Poetry | Scene
Yes, Poet(ic Pulse)! WUSlam hosts inaugural Intercollegiate Poetry Slam

(Alan Zhou | Student Life)
Sure, it was a poetry reading. But don’t imagine quiet, tasteful coffeehouse gatherings populated by berets and tweed, or nodding off with a classmate’s perplexing prose in first-period English — think stomps, snaps, and shouts. Think lively banter, sharp choreography, and most importantly, really good poetry – the kind that strikes a chord, crystalizes an emotion you’d never quite been able to grasp before in a single, devastating line. But you don’t have to imagine, because on Saturday, April 13, Knight Hall’s Emerson Auditorium was filled up by it.
Washington University Slam Poetry, or WUSlam, is one of the oldest student groups on campus and the only spoken-word poetry group at WashU. Besides weekly general meetings, where all members are invited to spend an hour reading, writing, and performing their poetry, WUSlam also has the audition-based Performance Crew (P-Crew), who formally compete in slams.
The group was hit hard when forced to go virtual during the COVID-19 pandemic and has struggled to regain its original membership since. The pandemic forced the intercollegiate circuit that WUSlam P-Crew had previously competed in — College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, or CUPSI — to cancel its tournaments. The organization has not hosted a competition in the four years since, depriving collegiate slam poets of a larger stage outside of their campuses.
Instead, WUSlam decided to take matters into their own hands by establishing Poetic Pulse, their inaugural intercollegiate slam with New York University’s SLAM! at NYU.
Slam poetry is primarily performance-based, emphasizing the poet’s delivery, conviction, and emotion, alongside the quality and style of their pieces. Poets cannot utilize anything outside their bodies — like props, costumes, or music — challenging them to connect with audiences only with their spoken word. Originating from Chicago clubs in the 1980s as an attempt to modernize poetry for popular audiences, slams are a far cry from the subdued, melancholic soliloquy typically associated with the form.
As a medium, slam poetry sets itself apart with the constant auditory buzz — audiences are encouraged to snap, stomp, and whoop “yes, poet!” in the midst of reading as a form of live feedback. With such significant subject matter, the back-and-forth response is crucial to creating an equal, conversational bond between the performer and their audience.
“I think where page poetry finds meaning in the words and the way that they’re arranged on the page, slam poetry finds meaning in the performance. And so it is like a conversation between the poet and the audience, in which the poet is using their performance to further the message that they want to send and the story they’re trying to tell,” explained WUSlam president, senior Jebron Perkins.
Poems can be on any topic, from the ironically comical (shellfish allergies!) to intimately confessional. Most poems tend to fall on the latter end of the spectrum, providing a safe space for poets to reflect on aspects of their personal identity and relationships: friends, family, gender, sexuality, race, class, and religion are often major themes. WUSlam vice president, sophomore Seamus Curtin, said that although the topics of each poem vary, they are united by performance.
“It’s really just whatever you feel is emotional enough that you want to share with the world, and [slam poetry] really is something that needs to be heard and not read. Sometimes it’s published, but it’s never going to be the same. There’s a certain amount of emotional vulnerability that I think you get in live performance.”
Curtin started Saturday’s slam as the “sacrificial poet,” reading his piece, “I’m scared of drowning, which is ironic” to help the panel of three judges calibrate their scoring system. With passionate, building delivery, voice cracking with emotional admissions, Curtin’s poem set the stage for an afternoon of similarly powerful pieces.
WUSlam senior Elizabeth Zeng officially began the slam with “Hands Speak,” a piece reckoning with mental illness and cultural and familial acceptance. The poem delivers just as much sharp gesturization as the title suggests, with Zeng utilizing her body in practiced choreography as an extension of her words.
NYU students Amina Abdiaziz and Xander Brewer delved deep into character while performing “BMI (Black Malpractice Initiative),” with Brewer morphing his jacket into a sterile physician’s coat with a sinisterly efficient gesture while Abdiaziz, his patient, contemplated the history of medical malpractice on Black women. Other group poems, such as “Ours Poetica,” performed by four WUSlam members, became a communal chorus of voices, united in their vocalizations of the Black experience.
Poetic Pulse was composed of three rounds, two preliminary and one final. No poets were eliminated, and the two team’s final rankings would be determined by cumulative scores. Throughout the afternoon, SLAM! at NYU and WUSlam poets took the stage in alternating turns, delivering solo and group poems on religious identity, sexual harassment, and racial identity in passionate three-minute declarations. Although working within the minimalist confines of the medium, poets found ways to entrance the audience, sweeping them along in crescendoing, breathless spits of climax, juxtaposed against a sudden, ringing silence of a whispered confession. Most of the poems read during the slam followed a similar pattern of buildup to an apex of emotion, typically anger, fear, or grief. Part of the emotional subject of many slam poems comes from the inherently therapeutic nature of the medium.
“Sometimes [slam poetry] is helpful for healing or processing things. There’s been tons of times where I’ve been really mad, and I wrote a poem and performed that and it felt really good to just release that,” Perkins said.
Although only the first event of its kind at WashU, Perkins hopes that Poetic Pulse will begin a tradition, reinvigorating the collegiate slam poetry scene.
“In the future, we’ll start reaching out to even more schools and making it like CUPSI, which was the best of the best, with like 60 different schools. It was a real tournament, and there was an energy like ‘we’re competing and we want to win’. And I want that energy for us again, because I think that so much of what drives P-Crew aside from just slam is that opportunity to perform.”
Finals resumed at 7 p.m., culminating in another round of poetry and awards. WashU junior Mare Spiller walked away with the highest individual score for “Mortal Gore,” and WUSlam group poem “Abracadabra” was awarded the highest group score. “Jigga Monkey,” a startling reflection on insidious forms of everyday racism, gave SLAM! at NYU poet Laney Jocelyn the Judge’s Choice award.
Ultimately, although poets artfully built moments of tension in their performances, the slam was less a nail-bitingly fierce competition and more a communal celebration of performance and prose. In between rounds, NYU and WUSlam members chatted, and the emcee followed each reading with well-deserved gushing praise. The collaborative nature of the slam was intentionally cultivated as a defining characteristic of much of slam poetry.
“Poetry is often a very solitary, individual interest. But this is an open invitation. We’re supposed to have community. It’s one of the strongest things that we offer each other. And I think that’s what we’re really trying to strive for — to take poetry to the community, to other people, to be in the room with other people,” Curtin said.