream, boo a low score, hiss poets - to reinforce the poetry," Flores said.
Last year, UNM's Word Revolution team competed at the College Union Poetry Slam in St. Louis.
"Every year for the past three years we have had poetry slams and formed the poetry slam team for UNM," he said. "Last year's team placed fourth in the nation. They made it to the finals and pretty unbeknownst to most of the University, they made it to finals of the college nationals and did a pretty good showing."
Cuffee said poetry slams are one of the last free public forums.
"There's a space where you can come and make people listen to you," he said. "The disenfranchised, the lonely or just those who want to get a bit more off their chest. There's so little of that around. It's a really important venue that needs to exist more in American culture."
He said while many people think they need to have some deep sort of understanding about poetry, this is not true.
"There's nothing anyone's missing," he said. "It's supposed to come from the universal and the commonality between people."
He said poetic forms like sonnets and villanelles can be intimidating to people.
"That's what poetry slam was created for, to make poets accountable to the audience," he said. "To bring it to back from the academia stuff where I think the intimidation comes from - of the stuffy rooms with someone at a podium droning on for three hours. Any number of thousands of people look at that situation and they're like 'it's either going to be boring as hell or everything's going to go over my head.'"
Carlos Contreras will also be performing at the SUB Slam.
"Slams are pretty interesting because you have normal walk-of-life people that you wouldn't normally think have these kind of thoughts and conceptions or the ability to articulate things this beautifully," he said. "When you sit down and watch them perform it's amazing. It's an art that pays back just as much as you put into it."
