What a poetry slam is

The scoring was invented to keep an audience in the room, and the format spread because it worked, not because anybody decided that poems were best judged by strangers holding numbers.

That is the whole of the definition, and every argument about slam poetry comes from forgetting it. A poem does not become slam poetry by being loud, angry, rhymed or performed from memory. It becomes slam poetry by being performed in a slam. The same poem read at an open mic the following week is simply a spoken word poem again, and What spoken word poetry is settles that wider term, while this page settles the competition.

How a poetry slam actually runs, from sign up to the final round

A poetry slam runs to a fixed order of events, and knowing the order is most of what a first time competitor needs.

1. Sign up at the door, usually an hour before the start, often by putting a name in a hat rather than a list, so the running order is drawn rather than chosen.
2. Listen to the host explain the rules and the scoring, which every slam does out loud at the start, so nobody needs to have read anything in advance.
3. Watch the sacrificial poet, an experienced performer who reads a poem that is scored but does not count, so the judges can calibrate before anybody's result depends on them.
4. Perform in round one, in the drawn order, with the whole field competing.
5. Return for round two with a cut field, commonly the top half or the top eight, and a fresh poem.
6. Compete in a final round, usually three or four poets, after which the highest total wins.

Most slams run two or three rounds inside an evening of about two hours, and a competitor who reaches the final has performed three different poems in that time. That is the practical reason experienced slammers keep a set of finished pieces rather than one poem they are proud of.

The rules: three minutes, your own words, no props

The rules of a slam are short, and they are close to identical in Chicago, New York, Boston, Austin and every room in Britain that borrowed the format. Poetry Slam Incorporated, the American body that ran the National Poetry Slam, published the version most hosts still work from.

• Perform your own work, written by you, with no exceptions for a poem you love by somebody else.
• Finish inside three minutes, with a grace period of about ten seconds and a deduction of half a point for each ten seconds beyond it in most rulebooks.
• Use no props, no costume and no musical instrument or backing track, so the poem and the voice carry the whole performance.
• Perform from memory or from a page, since the rules almost never require memorisation, whatever the room's habits suggest.

Youth slams add a safeguarding layer that adult rooms do not have. A school or library slam will normally ask to see the poem in advance, set an age appropriate content expectation, and brief the host on what to do if a poem discloses something that needs a response after the show. That last point is a duty of care question rather than an artistic one, and the adult running the room, not the young poet, owns it.

The score sheet: five judges, zero to ten, and two scores thrown away

The score sheet is the part people ask about most, and it is arithmetic rather than mystery. Five judges each hold up a score from 0.0 to 10.0, given to one decimal place so that ties are rare. The highest and the lowest are discarded, which removes one enthusiast and one contrarian, and the middle three are added together. The maximum a poem can score is therefore 30.

Judges are chosen from the audience at the start of the night, usually five people who have never judged before and are told to score the poem in front of them rather than compare it to poems they have loved. The randomness is deliberate. A panel of poets would produce a more consistent result and a worse night, because the room would stop being the audience and start being the gallery.

Why the score is not the point

The score is a device for holding attention, and Marc Smith, who invented the slam in Chicago in 1984 and has run the Green Mill show since 1986, has said so since it started. It gives the audience something to do between poems, it gives the evening a shape, and it gives a room of people who would not otherwise clap a reason to make a noise. It does not measure a poem. Three judges scoring to one decimal place cannot rank two good poems in the few seconds they have between them, and everybody in the room knows it.

What that means for a young poet is worth saying without softening it. A low score on a poem that took a month is a fact about five strangers and a Tuesday, not about the writing. The funny poem often outscores the serious one, the poem performed fourth outscores the poem performed first, and the poem about the topic the room already agrees with outscores the difficult one. Poets who last treat the number as weather. What a spoken word poet is sets out the same point from the other direction: the practice is the writing and the saying, and the competition is one room it happens in.

Where the slam came from

The slam was invented in Chicago by Marc Smith, a construction worker and poet who started a reading series at the Get Me High Lounge in 1984 and moved it to the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in 1986, where the Sunday night show has run ever since. The format travelled east to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side, which put a slam on Friday nights and sent it out to a much larger audience, and the first National Poetry Slam was held in San Francisco in 1990.

Britain took the format later and kept it smaller and more scattered. Hammer and Tongue runs heats in several English cities and a national final in London, and the Poetry Society ran SLAMbassadors, the national youth slam championship, from 2001 to 2018. What performance poetry is covers the older British tradition the slam arrived into, which had been running readings since well before anybody scored one.

Finding a poetry slam near you

To find a poetry slam near you, start with the buildings rather than a search engine, because slams are hosted rather than listed and the listings that do exist go stale fast. Ask at the central library, which increasingly hosts spoken word nights for under eighteens. Ask at the local arts centre or theatre studio. Ask the nearest university's poetry or creative writing society, which usually runs an open night that anybody can attend. Check the programmes of Apples and Snakes in England and Hammer and Tongue, both of which publish what they are promoting.

This site is a reference rather than a directory and keeps no venue list, because a list of rooms goes out of date within a season and sending a fifteen year old to a room that closed last year is worse than sending them to nobody. What is worth knowing before the first one is that most cities have an open mic long before they have a slam, that the open mic is the easier first night by a distance, and that Spoken word poetry does not require a competition at any point to be worth doing.