Simone Beaubien brings the National Poetry Slam back to the city that speaks slam.
For those fluent in slam poetry, the honor of having the National Poetry Slam (NPS) return this year comes as no surprise. By this point, it’s practically a second language for Bostonians.
The last time the event was held here was in 2011 (Boston’s first time hosting in 18 years), when over 300 poets from all over the world drew an estimated 8,350 onlookers to NPS poetry events. Crowds stood for hours, sometimes in the rain, outside theatres and bars to vie for a seat at the tournament’s immensely popular bouts. Crowds for poetry? Indeed, these are sweet words for the initiated.
“It seems perfectly reasonable anywhere else – to ask 700 people to come out and see poetry on a Tuesday night,” says Host City Director and area poet Simone Beaubien in a NPS 2013 rev-up interview with bostonnova (and yes, those are realistic numbers). “But it turns out about 1,000 or 1,200 people wanted to come out and see poetry on a Tuesday night.” Surely, these are numbers that poetry slam pioneer Marc Smith – or any other poet, for that matter – could have never anticipated when the first slam was founded nearly 30 years ago. But if 2011 showed anything, it is that Boston loves poetry.
Two years on, Beaubien and her team face the task of recreating that success. NPS 2013 will take place from August 13 to 17 all across Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville. A total of 72 teams of four to five poets will compete in over 80 events scheduled for the festival’s run. Roughly 11 venues, from the Cantab Lounge to the Lizard Lounge, will cater to what she anticipates will be a larger, hungrier crowd.
“The national scene understands us only from 2011, where it was so crowded that people couldn’t get into their own performances without finagling. I really want to make sure that they have that same sell-out, packed-house, incredibly hot room experience.”
In truth, the goal is not simply to match the success of 2011, but to surpass it. After a modest return to Earth in 2012’s Charlotte, NC-based event, Poetry Slam, Inc, (or PSI, the nonprofit matron of NPS) is depending on Beaubien for another marquee showing. And, if she has her way, this year’s event will present even more poetry to even bigger audiences. Fortunately, she’s got 20-plus years of slam history and one of the country’s premiere poetry audiences on her side.
A Poetry Hub
Home to the country’s third-longest-running poetry slam, the Cantab Lounge’s Boston Poetry Slam, Boston has been a mecca for performative poetics since the early ‘90s. The city’s two nationally certified slams (respectively at the Cantab –Wednesdays at 8:00, and the Lizard Lounge –Sundays at 7:30) regularly serve capacity crowds and feature some of the nation’s top touring poets.
In competitive poetry events, Boston teams have taken home top honors twice (1992 and 1993), with a slew of semifinal finishes coming in the years in between. Only three cities have ever hosted multiple NPSs, and scarcely any have encored as quickly as Boston will do this year.
“It’s an enormous burden on the scene in terms of volunteers and time,” Beaubien says of hosting an NPS. “Albuquerque in 2005 had an incredibly well-attended event, but they have not held a large event since because they want to focus on their own team to send someplace [else] to perform – which I think is more than reasonable.” Yet here in Boston, a city with a much more lengthy tradition of slam, the obligation feels greater.
“We are a slam with a very long history,” says Beaubien, recounting how, in 1992, Cambridge team captain Richard Cambridge and Michael Brown (one of the founding SlamMasters of the Boston Poetry Slam) worked to bring the nationals to Boston. “At that time, it was easy for a city to volunteer,” she says, alluding to the once manageable magnitude of the event. “Now, it’s quite a beast, with only a few cities in the country can really run it with a level of success.”
Beaubien knows that Boston is up for the challenge of another NPS. And, as the incumbent SlamMaster of the Cantab Lounge, Host City Director of this year’s event, and owner of a resume jammed with local poetry honors, she has staked an irrefutable claim to the title of Boston’s ambassador to poetry slam.
“It’s clearly not for money. I love the idea of bringing everybody that I know from the slam family to my own back yard. In additional to a festival, it’s a family reunion.” In fact, it’s this very sense of kinship with the scene that motivated her to play hero last year when PSI desperately needed one to step in.
Bidding for Boston
Though she has probably never donned a tracksuit studded with the stars and stripes, Beaubien likens the NPS nomination process to bidding for the Olympics.
And no—not everyone gets a trophy
“We have an overarching nonprofit organization and they have a certain amount of money for the National Poetry Slam every year,” she says of the surprisingly competitive process where any city can bid. “You don’t have to be a SlamMaster, you don’t have to have any poetry in your city whatsoever. It helps if you have a presence so that you understand the culture of the experience – but, truly, anyone could bring it to their city if they felt they had the infrastructure to do so.”
Actually, Boston was never supposed to host in 2011. The poetry community sort of stepped into it while making a proper bid for 2012. After receiving Boston’s bid for the 2012 National Poetry Slam, PSI approached Beaubien and, instead, asked her to take the quickly approaching 2011 tournament – for which they had no viable bidder. She accepted. With mere months to spare (NPS usually runs on a two-year bid cycle), Beaubien and her team hunkered down and put together what was to be a landmark event.
“We had a strong bid, we have a strong team, and we’d been perennial semifinalists. We brought good poetry to Nationals, and also [Boston] is a scene that people wanted to tour. People wanted to book at the Cantab Lounge and we were able to say ‘well, people sell lots of merch. We have a good community.’ Our reputation was very good. So they awarded us the bid for 2011.”
A year later, in 2012, Beaubien was on tour in Illinois when she heard that PSI was in yet another dilemma.
As the story goes, NPS 2013 was set to return to Chicago, the city where Smith had founded poetry slam in 1984. However, Chicago was forced to withdraw their bid because of a scheduling conflict with another event, the Brave New Voices youth poetry slam. Beaubien, who spends her days as a paramedic, responded to the emergency the only way she knew how – by leaping to the rescue.
“When I came home, I gathered the team together and said ‘I have a lot of food and a lot of beer, and I’m not going to give you any beer until we have this discussion in a reasonable way.’ I asked them ‘do you want to run Nationals again? It’s okay to say no,’ and every single person, everyone on the team, said they wanted to bring it back… And then we had a great and foolish party.”
In the end, it was a win for both Boston and PSI – the city would get the event it had so feverishly enjoyed two years prior, and PSI would get a city it knew would have no trouble standing in for Chicago, the birthplace of slam.
Anniversary no Slam-Dunk
While 2013 is the second anniversary of one of Boston’s more recent literary high-water marks, it also marks the 20th year since a Boston team has claimed victory. Aside from a fourth-place finish in 2008, a Boston team hasn’t stood on the Finals stage since their runner-up effort in 1995. When asked about overcoming this lengthy dry spell, Beaubien remains unconcerned.
“We like to say ‘the points are not the point – the point is poetry,’ and it really is true. I think, just as long as poetry is served, I don’t really care. I just want to see a good Finals show.”
Boston will field a five-person team, which includes three NPS rookies. Sparkplug New Hampshire poet Ed Wilkinson heads up the newcomers alongside Jade Sylvan and Nora Meiners. Omoizele Okoawo and Sean Patrick Mulroy round out the experienced end of the squad. Though she will not be taking the stage in competition, much the of the attention will be on coach Beaubien when the mics click on in August.
And, as she says, as long as poetry is served, the Boston team will have done its job.
“I don’t know that I remember who has won every Final stage that I’ve been to, but I remember individual poems and I remember individuals from those years. That’s where lasting art comes from, and that’s where art that changes your own ideas and your own voice comes from.”
Win or lose, Boston will be better for having the NPS in 2013. As casual listeners become poetry junkies and passersby tune their ear Boston’s proudest lingua franca, a decades-old art form will slowly worm its way further into the public consciousness.
“What is poetry slam? Are you a beat poet? These questions are still being asked by boring people everywhere,” says Beaubien, “but, in Boston at this point, we have a baseline of [poetry] knowledge that I think didn’t exist at the level that it did back in 2011. After 30 years of being underground, it’s ridiculous, [but], for us to be recognized amongst all the art scenes in Boston, it feels good.”
For details about events, visit NPS 2013’s homepage or follow them on Twitter. Tickets and passes for the NPS are one sale now and are available via Poetry Slam, Inc. NPS 2013 is currently seeking volunteers and donations – visit their site for more information.
Slam Photo Credits: Marshall Goff
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