Slammin’ Becomes SlamNation

Posted by Paul Devlin:

I had completed my television pilot shot, Slammin’, shot at New York City’s Nuyorican Poets Café, and was shopping it to TV as a series. By then I was hooked into slam poetry in a big way. So in the summer of 1995 I went on a pilgrimage of sorts to Ann Arbor where the National Poetry Slam was happening that year.

There I met the movement’s founder Marc Smith. Man, did he give me the evil eye! He did not trust television people and he was very wary of someone appropriating and perverting the great thing that he had started. He also did not like the fact that Slammin’ was centered in New York, a place he was naturally suspicious of, being from Chicago.

So he and poets Gary Glazner and Allan Wolf sat me down, and explained their vision of where slam poetry should go and their reservations about putting it on television. I listened carefully and their interest in maintaining the integrity of the movement and keeping it inclusive to represent the diversity of slam poetry across the entire country had resonance. This meeting is the seed that germinated into SlamNation. Eventually I became good friends with all of them and part of the community myself.

SlamNation DVD
SlamNation Trailer