Skip to main content

Getting Slammed with Poetry

Taut with anxiety, the competitors position themselves under the spotlight in the dim arena. One by one they bang out their routines before the line of stoic judges. The crowd impatiently waits to see the final numbers of each performance dissected down to the decimal. The air is thick with tension and sweat and smoke. Finalists emerge, then are lopped away in sudden death rounds until only one is left standing.

It's fierce. It's cutthroat. It's poetry. A poetry slam, to be exact.

"Judges score it how they feel it," says Mara Michael Jebsen, a Duke senior and veteran of many such slams in New York, Boston and the Duke coffeehouse. "Your performance becomes very important, because the criterion is how it hits the audience. It's not broken down into delivery and content. It's, 'Do you feel it?'"

Evidently, the fans feel it when Jebsen steps on stage, and the Blue Roach poetry collective knows it. When the Blue Roach group stages its spring poetry slam on Feb. 24, Jebsen will have the honor of being the featured poet. Usually the group brings in a well-known poet from New York to give a half-hour performance before the poetic battle begins. Jebsen's appearance marks the first time Blue Roach has asked a local performer to headline its semi-annual event.

While slams have been introducing new poets and showcasing favorites in cultural centers like New York and Boston for decades, the slams have only come to the Triangle in the last couple of years, courtesy of Blue Roach. Slams in larger cities may have as many as 30 competitors, but Blue Roach limits its roster to a dozen. Each contestant has up to three minutes to impress the judges ‚ selected from the audience moments before the contest begins ‚ who hold up cards rating the performer on a scale of 1.0 to 10.0. Just as in the Olympics, a 5.0 would be considered a dismal failure and a 10.0 nearly impossible to reach.

After devoting the past two summers to competing in slams, Jebsen, 21, isn't fazed by the pressure of performing. Her first night at the Nuyorican, one of New York's premier poetry slam venues, was a different story.

Jebsen had gone to the city with her roommate and had memorized a long poem to perform. When it came her turn on stage, she started off well.

"It was beautiful; I was feeling it," she says. "It was one of those moments with the spotlight on you and you're going and going and there's no stopping you. Then all of a sudden, it just disappeared. The next word didn't come. It was a terrible moment."

Her roommate, who had heard her practice night after night, knew the next word. She called it out, and Jebsen, taking the cue, continued the poem as if she'd never stopped. When she finished, the audience rose to its feet. The judges held up their scorecards. Each one had given her a perfect 10.0.

Jebsen's style is a rhythmic, lyrical mix of blues and hip-hop. She might begin by singing a few lines of a Billie Holliday torch song before breaking into poetry, then slipping back into song. She uses lots of rhyme without crossing the line into rap, combining disparate styles and images similar to the way that she combined a childhood in the Philadelphia public school system with an adolescence in a boarding school in the African country of Togo.

Though sometimes backed by musicians, Jebsen more often than not performs a cappella. She is producing a CD of her most popular pieces and reworking some of her poetry to collect in a book. Making the transition from stage to page isn't as direct as it may seem.

"Sound is very important to performance," she says. "At a slam, you can occasionally sacrifice some complexity and careful word choices. Sometimes you can sacrifice to sound what wouldn't work on the page."

Jebsen has supported Blue Roach since its inception in 1997, when she met fellow student Kelsey Davis, then a senior, in an African-American poetry class. The two approached the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture and arranged to use the coffeehouse for poetry readings. From the outset, Blue Roach attracted poets from collectives outside of Duke and outside of the black community.

"We'd all meet in the coffeehouse and there'd be words flying around and we'd work with guitars," recalls Jebsen. The group started inviting big-name poets from New York to kick off the open mike nights held on the second Thursday of every month. Within a short time the open mike nights, at which Jebsen was a regular performer, attracted a standing-room-only crowd.

Through headlining the Blue Roach poetry slam, Jebsen is considered to be launched as a poet. Recognizing that she must support her work before her work supports her, she expects to do some teaching in addition to writing and performing her poetry and is planning to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing, perhaps in New York.

"Two years ago, I was the student, and now I'm the poet," says Jebsen. "This is a very big moment for me."

Written by Nancy Oates.