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National Poetry Slam

The National Poetry Slam's coming to Austin in a couple of weeks, August 9-12, happening at several venues. The preliminary slams are free, but you have to buy a ticket for the semifinals and finals.

Here's an excerpt from a longer press release:

The National Poetry Slam has grown from a bardic grudge match between Chicago and San Francisco to a four-day festival involving hundreds of poets, as many as a dozen venues, and audiences numbering in the thousands. Organizers for the 2006 National Poetry Slam, to be held in Austin, Texas., this coming August, expect record numbers of teams and audience members to converge on Austin for the largest poetry event of its kind.

The 2006 National Poetry Slam, which will kick off on Wednesday, August 9 with as many as 80 teams competing in eight venues along Congress Avenue, will culminate with the Individual Finals show on Friday, August 11 at the historic Paramount Theater and the Team Finals competition on Saturday, August 12 at the newly-revitalized Palmer Auditorium.

"When we held Nationals in Austin in 1998, it was the largest one in history," said co-director Mike Henry. "Selling out the Paramount Theater for poetry was an unthinkable accomplishment at the time, and now it's part of slam's considerable lore. In 2006, Austin is ready to add another chapter to the story and make history again."

The National Poetry Slam is the premier annual event for poetry slammers across the globe. Billed as "the competitive art of performance poetry," slam was invented in Chicago in July 1986 by Marc Smith, a construction worker-turned-poet who included the slam as part of his performance poetry troupe's weekly show at the Green Mill Tavern, an uptown Chicago watering hole once frequented by Al Capone.

jon posted this at 12:54 PM
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