Competition Makes You Better

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by Michael DeVoe

Competition makes you better. Playing sports, creating a business, getting good grades, and especially in art. Competing for arbitrary points, money, customers, audience members, fans, youtube views, or pride; it doesn’t matter they will all make you better. Here are a few ways that competing in poetry slams will make you a better poet.

Poetry slams are like crack, addicting and deadly.

Concentration

Comic by Chuck Ingwersen

A good slam is loud, competitive, and fun. The crowd is yelling while you’re trying to remember words, amens are thrown from the back row and the little lady in the front wont stop screaming, “No he didn’t” Think of it like 8-mile with points and no drive-bys, but possibly with sirens driving by the open window of the bar. If you don’t know your poem good luck, but if you can continue to recite your poem through a hail of loud, praise or not, you’ll be able to handle that piece in a feature any time.

Writing
When you hear poets so much better than you for the first time, you either quit, or get better. I chose to get better, I’ve seen a lot kids scratch their name of the list and go home. The challenge of beating better writers should inspire you to pick up your pencil and see how much better you get every time. Searching your vocab for better rhymes, finding new ways to alliterate, painting the most obscure image just to see if you can make it relate. Take the challenge.

Performance
Winning slams is a little bit about your writing and a lot a bit about your acting. This was hard for me because I’m really shy, I just wanted to get up and say poem and go away, but to win a slam you have to get loud, emotional, and animated. It’s as much about rhyme schemes as it is about how much your hands move. Your look can emphasise a phrase, your tone can make a line, and crowd involvement makes a score. The louder you can get the crowd the better the piece was for a slam and the higher your score will be, whether they laugh, cry, yell, hate, or go to church their volume is as important as yours.

Company
Lastly when you’re around other poets, especially the good ones, ask for advice. The best resource you can find on poetry the scene, the business, the talent, or the skill, is other poets, and a slam is full of them take advantage. The first slam I ever won was a week after asking the best poet I know in real life how he won slams, he told me to animate my poems with hand gestures, eyebrows, and tone inflections. Taking his advice was the best move of my career, I won the next slam I was in, and am a better poet all around for it.

If you think you’re a good poet, prove it, your three minutes starts now

Write, Love, SLAM.

Poetry and the Inner Sense

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by H. T. Kainaroi 

Above all, I am a dreamer, and it is through my dreams and my imagination that I create.

Poetry and the Inner Sense

With eyes we see, with ears we hear, with hands we touch, with the nose we smell, and with the mouth we taste.  There is, however, another sensory tool.  It is the mind and the soul, and with this we think, and we produce thoughts and dreams.  It is there that one travels away from the world as it is traditionally known, as it is perceived in most of one's life in an ongoing process of mainly physical senses.

It is the inner sense, the dream world within that allows one to truly feel.  The world in its physicality and day-to-day events do indeed play a part, but it is when attention is directed at this inner sense that the material journey undergoes a change, and is perceived through an alternative lens.

Poetry is one very significant medium in which this transpires. This as well as any other form of art is a literal pouring out of ones dreams into this world, to remind the self and others that, "I am still here and my spirit is alive.  I travel and explore within the world of my mind and my soul and what I see and experience there is of a truer nature than anything that I come across on a purely materialistic level.  Here I am to present it."

It is not a denial of the physical world.  Rather, it is a realization.  Some live for money and/or temporary pleasures.  Others live life only in a process of basic adaption, adaption to the forces of nature, to the seasons, and to what society presents as right and wrong.  However, for the dreamer, for the poet, they say no.

What was mentioned before as living life solely in adaption and/or mere survival is in itself a perception.  In the world of dreams, however, this changes.  And it is the most real worldly interaction because it comes from within.  It is not what one is told to do and is not governed by events only experienced by the five usual senses.  As this interaction comes from within, the sixth sense is added.  It was always there, it is for everyone, but for some it is realized and magnified.  Because it steps away from the usual awareness, the events of the material world no longer govern, but the poet governs because the poet can observe it and see inside it and through it.  As it is the sense from within, this is done as the self, the true self.  One can then realize they are an individual in the truest sense, and inside them there is world of their own, a world of their creation that they can explore forever.  Ultimately, this is freedom.

It is then possible that one can realize such a world in everyone, whether sleeping, dormant , tired, or awake; that everyone is related, and all make up the world.  Poetry reveals this, that there are relations, there are connections, and there is life.  No one is alone.

Streaming words on a piece of paper:  People observe this and many may say. "I don't understand" or "this is absurd."  The dreamer knows that such a reaction is really a blessing, because it only means that the usual sensory world by itself has expressed separation, and is separate.  However, the misunderstood nature of poetry as well as art in general, encourages the need for an understanding, to look past what is presented and to look inside.  If this is done, they who at first were confused and did not understand become poets and dreamers as well.