Left to right: Hamid Micheal Mutawadd’i, Croilot Carlos Adames, and Tareshi Schuler
Verbal Slap, a New Haven-based five-person poetry team, will compete next week at the National Poetry Slam in Boston. The team is hoping to raise $2,000 to help defray the cost of the trip — specifically the cost of lodging.
According to Frank Brady, who spoke on behalf of the team, Connecticut has not been represented at the National Poetry Slam in a decade, making Verbal Slap’s participation “really historic.”
Verbal Slap is: Croilot Carlos Adames (“Qualois”), Lyvonne Briggs (“Proverbs”), Fredrick Douglas Knowles II (“Yesod”), Hamid Micheal Mutawadd’i (“Face”), and Tareshi Schuler (“Midnight”).
“I along with other poets and writers in the New Haven community have been putting on poetry slam competitions for the last six to seven months in order to determine who will represent Connecticut in the 2011 National Poetry Slam,” Brady wrote in an email.
The competitions were organized by Poetz Realm in Bridgeport and Verbal-Slap Productions, an organization directed by Adames.
According to the National Poetry Slam website, “Poetry slam is conventionally defined as the art of competitive performance poetry. Invented in the 1980s by a Chicago construction worker named Marc Smith, slam is a fast-paced competition where poets have a limited amount of time to impress judges randomly selected from the audience.”
The National Poetry Slam website also explains that “the National Poetry Slam is the annual poetry slam championship tournament, wherein four- to five-person teams from all over North America and Europe gather to compete against each other for the national team title. It has become part super bowl, part poetry summer camp, and part traveling exhibition.”
The National Poetry Slam will take place Aug. 9 – 13 at several locations in and around Boston. Verbal Slap is scheduled to perform on Wednesday, August 10, at 7 p.m., at All Asia Bar in Cambridge, and on Thursday, August 11, at 7 p.m., at Cafe 939 on Boylston Street in Boston.
Final and semifinal rounds — or “bouts” — are scheduled for Friday, August 12, and Saturday, August 13, at the Middle East Restaurant & Nightclub and Berkeley Performance Center, respectively.
Members of Verbal Slap will appear this Friday at the New Haven Peoples Center as part of the “Free 2 Spit” poetry series.
Donations to help pay for lodging for the members of Verbal Slap in Boston are being accepted online at gofundme.com.
Brady said the poetry team’s participation at the National Poetry Slam “literally helps to spark a poetry renaissance” in New Haven and throughout Connecticut, and that “this also has implications for the youth” in the region and across the state.