Iyeoka Ivie Okoawo will be among the ninety-six of the world’s top performance poets, representing slam venues from around the globe, converging for three days of competition and community for the 2009 Individual World Poetry Slam (iWPS) Oct 8-10 in Berkeley, California.** Iyeoka writes on the science of slamming:
I say for arts sake SLAM a poem.
You can READ a poem just as casually
as you can declaim what is on your mind.
You can take a stab at leaving OUT the poetry and the rhyme.
Delete the memory and the melody.
Leave the gut alone.
Forget about who is listening.
Better yet, stop listening to poems you could never write on your own.
Choose to rearrange the game to pronounce every poet who touches the stage a champion.
or…you can watch what happens when the rules of engagement is injected into the formula. You can write the syllabus, the curriculum, the objectives of the movements. You can DANCE if you want to.
You can witness the emergence of a qualitative standard of fierceness.
You can testify to a simple action suddenly becoming more difficult to accomplish.
A moment involving voice and words, body and microphone to materialize into the art of balancing strategy and poetry.
This is the science of slamming.
Technically anyone of us can win.
To win is not why we come.
To lose is NOT why we come.
We come to slam.
Anything else would be uncivilized…
or boring.
**Iyeoka Ivie Okoawo went on to win the 2nd place title at the 2009 IWPS competition on October 10th, 2009.
