Word: slamming
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Even at 8 in the morning, Austin, Texas, is as hot and sticky as a locker room. I am on the hotel patio, waiting for the lineup for tonight's semifinal bouts to be posted, wondering how long we can stay in the saddle of this bucking bronco called Slam. "We" are the Los Angeles team--Thea Iberall, Poetri (yes, his name is Poetri), Jerry Quickley and I--four poets, linked by a love of words and a passion for competition. We are in Austin to sling verse and reap scores in the ninth--and largest--National Poetry Slam...
...slam, for the uninitiated, is a kind of poetry Olympics in which poets perform their work before a panel of judges randomly chosen from the audience. Each performer is rated on a scale of 0 to 10; the highest cumulative score wins. It is poetry as team sport; Emily Dickinson vs. Langston Hughes on the wrestling mat. It is not for the faint of heart...
...heard that tickets had actually been scalped out front. Inside, all previous scores and rankings have been dropped. Everything now depends on which poems the judges like tonight. We draw first up; it's disappointing, but we're confident. We wait through the band and featured poets. (During the slam, a slam veteran, Patricia Smith, the columnist who was forced to resign from the Boston Globe for fabricating stories, had brought an audience to tears when she concluded a reading with the lines, "Man did not give this gift to me. Man cannot take it away...
...paths with one of the President's spokesmen at NBC's green room in Washington. Hatch said he meant what he said, that he would do whatever he could to help the President if he would just come forward, stop the stonewalling and let up on Starr. Repent and slam no more...
...Clinton administration didn't want to totally slam the door in the Kings' faces. This is a courtesy to them," says Monroe. "But there's not a whole lot that's new, and I don't think anybody expects anything to come out of this. Except the Kings." And of course it wouldn't be a Reno investigation without someone crying for an independent counsel -- except this time it's not Republicans, it's Ray's brother Jerry. "If the FBI does it, they'll say James done it and he's a racist," he said Thursday. That call...