Z Experience Poetry Slam
Peabody Museum
New Haven
Jan. 19
Honoring the legacy of your family while not forgetting to honor yourself. Coming to terms with the injustices of the world to understand how to find your place in doing something about them. Believing and insisting on the power of language to change minds, even as you wrestle with its limitations.
These were among the themes that fueled the Z Experience Poetry Slam and community open mic, which happened Monday evening at the Peabody Museum on Whitney Avenue.
The poetry event capped a day of programming for the Peabody's 30th annual celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr., which began at noon and featured crafts and musical performances, zine making workshops, and community conversations, in addition to all the Peabody's galleries being open to the public as per usual. A mid-afternoon stroll through the museum found it bustling with families and groups of friends.
Poetry fans converged on the community open mic, which began at 4 p.m. as a prelude to the slam but was an event in its own right. With energetic and amiable hosting by Frederick-Douglass Knowles II, the open mic featured current state poet laureate Antoinette Brim-Bell, Enfield poet laureate Nzima Hutchings, and New Haven poet laureate Yexandra "Yex" Diaz. One poem acknowledged the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. Another was about the poet's complex feelings remembering a childhood reenactment of the Underground Railroad at a nature camp. Another was about getting a tattoo, and the person who held the poet's free hand while the other was under the needle. Still another was about the poet's complex feelings about the violence in Gaza and the way she felt, as a Jew, that neither the U.S. nor the Israeli government spoke for her.
A few poems steered in the direction of hope.
"Did you thank your ancestors for the freedom to choose? ... leave a compass for the next generation," one poet read. "We are the peace. We are the freedom. We are the light. And know that light always trumps darkness."
The community mic concluded in time for the crowd to move downstairs to the Peabody's central gallery, where they joined an even larger crowd already seated for the Z Experience Poetry Slam. The slam honors the legacy of community organizer Zannette Lewis, who, with poet Ngoma Hill, made it a part of the Peabody's MLK celebration at its inception 30 years ago along. Current host Croilot Adames Semexant paid homage to Lewis, who died in 2009, and to Hill, who was in attendance along with two of Lewis's children to mark the event's milestone anniversary. He then announced the poetry teams that would be competing in the slam this year: Verbal Slap, from New Haven; Slamherst and New Word Order, from Massachusetts; Fruity Fudge, from Rhode Island; and Charm City, from Baltimore. He also explained how scoring worked. There were five judges who would judge each poem, with the score determined by dropping the highest and the lowest score.
Slamherst kicked off the event with a group poem about language and the friction it creates with identity. "My words are a battlefield and they will fight back," the team chanted in tight unison. "Even when words are lost, they won't go down without a fight." It was a strong opening, garnering a 27.3 out of a possible 30 from the judges, and set the bar high for the evening. A solo performer from Fruity Fudge countered with a poem about being born, literally, with a hole in her heart, using it as a metaphor for the sense of needing to fill a void in her that involved, for a time, avoiding what she knew in favor of the unknown, before coming to terms with who she was. "Whatever holes we are born with, we repair ourselves," she said. "I was born with a hole in my heart and I survived." The judges gave her a 28.7.
Verbal Slap's opening salvo was a duo piece about the do's and don't's of writing a group piece, which started off funny ("we're two dudes playing two dudes that happen to be two dudes playing ourselves!" they said, to laughter) and got suddenly serious, as it dived into the dangers that several different groups face in the United States. They landed a 29.9. Charm City came out swinging with a group riff on Martin Niemöller's "First They Came," asking "what happens when they come for the poets?" It was a call to political action before it's too late, and it got a 28.8 from the judges. New Word Order responded with a solo piece from one of its poets that started off very strong until the poet stumbled; the judges netted them a 22.5, a score demoted partially for going over time.
In the second round, New Word Order sent another solo poet to the mic to spit a poem about police. "The police kill bad people. This is what my five-year-old told me," the poet said, confirming "the lies that were sold me." The poem interrogated the complexity of police work and the myths surrounding it ("we can't beat the system but the system can beat us") and the damage done. Charm City countered with a solo poet who likened the killing of children in Gaza to a mass case of sudden infant death syndrome, in the sense that so many thousands of kids died while adults in America slept, to devastating effect ("every day is Ash Wednesday"; "they put up their hands to stop the bombs; this is their Palm Sunday"). Its plea for humanity garnered the first perfect 30 score from the judges.
Verbal Slap's second-round entry was a return from their competition last year, a piece in which men vigorously compliment each other, a rejoinder to male toxicity and the ways men are told to wall off their emotions. "We are the titans you will always remember," they said, getting a 29 from the judges. Fruity Fudge performed next with a quieter poem, almost a love song, to a lover and to themselves. Slamherst brought up the volume again with a poem about how "America is a country that loves to flaunt its diversity but can't keep up with it." At the end of the second round, the race for first place was shaping up. New Word Order and Fruity Fudge had scores of 49.9 and 50.5, respectively, while Slamherst was pulling away with a 54.5. Charm City and Verbal Slap, meanwhile, were neck-and-neck for the lead, with 58.8 and 58.9 points, respectively.
In the third round, New Word Order deployed a solo performer to spit about living up to his namesake, killed in an altercation years ago.
Fruity Fudge's solo performer talked about coming into her own as a queer person.
Slamherst's duo talked about the difficulties of being from an immigrant family, and the hypocrisies they saw in mainstream U.S. society.
Charm City's duo riveted the room with their take on a couple in Rosewood, Fla., before that town was destroyed in a race massacre.
Verbal Slap's performance brought the house down with a riff on the men vs. bears internet trope, finishing at the end that if we ever saw her in a tussle and it was getting grisly, "help the bear."
Moving into the final round, each team pulled out the rest of its stops. Verbal Slap, in the lead, unfurled a group piece about the appropriation of Black culture in the style of a cheesy infomercial. Funny and sharp, it got the next perfect score of the day. Charm City charged out with a piece about the ways U.S. society stifles the Black imagination. What will happen, they asked, when that imagination is cut loose? "What will happen next is something White supremacy can't imagine." The hard-hitting performance earned them a 30 as well.
Slamherst delivered a group piece about the need for poets to not "be nice, be necessary," which also involved finding hope in the chaos of today, "dancing despite dystopia." Fruity Fudge's solo performer had a complicated poem about a family history filled with love and strife. "If my papa were alive, he'd call me by my name, tell me he loved me either way," the poet said.
And New Word Order's solo poet delighted the crowd with perhaps the strongest poem of the evening, about what constituted a Black poem.
"It is the life of every party, even though it never makes it home," the poet said. "It's marching for peace and at the same time ready to burn shit to pieces." The poem gained energy like an avalanche; the audience responded with cheers.
"That was the last piece you've all been waiting for," Croilot said, cajoling the judges to "get it right." They obliged. Though Verbal Slap emerged as the victor overall, beating out Charm City by less than half a point, New Word Order's final poem got the judges' only unanimously perfect score, a clean sweep of 10s. It was a poem about a poem, but felt like it was about everything else, too.
