It's Only Hours Away

In just a couple short hours, Brass Knuckles will be balls deep in an opening night full of poetry, slam, and most importantly, fuckery. Of course, tonight we will mainly be trying to focus on the slam festivities... Not so much the fuckery part. But fuckery is hard to ignore.

As far as slam is concerned, some people don't know what the hell we're talking about. So, where gonna give you the run down. Basically, Slam is competitive performance poetry. In Slam, the focus is not just on writing, nor is it just on performance, but it should be a little bit of both. Poets perform original work within an alloted time period and get to be judged by selected members of the audience. Generally, most slams are open to everyone. Tonight's Slam is what we refer to as a "qualifier" which basically means that you must participate in and place in the top 5 to then be eligible to compete in the Semi Finals and so on. Think basketball. Everybody don't get to play for the Championship... Only a select few get to compete in the higher level for a shot at the title, and of course, that's based on their previous performance in preliminary games -- or as we say in Slam, "bouts". In this particular case, "The Championship" would be a spot on the 2010 Los Angeles Slam Team. Once you make the team, you get to go to Nationals and compete against other teams from all over the country, and that's basically the whole point.

Got it?

Okay, good. The rules are as follows:

-Each poem must be of the poet's own original work

-Each poet gets three minutes (plus a ten-second grace period) to read one poem. If the poet goes over time, points will be deducted from the total score.

-The poet may not use props, costumes or musical instruments, nor may they do a poem with another person or persons.

-Of the scores the poet received from five randomly selected judges, the high and low scores are dropped and the middle three are added together, giving the poet a total score of 0-30.

That's pretty much it. Judges, score cards, boisterous audience, 2 fly hosts, and some fierce poetry gets us a one way ticket to Slam-ville.

I'm excited. How about you?