I’ve been thinking a lot about writing process lately and how to transfer ideas, images, feelings into words and finding the right medium. The point of blogging about this is to help deconstruct some of it in the hope of breaking out of old habits and writing what is right in the right medium.
Sam Cooney’s piece in The Emerging Writer goes into this struggle a bit, when writing about the real world and how hard it is to do it justice in words, and I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit.
A few days ago I was asking people to leave comments on how they approach the process. Please keep telling your own creative stories. I love to read them. Process is a boring word. It makes it sound like a mechanical automatic kind of thing, but it really is something you have to allow to be organic, like transcribing a dance in your head. I have multiple ideas and a few mediums I’m working in. I am no longer just a prose writer, but a poet, spoken word artist, blogger and non-fiction writer. This opens me up to using a variety of ways to tell a story, get across a thought or image, but sometimes it can be restricting, like thinking I need to write a spoken word piece and finding an idea to shove into that container when it might not fit. Or an idea that could very well fit, but assumptions and tropes of that mode of writing holds me back
Which brings me to another thought I’ve been having about slam poetry, and spoken word. One of the first things that I loved about being able to perform poetry and then writing it for performance was that I could express anger. Some people cringe at anger, look down upon it as an unhealthy emotion, but I actually love it. I love the rant also. And although I may have missed the mark, made a few mistakes etc, when I first started playing with it, it’s an area I want to explore further. In the space of open mic and the more traditional poetry nights, the content is fine. You can be dark and it can feel like you don’t have to ‘please’ people in the same way that slam does.
Does slam in Australia have a predisposition the positive and inspirational? I know that’s not the worst thing in the world until you consider it’s opposite. Does slam in Australia have a disinclination to the angry or critical? I know it is not really meant to be a competition but often that pressure and appealing to the audience gets the better of you. People are looking for the funny, the uplifting, positive, inspiration, that beautiful inspiration line, simile or metaphor that gets the audience clicking fingers. I say Slam in Australia because American poets like Ken Arkind seem to be articulating anger so beautifully and get the right reaction. Maybe I just haven’t hit the mark yet.
Anger isn’t meant to be negative. It’s about working out what you want to get rid of in order to build something new. It’s cathartic. And I have something I want to write, so I could do it, and see what comes up.
It’s fine to focus on the audience, to write for them, for it not to be self-indulgent, but sometimes it can be a barrier to reaching some of the people in the audience. My favourite moment from a slam was after performing ‘Unless You’re Free’ at Slamalamadingdong one night and a stranger came up to me and thanked me because he’d just quit his ‘shitty job’ and he related to the poem. Sometimes things like that matter much more than the score.
Benjamin Solah 
I have limited experience of slam in Australia, but from what I’ve seen it’s a literary form that (for better or worse) makes space for a lot of anger, to such an extent that even benign subjects are engaged with a kind of spittingness. Seriously, when I saw the title of your blog post I assumed it was a joke…
I’d be curious to hear what kind of slam and who you’ve come across. I haven’t come across a lot of anger, especially recently.
You, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Koraly Dimitriadis, Omar Musa – all poets with anger close to the surface when they perform, and a kind of – I don’t know – righteousness?
All favourite poets of mine, except that Ben guy. But most, with probably the exception of Omar, are outside the ‘slam scene.’ I particularly like what Maxine Clark does. I was mostly talking about ‘slam,’ which is a scene that’s a bit different to the poetry around the pub venues. There’s sometimes an overlap, sometimes not.