Documentaries

That is the thing worth knowing before a teacher shows one. The slam is the structure the films borrow, because a competition supplies a deadline and an ending. In 3 of them, what the camera spends most of its time on is the room where the poems get made, the arguments in it, and what happens to the young writers afterwards. Everything described here is somebody else's work, named from public information, and nothing on this site hosts, sells, embeds or links a copy of any of it.

What a poetry slam is, in these films

A poetry slam is a poetry reading with a scoring game attached: poets perform their own work inside a time limit, judges picked out of the audience score it, and the scores decide who goes through. The standard limit is 3 minutes with a short grace period, and the scoring is deliberately arbitrary, which is the joke at the centre of the format and the reason the poets in these documentaries take it seriously and mock it in the same breath.

The films use it because it makes an ending. A workshop has no natural climax and a slam has a final, so the arc of a poetry documentary is nearly always the same shape: a room, a set of drafts, a deadline and a stage. Where to read, watch and listen sets out the rest of the record these films sit inside.

The 4 films worth a teacher's time

These 4 films are described from public information, oldest first, with what each one covers and what it is useful for. None of them is short, and all of them contain material that needs deciding about before a class sees it.

Is slam poetry Black?

No, in the sense that a slam is an open format and anybody can enter one, and the question is still worth taking seriously rather than dismissing, because the lineage behind the form is substantially Black American and the films make that visible. The slam was invented in Chicago in the 1980s in a working class bar. What poured into it came from further back: the oral traditions carried into the Americas, the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and its argument that poetry belonged in the street and in the community rather than in the seminar, and hip hop, which had already made the spoken line a form with an audience.

The pivot in that history is The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and it explains why so many of these documentaries look the way they do. A Puerto Rican and Black arts space on the Lower East Side of New York, it became the place where the slam met a literary scene, and the poets who came through it shaped the delivery, the subject matter and the standing of the whole form. Any account that treats spoken word as a style invented for teenagers has missed 60 years of that history, and a young writer is owed the real version.

Slam poetry against spoken poetry

Slam poetry names a competition and spoken poetry names the practice, so the 2 terms are not alternatives and a film can only ever be about the second. A poem performed in a slam on Friday is the same poem read in a library on Sunday, and nothing about it changes except that on Friday somebody held up a card with a number on it.

The distinction matters when a class watches one of these films, because the competitive frame is the most visible thing on screen and the least important thing in the room. What the young writers in these documentaries are doing for most of the running time is drafting, arguing about a line, and reading to 6 other people. Listening to the form covers where performances can be heard outside a competition, and Books covers the shelf a young writer reaches for next.

Showing one of these films to a class

Showing a documentary to a class is a licensing question and a safeguarding question before it is a teaching question, and both have straightforward answers. Watch the whole film first, without exception, because every one of these contains poems about violence, family breakdown, prison and death, said by people who lived them.

• Check the classification: in the United Kingdom, cinema and video releases are classified by the British Board of Film Classification, and a school should be working from the certificate rather than from a summary of it.
• Get the copy properly: buy or hire it through the distributor or a library service, and treat any free full length copy circulating online as what it usually is.
• Know which screening you are running: the education exception in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which applies in England and Wales, in Scotland and in Northern Ireland alike, covers showing a film to pupils and staff for instruction, and an evening open to parents or the public is a different event that needs a licence from the distributor or a licensing agency.
• Warn the room specifically: name the content in advance rather than after, and arrange a way out that does not require a student to explain themselves.
• Write afterwards, not about the film: the useful follow up is a prompt taken from one of the poets' methods, not a comprehension task about a documentary.