Freshmen Chris Kammerer and Aaron Samuels dream of sweating on stage with mikes in their hands, yelling something intensely personal out loud to hundreds of cheering strangers in San Francisco or Chicago.
But for now, they are content to move furniture in the lobby of Lien House, helped by six other poets dedicated enough to give up two valuable hours of their Monday nights. This Monday marks the third-ever meeting of the Inklings poetry group. By next year, they will be preparing to send four poets to a national college slam competition.
Many people who think they can define “slam poetry” are mistaken.
“There’s nothing called ‘slam poetry.’ There’s only poetry done in a poetry slam,” Kammerer said. “Basically it is a poetry reading in which the poets are competing.”
The rules can be very complicated. The basic format for national competitions involves three levels: preliminaries, semifinals and finals. Almost all national competitions feature teams of four to six people who collectively represent a city or other entity. Judges are chosen at random from the audience and given scorecards numbered from zero to 10.
“The less they know about poetry, the better,” Kammerer said.
Competitions usually take place among groups of five teams. In the preliminaries, the two highest-scoring teams in each competing unit move to the next round. This pattern continues until the final competition, when four or five teams remain.
There are no prizes for winning most national competitions; teams compete for the fun of it.
“Once you make it to the final stage,” Kammerer said, “it’s not about competing to win anymore.It’s about putting on the greatest show ever.”
In order to send people to a competition, Kammerer and Samuels needed funds from Student Union; this need was part of the reason for starting the club. Director of Student Activities Julie Thornton explained that her office could only fund a club that has existed for a year on its own.
The visit to the student activities office took place in early January, but the thought process began much earlier. Kammerer based Inklings off of a Chicago group called Wordplay, which he began attending as a high school freshman. He met Samuels through a common friend, Nate Marshall, a slam poet featured in the 1998 documentary “Slamnation” and the book “Spoken Word Revolution,” which are both part of slam poetry history. Soon after they met, the two began discussing a Washington University slam team. They finally went to the Office of Student Activities in early January.
While developing a Washington University slam team is the group’s primary goal, it also has other projects. Inklings is part workshop, part open mike. Kammerer and Samuels read a poem each week and then offer a prompt based on the poem. After members read their spontaneous prompt poetry, anyone who has brought a pre-made poem is allowed to read it.
The group has already hosted one visiting poet, Jared Paul, a professional poet and Samuels’ tutor. In addition, Samuels has hosted an open mike event called WU Expressions for Celebration Weekend, and they are planning a showcase for Inklings members, probably at Ursa’s Fireside.
“It’s just a way to get the Washington University community open to writing,” Kammerer said.
He also hopes that making students think about writing will improve the future slam team, which will be chosen by auditions sometime before April of next year.
“They have to have that mixture of poetic sensibility and stage presence,” he said. “We have to have a core group of poets that can continue a performance together.”
As far as life lessons in slam go, Kammerer and Samuels live and teach by a popular mantra that can be heard at virtually every competition across the country.
“The point is not the points,” Kammerer said. “The point is the poetry.”