Annual Youth Slam Series
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Send to friendYouth Speaks Seattle 2009-2010 Poetry Slam Series
Prelim #1:
Friday December 18th
The Electric Tea Garden
(across the street from Chop Suey on Capital Hill, above the artificial limb company)
1402 E. Pike St
Seattle WA 98122
signups 6:30, show starts at 7:00pm
Prelim #2:
Friday January 15th
Youngstown Cultural Arts Center
(West Seattle)
4408 Delridge Way SW
Seattle WA 98106
signups 6:30, show starts at 7:00pm
Prelim #3:
Friday February 19th
Northwest African American Museum (NAAM)
(south of downtown on 23rd)
2300 South Massachusetts St
Seattle WA 98144
signups 6:30, show starts at 7:00pm
Wildcard slam:
Saturday March 6th
Seattle Art Museum (SAM)
(downtown)
1300 First Avenue
Seattle WA 98101
signups 11:30am, show starts at noon
Final Slam:
Friday March 19th
The Moore Theatre
1932 Second Avenue
Seattle WA 98101
signups 6:30, show starts 7:00pm
BUY GRAND SLAM TICKETS
And click HERE for more information
A series of all-city poetry slams, or competitive poetry readings, held monthly January-May for the selection of a team to represent Seattle at Brave New Voices: The National Youth Poetry Festival and Slam.
For more information, please contact Youth Speaks Seattle regarding youth poetry slams.
Please tune in to SCAN Channel 77/Comcast, on Thursdays at 4pm for Youth Speaks: In Tha Studio!
Information and Rules:
Every year, Youth Speaks Seattle
hosts a series of poetry slams to select the Seattle youth poetry
slam team, which is 4-6 youth who then have the opportunity to travel
together to the international Brave New Voices youth poetry festival
and slam. This coming year, the 13th annual BNV festival
will be held July 19-25th in Los Angeles.
This year we have secured a series of
venues, doing our best to make our slams accessible to all parts of
the city and beyond. We also welcome and encourage other youth in
the region beyond the Seattle area to come slam. We've had people
from as far away as Oregon secure a spot on the Seattle team! Youth
must be 19 years old or younger as of July 2010 to slam.
While Youth Speaks Seattle offers many
opportunities for working on your writing and performance, not
everyone has had the same opportunity to access our programming to
get help and coaching with their poetry. We already held our first
mentor-day, and will schedule more days like this for any interested
youth to come and get suggestions and help with their writing and
performance from our amazing poetry mentors, so please take advantage
of these opportunities. We are also happy to meet with you, or email
with you to help you with your work, so please get in touch with us!
Slam is essentially a gimmick to make
poetry exciting and to attract an audience. Young people in Seattle
already write amazing poems and attracting large audiences, so we
would love to avoid the ridiculousness of judging and scoring
artistic expression. Unfortunately, we don't have a better way of
choosing a youth poetry slam team fairly, so we continue with the
necessary evil of slam. Just remember, the points are not the point!
The point is the poetry! But to make sure that everyone understands
the rules and structure of the slam series in advance, this is all
the nitty-gritty business that you should know:
This season, we are hosting 3
preliminary slams, 1 wildcard slam, and then a final slam for
poets who have qualified in the 4 previous slams. To make sure that
we create space for the largest number of young poets the opportunity
to compete, we limit your participation to any 1 of the 3
prelim slams: you may not slam in more than 1 prelim slam. Choose
wisely. While waiting and polishing your work for a later slam may
have its advantages, also be aware that in all past years the number
of people slamming in earlier prelims is often smaller and
competition less fierce than later slams. Because this limit means
you have only one chance to make it to the final slam via a prelim
slam, we have also created a wildcard slam which is open to ALL
poets, including anyone who competed in a prelim slam. The wildcard
slam is your second chance if you didn't make it in a prelim slam.
Because the wildcard slam is the last chance to make it to finals,
everyone brings it hard, so it is often the most difficult slam to
win. In each of the prelim slams and the wildcard, 3 poets will
be selected to move on to the final slam, for a total of 12
finalists.
The 3
prelim slams will be a maximum of 12 poets, and sign ups are
first-come first-serve 30 minutes before the show-start. Be at
the slam early! If you are traveling from out of town or can't
arrive early to sign up, please email us well in advance:
yss.info@gmail.com
The wildcard slam may have a different
maximum number of poets and an entirely different round structure to
allow more poets to compete, this will be determined and announced
later, it is always pretty wild!
Each of the 3 prelim slams will have
the same structure: there will be three rounds, with a cut after
each round based on your score, from 12 poets, to 8 poets, to 5.
First round is random order. The top 8 poets will move on to the
second round which is ordered based on score with the highest score
performing first. After the second round, the cumulative score
from rounds 1 & 2 determine the remaining 5 poets who move
on to the final round which again will be ordered by score from
high to low. The final round is clean slate (scores from
previous rounds have no impact, unless a tiebreaker is needed). Out
of the 5 poets in the last round, the top 3 poets win a spot in the
final slam. The remaining 2 poets secure a spot in the wildcards, so
they do not need to worry about signups for the wildcard.
As is standard, there will be 5 judges
giving scores olympic-style (0-10), on the quality of both your
writing and your performance.. The high and low scores are dropped,
the remaining three give your score (after any time penalties) out of
a possible 30 points. We follow the same time limit as BNV, which is
3:30 with a 10-second grace period. After 3:40 there is a penalty
of .5 points for every 10 seconds over. So if you read a poem
that is 3:53 long and score a 26.5, your adjusted score will be 25.5.
Know how long your poems are because the penalty is severe, and be
aware that audience applause can also slow you down. There is no
minimum time limit.
And as usual, the slam is about your
words and performance. Be as creative as you want with your
performance! No costumes, props, or musical instruments are
allowed, and your poems must be your own work. You can make
music with your body or voice if you want, just no instruments. You
can bring up whatever papers or notebooks you need if you do not have
your poems memorized. We strongly encourage you to be very familiar
with your work for the best performance, so memorization is to your
advantage.
