Friday! I don't really remember what I did Friday. I've kind of blocked out the SlamMaster Meeting, which I don't think was too bad this year, but if you have questions, email me and I'll be happy to update you. After that, I checked out the Group Piece Showcase, had a pretty fantastic dinner, then did a little timing for Eric, who was in a bit of a flurry putting together a new piece. More on that later, I promise.

After all that, I headed out to the Flying Star, a fantastic, lofty diner which was the semi-final bout spot for Hollywood, Baton Rouge, Boston Lizard Lounge, Seattle, and LA Green. This entry is going to be pretty damn long, so I will cut the details on this one short (I do have scores and poem recaps, though, so if you want them, again, email me): after the group showcase, in which Worcester performed Gary Hoare's "fuck it" piece with five voices and Nick Davis also did his motorcycle piece, the bout got off the ground right on time. Hollywood got 1.9 ahead in the first round with Rives' mockingbirds piece and never looked back.

I left for the indy semis after their third round piece sealed their win for the night, but I did get to see all three of Boston's pieces. Kit went up in the first round with the Hawaii poem, which was not well-received by the judges, although we thought scores would be closer before Hollywood's huge score advantage. For the second round, Lizard sent Kit back up with Iyeoka to do Shout as a two-voice piece. It was good enough for second in the round (behind Hollywood) until Baton Rouge's indy semi-finalist Xero Skidmore took the round decisively, sacrificing a piece to this semi-final bout that he would not be able to take to the indy competition later. Marlon closed the Lizard's night with his old "pen" poem and, sadly, that was all she wrote. Congrats to the Lizard for a great run.

I raced over to the El Rey in time to see the line at its shortest, just starting to stretch around the corner and down the block. Ansel secured me a spot about 50 people back and I figured I'd get a pretty decent seat. Being a SlamMaster has its perks, though, so when I saw Eric coming down the street I totally piggybacked as coach in order to sneak into the venue early and get right down front. Talk about rockstar treatment.

The bout was slow in starting, especially since some poets were still making their way over from competing in semi-final bouts elsewhere. Eventually, though, the poets were called up to draw and Eric returned to our seats and handed me a square of paper with a neatly written "2." The spot sandwiched him between Jaylee Alde and Corbet Dean and put him next-to-last in the second round; he'd have to wait for seventeen poets to read between his first and last poems.

Versiz started the night with a heavy-duty piece about bad cops and good cops, which, somewhat questionably, he dedicated to Corbet Dean. The audience loved him and the judges liked it enough for a 27.9, a good score but one with a little room to grow as the night wore on. Jaylee came up next, bringing a dramatic love poem that hauled in the same score as Versiz, and, just like that, Mike Henry was announcing "from Boston Cantab: Eric Darby" on the NPS Individual Semi-Final stage.

Eric performed Scratch and Dent Dreams, the one poem he told us he wanted to do at NPS this year. If you have ever seen Eric nail a piece (which, enviably, he seems most capable of doing under the greatest amount of pressure), then there's no need for me to give you the play-by-play. I can tell you that the audience, already hyped up beyond measure, was following his every phrase as closely as 500 drunk and partying poets are capable of, and, despite that, the poem clocked in exactly where we'd measured it in the hotel room that day. Knowing that Michael Brown coached him on the movements for this poem, I do wish he could have been there to see how big the poem was on stage, the huge stack of 45s Eric shoveled aside to find that crate of secondhand hope, how Mama Genuine's awning almost yanked off its tether in the snapping breeze, how the whole audience looked down into that box at the leftover parts of Now. When he finished, the audience blew up; I would not have said it then, but I did feel that no matter what else happened in that slam, I could be proud like nothing else that a poet from the Cantab brought that to the stage.

The judges were not as impressed. One judge handed out the first 8.9 of the night and Eric pulled a 27.8, a tenth behind Jaylee with eight more poets to go in the round.

I doubt Eric saw much of the rest of the slam. Sitting next to me, he spent the rest of the round and half of the following one copying the poem he had written that afternoon in the hotel room into Marlon Carey's borrowed notebook (big thanks to Marlon, as well as to Ross Johnson who grabbed Marlon's notebook when he heard Eric needed one). I wasn't going to waste a third-row seat at semi-finals, though, and let my only distraction for the next dozen or so poets be the few seconds it took to track the poets' scores between rounds.

Ragan Fox (remember him from last month at the Cantab?) was the first to crack the 29 score barrier with his HIV piece, but the scores stayed surprisingly consistent; Xero Skidmore's very funny piece ("if men could also conceive children") got the high score of the round with a 29.2, beating out Ragan by a tenth. Anis Mojgani followed him with a tender, beautiful narrative that definitely made one of my favorite pieces of the night and just tied Ragan. The next two poets (Christa Bell and Jamie Kennedy) were just a tenth behind that and the whole round ended up with a 1.3 point spread.

Between rounds, Beau Sia performed a piece to clear the air before the reverse rotation started. Scores were consistent in the high 28s, so there was still room for a poet to blow the roof off the room. I really thought Anis would do it with his second piece ("I am invincible"), another quirky and sweet narrative about the beauty of the everyday body, when the lights went out about one minute into his piece.

Now, Albuquerque has been an amazing, amazing National Poetry Slam; aside from a few last-minute schedule changes, everything else has literally run without a hitch. We've spent the last week telling Danny Solis and Don McIver and the host of unnamed but fantastic volunteers what a great show/party they've been running and how thankful we are at what a good time they've enabled us to have. So, when every last stage light went out at the El Rey, leaving Anis in total darkness a third of the way through his poem, the shock in the room was almost tangible.

There was a gasp, and then some rustling; some light booing started, but was quickly shushed. Throughout all of this, in total darkness, Anis pushed on, not missing a single beat; seated so close to the stage, I could just see the shadows of his motions, his intensity totally unaffected by the lack of light, the distracted crowd, and Pilot le Hot, the French slammaster, who was shooting off his camera flashbulb as fast as it could recharge in the hopes of illuminating the poet for just a few seconds at a time.

There are poets whose poetry suffers deeply without visual aid: sometimes the physical presence of the poet, her power, his stance, all of those are necessary to the audience's enjoyment of the piece. Anis is not one of those poets. If anything, the shades of his voice, his energy, the color he had obviously worked hard to fill in the performance of the piece, all came through in the dark in a way nobody, probably not even the poet, could have anticipated. Plus, it was pretty fucking impressive (pardon my French) that, a consummate professional, he actually seemed completely unfazed by the abrupt lack of lighting. Somehow, the house managed to get the lights up just a few moments before Anis finished his poem --exactly enough time for the audience to wildly applaud, calm down, and let Anis deliver the end of the piece before we all rose to our feet, applauding not just the piece (which, frankly, a lot of the audience probably missed most of) but the unflappability of the poet on stage.

It says something for all the competing poets, too, that the judges were not particularly impressed by Anis' ability to overcome the lighting mishap. His 28.6 was not the highest score of the night, or even the round; it placed him firmly in the middle of the pack and by no means confirmed a slot in finals. It was as though the judges simply expected that a poet of this caliber would, of course, be able to perform without lights, or a mic, or a stage, or whatever might have fallen though. I'm impressed at the respect their scores reflected.

Our lighting troubles, unfortunately, did not end there. When Xero, the next poet up, took the stage, the lights kicked out precisely at the moment he took his breath to begin. In the half-light there at the base of the stage, I could see his body deflate as he stepped away from the mic; what a horrible surprise and a letdown for the poet on stage. The crowd actually tried to bump the poet up, encourage him to begin --and he almost did, somewhat resignedly reapproaching the mic-- but Mike Henry sprinted onto the stage and stopped him just in time.

This was the point when I started to be concerned that the lights wouldn't stay on for Eric's piece: written this afternoon, freshly copied onto four fresh sheets of paper, and by no means memorized. When the lights came on this time, though, they stayed on for his entire piece, and Mike and Nazela afterwards assured us that the appropriate breakers had been flipped and promised the lights would remain on for the rest of the slam, no doubt much to the relief of the following poets.

Ragan took the stage next with a rendition of Suburbia; you may remember how that poem absolutely slayed at the Cantab when he featured for us. Despite Ragan's usual great performance, the piece simply did not fly and pulled a 28.1, which would be the lowest score in the round. You could tell, too, that the judges were getting tired and were going to have to be challenged to give up the big scores.

Two poets later, Corbet Dean was the first to manage it; even though he was close to mathematically eliminated at this point (needing a high 29 and for the next two poets to blow it), he was obviously not going to lie down on the stage. His "he who hunts monsters" piece got the crowd on their feet and garnered a 29.4. It would not be enough for Corbet, but nothing could have been a better set-up for Eric: a serious, quiet piece, delivered calmly but with power, had primed the room for someone to blow it up.

If you know Eric (and chances are, if you're reading this, you do), you know that he is a fairly aloof person, not a flashy guy, and someone very strict ideas as to what is and what is not poetry. Most of his pieces he refuses to call poems, and, if you look at the team chapbook, you'll notice they're formatted more like short stories. In fact, you can only see that in the team chapbook, because he refuses to publish his own. Eric walked onto the stage holding four pieces of paper that I only knew contained what he had referred to earlier as "a rant, not a poem" and something both of us were reasonably sure was going to go painfully overtime.

It is a joy and a pleasure to see someone whose work you know and respect perform on a stage as large as indy semis. It is even greater to see someone you consider a friend reach such a high level doing what they enjoy. But it is perhaps the best feeling of all when that person is your teammate, who you've watched work so hard to do what he does, and who is where he is totally by virtue of being a team player. Eric performed the poems we asked him to in the slots we asked him to in the two prelim bouts. We had no intention of sending Eric to indy semis; our entire goal had been to make semis as a team, and using Eric as our closer had been an entirely strategic decision --originally, in fact, we'd not even planned to have him read in the first bout, and when we'd given him only two or three poets' notice to prepare Von Dutch he did it, and did it admirably. Our sadness at not making semis is its own disappointment, separate from the indy competition entirely, but Eric's success is a source of happiness for the whole team --for the whole region, really, considering how long it's been since we've seen a New England poet competing at this high a level at NPS.

What I'm trying to say is that Boston, Worcester, and Providence were all just about busting with pride down there in the audience. The best way to describe it is simply to describe Jared Paul, Providence SlamMaster, seated ahead and to the left of me, his body like a tightly coiled spring in his seat, the kid a barometer of love ready to start spinning uncontrollably with the slightest change in pressure.

I will not describe the piece Eric read in that round. I suspected (and later had my suspicion confirmed) that it would see that stage and probably no other, that it was a one-shot deal, hit or miss, but simply something Eric wanted to say to the poets in the audience. You will have to ask Eric or someone else who was there if you want the piece recapped completely. What I will tell you is that it was a call to action, specific in a way that so many slam poems are not, and that when Eric told the audience "I want you to stand up" the audience almost beat him to it, stomping, clapping, and yelling so loud that despite being one of the closest people to the stage there were a good ten lines building up to the end that were completely impossible to hear.

A few people have remarked to me this morning that what Eric did on stage last night was a one-of-a-kind NPS experience, the kind of thing you go to NPS to see and can't get anywhere else. Frankly, I lack objectivity on the subject. What I do have, however, is the score, which is objective, and which you probably don't care about at this point, which nobody really cared about at that point, but which I cared about because a 29.6 with no time penalty was good enough to guarantee Eric Darby a spot in the Individual Finals tonight.

Jaylee closed out the bout and came just a few tenths short of the last spot; he'll be the sacrifice for a bout that will include Janean Livingston, Ragan Fox, Eric Darby, Xero Skidmore, Jamie Kennedy, Anis Mojgani, and Christa Bell. Team finals will include Hollywood, Albuquerque, Fort Worth, and charlotte.

Today: Slam Family Meeting, Slam Fam Picnic, and Finals! I have high hopes that Eric will wake up sometime before that last event.

posted by simone at 11:00 a.m.

Friday, August 12, 2005