by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Albuquerque's spotlight poets won another competition.
UNM's Word Revolution slam team members Hakim Bellamy, Aaron Cuffee, Damien Flores and Carlos Contreras beat out 21 university teams at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational in San Marcos, Texas, last weekend. They competed individually and in groups.
Contreras said he often does research for his pieces with online newspapers.
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"I look for old articles and things," he said. "I've always been told if you speak the facts, nobody can call you a liar, so I do a whole lot of research on what I write so that they don't find any holes in what I'm saying."
He called one of his individual pieces "Poet-trees."
"It's like a battle cry to all poets in a lot of ways - kind of a reason why we write and kind of a prayer for those that we've forgotten or that have fallen," he said. "It references Tupac and Notorious BIG, also Malcolm X, some of the racial problems in America. It has references to the song 'Strange Fruit' by Billie Holiday."
Contreras said although they won, the amount of good poetry performed at the invitational should not be overlooked.
"We won, but it's definitely a competition that's subject to the random judges that they pick, so on any given day it could've been different," he said. "We were just lucky it turned out in our favor."
Bellamy said one of the misconceptions that comes with poetry slamming is people categorize it as either hip-hop or poetry reading.
"People don't know what it is, so they fit in different paradigms they already have, and none of them are completely right," he said.
He said if he can get someone to go to one slam event, he or she is always down to attend more.
"Whenever you tell somebody something they've never heard of, they're like, 'Well, I already like what I am doing,' even if that's just sitting in their dorm room eating ramen noodles all weekend, and they think that's more exciting," he said. "And they think that playing 'Bond 15' is more exciting than coming to a poetry slam, but once they go and see it, they feel like it's something worth leaving their house for once a week."
Bellamy and Cuffee also performed a piece called "Telephone."
"It's a very expressionist imaginary reply to if we actually got George Bush on the phone," Bellamy said. "It's very explosive - I even kill myself at the end of the poem. Cuffee's like the narrator, and I'm the crazy person, and through that we kind of tie a poem together around this kind of scene we create."
Cuffee credited their winning to the fact they work well as a team.
"The teams that work better, maybe don't win all the time, but work better, are friends and hang out together," he said. "At least longer than the duration of the time they need to work on a competition."
Cuffee said Contreras, Bellamy and he have worked together for a year and a half almost nonstop.
"We're really comfortable doing anything - pushing the limitations of what we're comfortable doing onstage or in our writing," Cuffee said. "So we're willing to put ourselves out on a limb more often and rely on each other."
