Jakob Boyd’s whole body folds around the microphone. The words come out of him like a heartbeat – slow and steady – and then they rise. He whispers about drinking out of a goon bag late at night. He shouts when talking about traffic and urban sprawl. His shouts get lost in the cheering.
The event Boyd is performing at is not quite a poetry slam. Yes, its loud – it’s held in a pub – and promotes audience participation. In a regular poetry slam, the poet often has a time limit and cannot perform with props, costumes or music. Judges are selected randomly from the audience and, at the end of the competition, the poet with the highest score wins.
The anti-slam is different. In an anti-slam, the worst poem wins.
The anti-slam was created by British performance artist Paula Varjack, inspired by poet Jamie DeWolf’s self-reflexive and satirical performance piece, The Worst Poem Ever. In DeWolf, Varjack saw an opportunity to push performers to be more creative by challenging the competitiveness of a traditional slam.
“I saw some performers fall into formulas, replicating similar work, or capitalising on trauma (sometimes theirs, sometimes hearsay, or constructed) to win,” she tells Guardian Australia over email. “I didn’t find this helpful to artists or the writing.”
The first anti-slam took place in Berlin in 2009. Since then it has gone on to captivate audiences around the world.
While every anti-slam is run slightly differently, Varjack says that at their London events even the few rules they have are not taken very seriously. “We have a scorekeeper, comedian James Harris, who makes up rules at random,” she says. The trophy awarded to the worst poem also mocks the premise of competition, with organisers buying it from the pound shop on the day.
Saoirse Nash, who runs the anti-slam in Perth, Western Australia, says its format is very close to that of a traditional slam, with poets getting two minutes on stage to perform before being judged by five randomly chosen audience members. The biggest difference, she says, is that “the lowest score wins” and “we encourage the audience to boo, jeer and heckle”.
The power of bad poetry, Nash says, comes from its capacity to challenge the way you see the world: “I believe that we are most open to new ideas when we’re having fun and feeling curious.”
Boyd, a Perth performer and regular slam host too, says: “The whole event is about subversion, challenging expectations and getting a bit messy. When poets get up there and play around with norms and expectations, the crowd goes off.”
While the anti-slam’s focus on bad poetry isn’t a new literary development, the format makes it accessible to a contemporary audience. Poets have often played with writing intentionally bad poetry. John Donne wrote intentionally bad poetry as a reaction against Elizabethan poetry, many of his poems satirising earlier forms. Geoffrey Chaucer also wrote intentionally bad poetry, using the technique to represent his narrator’s different levels of education in the middle ages.
Varjack says many contemporary performers embody characters in anti-slams as well, using bad poetry not to comment on their socioeconomic status but to mock and ridicule them.
It’s this use of comedy that sets the anti-slam apart from its serious and often highly politicised counterpart, with many performances mocking the cliches of slam poetry. David Graham, host of Word Hurl Anti-Slam in Newcastle, New South Wales, says the anti-slam is also a reaction to the pressure put on the arts to justify its existence and influence public opinion.
“A lot of people say they aren’t creative,” Graham says, “but then they’ve got these notebooks full of poems. They just haven’t found the forum to express themselves in a way that they’re comfortable with. That’s one of the experiences I’ve tried to create with the anti-slams.”
For Varjack, the anti-slam is really about people coming together. “I know I keep using this word ‘community’ but I think it’s because that is so much at the core of it. Community, even for one night. Community created around a celebration of creative risk. I also think there is great power in bringing people together through humour.”
This is a sentiment Boyd and Nash agree with. “To get up and purposely perform something unquestionably awful takes a lot of trust in the audience,” Nash says. “It’s vulnerability of a different sort to a traditional slam, and it’s really rewarding in such a socially performative age to give people the chance to let go, to invite ridicule, and to play with that in a safe environment.”
