Poetry Slam 101: Everything you need to know about the National Poetry Slam

The National Poetry Slam is coming to Boston and Cambridge and Somerville Aug. 13-17, which means a lot of curious newcomers will be sidling up alongside longtime fans to check out the Olympics of Spoken Word. While slam is at its core a populist art form designed to be accessible to all comers, like any sport it has its own rules, lingo and quirks. Here’s a rundown of everything someone new to slam needs to know to watch NPS 2013 like a seasoned pro.

The Basics

Poetry slam is the art of competitive performance poetry. Poets come to the stage and have three minutes to read their own original work, using no props, costumes or musical accompaniment. A panel of five lucky audience members judge each poem on a scale from 0.0 to 10.0, amidst raucous choruses of cheers and boos from the crowd.

 The National Poetry Slam is a team competition. Slams from around the country send up to five of their top-ranked slammers to compete. Every round, the team will send one poem to the stage--but that poem could be performed by any number of poets on the team.

 This is the basic information needed to see and enjoy a slam, and it will all be explained at the beginning of every show. But there are lots of other ins and outs that don’t make it into the emcee’s standard spiel. Here’s some inside info:

 ●     Score Creep: Judges have a natural and well-documented tendency to give higher scores as a bout goes on. This is either because they’re getting into the show, or because they’ve been availing themselves of the bar. Poets bemoan this endlessly--especially if they’re going first.

 ●     The Sac: Slang for “sacrificial poet,” aka the “calibration poet. This poet performs at the start of the bout, and is scored like any other poet, but is not a competitor in the bout. The idea is to give the judges a baseline to judge the rest of the slam by. At NPS, the sac is sometimes even a group piece featuring multiple poets.

 ●     The Rotation: Thanks to score creep, teams don’t want to go in the same order every round; the team who had to go first every round would complain. So instead there’s a rotation that determines which team will go when. In the first round, the teams draw a letter and perform in alphabetical order: ABCD. The next round the order goes CADB, followed by DCBA, and BDAC. Opinions differ on which letter offers the best scoring opportunities.

 ●     “Took the one”:  Every team gets to compete in two preliminary bouts over the first three nights of NPS. Their ranks in those two bouts are then added together, to get a number that will determine who advances to semifinals. For example, if a team won their first bout and was the runner-up in their second bout, they’d have a total of 3 (1+2). Poets will often say things like, “We took the two,” as slang for saying they finished second.

 ●     Making Semifinals: The twenty teams with the best combined bout rankings make semifinals. While there are no hard and fast guarantees, anyone with a 2 (meaning they took the 1 in both their bouts) is essentially a lock-in, and most 3s will make it as well. Usually 4s will not. So if you like the team that took the one or two in a bout you saw, you might get to see them in semifinals on Friday, Aug. 16. Check out scores.poetryslam.com, or listen to the SlamCenter podcast every day of the tournament at SlamCenter.org to keep tabs on how all the teams are doing.

 ●     Making Finals: Also known as “winning” for teams who’ve made it their goal to read more poems than anyone else. This is pretty straightforward: There will be four semifinal bouts with five teams each. The winner of each bout makes it to the big stage at the Berklee Performance Center on Saturday, Aug. 17.

 ●     What’s a Prop?: Any object intended to enhance the performance is forbidden. But poets can use anything around them that’s available to all competing poets--a mic stand or a chair, for example. Poets are also free to bring a physical copy of their poem to the stage, though this rarely happens as most work is memorized.

 ●     F**k the Time!: A cry that often erupts from the audience when a poet gets a time penalty--meaning they lose points because their poem goes longer than three minutes. Regional variations exist, and you might hear some at NPS. (In Vancouver, for instance, they like to shout, “You’re ruining it for everyone!”) Poets lose a half point for every ten seconds they go over time, which can really add up in a close bout.

 ●     Group Piece: A poem performed by more than one poet. These are scored the exact same way as solo pieces. You can see the teams with some of the tops group pieces and teams in the game at Group Piece Finals at the Middle East on Friday Aug. 16.

 ●     The Primary Author Rule: Each of the four poems a team sends up has to have a different primary writer. This can get a bit interesting when it comes to group pieces, which might have more than one “primary author,” giving their team some strategic flexibility. For example, if Maya and James perform a piece they wrote together in the first round, then one of them could perform a solo piece later.

●     The Point Is Not the Points, the Point Is the Poetry: Traditional slam motto, coined by former Asheville, N.C. SlamMaster Allan Wolf. The phrase has become a mantra of sorts, reminding poets and organizers that the goal of slam is to expand poetry’s audience.

 For more tips on how to enjoy the National Poetry Slam, visit the official NPS Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/NationalPoetrySlam.