It's All in the Slamily

The Hawaiian Hut would have been pretty hard to find if it wasn't for the long line of people waiting to get into the building; a winding tail of expectant and eager patrons that snuggled against the front of the club and wrapped around the side of the Ala Moana Hotel. The message is clear from the Web sites: If you want a seat on First Thursdays, get there early. The place fills up fast. Once a month, over 600 people from many different cities, age groups and walks of life fill this venue to capacity to witness the largest Poetry Slam in the world.

Inside, Hawaiian Hut is one grand room, filled with candlelit tables and booths, most offering an advantageous view of the stage. DJ Kavet the Catalyst sets up his tables in the corner, while Emcee and Hawaii Poetry Slam creator Kealoha preps the microphones and sprinkles flowers around the stage. Near the back of the stage, Erin McCullough stands in front of a large blank canvas, a paintbrush gripped in one hand, contemplating the lines she will soon stroke. As guests filter in, the music begins to play, and McCullough sways to the beat as colors are mixed and shapes created.

It's a tradition that has, over decades, flourished and evolved, all the while maintaining what slam poetry was originally created for: Communication. Understanding. Interaction. Imagine yourself in a small, dingy bar called the Get Me High Lounge in the heart of Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood. It's a Monday evening in November of 1984, and a few oddball, blue-collar, anti-academic performance poets are about to start a new movement that will change art history. Their goal was to move poetry out of dusty texts and university halls and bring it into the fiery, unstable belly of raw human interpretation. No longer would poetry be written and read in a monotonous, intellectual tone; words will now be spat, whispered, yelled, sung, bodies will swivel, swing, dance and undulate under an instinctive, beatific rhythm inspired by Ginsberg and Kerouac and the hip hop and rap music coming in from the black and Latino neighborhoods of New York City. It was punk poetry, a revolution against the academic world of literature, and the people loved it.

Which, argued slam poetry-papa Marc Smith, was the whole point. You see, he believed that poets needed to be creative but also effective, that audience understanding and interaction was vastly important for a poet to maintain the craft. So what better way to instigate this dialectic but with a little competition? The idea was simple: judges were to be randomly selected from the audience, five in total, with one person chosen to keep score. Poets are allotted a three-minute time slot to perform their piece, and audience members are then encouraged to show their approval with applause, hoots and hollers, and conversely, their disdain with boos and hisses. The judges will then rate the performance with score cards, numbered one through ten, ten being the highest, and the performer with the highest points by the end of the night wins. In 1987, Smith finally found a home for this innovative event at Chicago's Green Mill Tavern, where the Uptown Slam, the original slam poetry event, is still held today. Although, these days the prizes are a bit nicer (back then the winner received either ten bucks, a package of Twinkies, or a box of Macaroni & Cheese signed by the judges.)

Good news traveled fast. Within a couple years there were slam teams in San Francisco and New York City, spawning the first ever National Poetry Slam competition in 1990. By the turn of the millennium, slam poetry was global, and the Roma Poesia International Poetry Slam in 2002 featured teams from Spain, France, Russia, the US, England, Germany and Italy.

So how exactly did the movement reach Hawaii? It started eight years ago back in San Francisco, with a native Hawaiian restless and stuck in a dead-end consulting job.

"It was like selling out, in my mind," says Kealoha. "I was just helping rich companies get richer, and I was unsatisfied." When he stumbled upon slam poetry at a local San Fran club, a fire ignited.

"I just remember thinking: This is what I have been waiting for! It was the perfect combination of theatre, hip hop, story telling, all the things that I loved."

Kealoha decided to come home to Honolulu, and he took a year off to surf, hike, and write. In that time he found his passion for poetry, and became involved in the art scene around Chinatown. During a particularly painful artistic drought, where Kealoha and his pals could find nowhere to perform their poetry, an idea emerged: to create a home base, a monthly poetry slam, to further their craft and inspire the community to get more involved in the movement. And thus, five years ago, First Thursdays at Hawaiian Hut was born. The first show attracted over 400 people, automatically making it the largest poetry slam in the nation. By the second month, it was number one in the world.

From the beginning, Kealoha was the facilitator of and a participator in the HawaiiSlam Team. The top slam contenders who compete on First Thursdays win a place on the team, which travels to compete at the annual National Poetry Slam against teams from across the country. This year's HawaiiSlam Team includes Kealoha, TravisT, Dar'ron Cambra and Tui Scanlan.

"The four of us have a certain amount of stage presence, of that theatrical element," explains Kealoha. "So this year I am excited because we are really going to use the space we are given, we're going to move around a lot."

At nationals, poets typically stand in front of the microphone to perform; a tradition Kealoha has no qualms in breaking. On stage, the foursome take turns moving around the stage, speaking at times singularly or in unison. It's like witnessing a camaraderie in poetry, a likeness of mind and spirit, watching each slammer take the words and create them in his own image, altering, moving the piece this way and that, meandering through the bowels of creative genius, tones, inflections, a cacophony of personalities. The poems range from silly to serious, a look at philosophy and social analysis through the glorification of recess or the magnification of homeless life.

HawaiiSlam Team member Tui Scanlan, another Hawaii native that boomeranged to California and back, traded a life of crime for a life of creativity. After becoming disillusioned by the theatre "divas" he encountered while in college in Los Angeles ("diva," he says, "is anyone who has fallen in love with their own genius,") Scanlan says he lost faith in theatre and humanity itself, and turned to drugs and crime as an escape. When he came back to Oahu to join the union for stagehands and was introduced to the poetry slam, it was love at first sight.

"I was like, for real? Are you kidding me? I can say whatever I want and people have to listen to me? I thought, I've been an actor, I've been a director, I've been a gangster, why not try to be a writer. Why not try to create things instead of destroying them, you know? And that's why I think spoken word is such a beautiful thing. I hope, with my words, an audience will question their beliefs. I hope that the dogmas to which they have assigned themselves are challenged."

Inside the Hawaiian Hut on this Thursday in June, I watch in awe as poet after poet bravely take the stage and bare their souls to a room full of strangers. The performers aren't listening for the jeers of hecklers but the more benign sound of jingling keys, the chosen method of telling a poet their time is up or that they aren't connecting with the audience. People laugh hysterically during a poem called "It's My Time of the Month," and a love song dedicated to a nectarine garners an enthusiastic round of applause.

But the greatest reaction comes when other poets take a more serious tone, lyrically recounting stories of loss, rape, the death of a brother and soldier, the devastation in New Orleans. To these tales of fear, woe and abiding strength, people respond with the most heartfelt of cheers, the widest range of emotion, and with the highest scores.

But, to use Marc Smith's term, was the poetry performed at First Thursday truly effective? I can't speak for everyone, I can just offer up what the evening meant for me. And to me, poetry is effective when the words being spoken pass your brain completely, when they hit nerves, chords, sinews, muscle, bone, soul, when they send uncontrollable and irrefutable shocks into the recesses of emotional wells, raising hairs, tingling necks, accelerating heartbeat, and then all at once the words bounce back up and echo in your mind, exploding into consciousness, you open your mouth and all you can say is "ahhhhhh..."

That's all you can ask for, and that's what I felt.

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