It is 11 o’clock and Darren Henry has just emerged from Upscale Restaurant. There are a few people hanging around outside the entrance – the East Coast Car Park is almost deserted, with no buses and a couple of tired late night travellers hoping that the inevitable bus will arrive rather sooner than later.
Someone asks him where he is headed.
“Linden,” he replies, “I am going to the park now to see if I can catch a bus.”
Upscale Restaurant’s Open Mic Poetry sessions usually end around the same time each month, close to midnight, yet Darren Henry is there at every single one of them.
“It is hard to find this sort of thing in Linden,” he offers in explanation, “I am not finding any other poets there to start up something like this.”
Darren Henry is one of a new breed of poets who have found their particular place at Upscale Restaurant – the Slam Poets. Slam Poetry has its origins in the United Sates’ urban centres during the late eighties and early nineties. It was a way of democratising poetry, taking it out of the stuffy and elitist halls of academia and making it more participatory and meaningful to ordinary people. The man credited with founding the art’s main regulatory and licensing body, Poetry Slam Incorporated, is a former construction worker named Marc Smith.
It’s popularity, the competitive nature, and gritty earth-bound themes inspired one critic to label it, “The Death of Art.”
To slam poets, it has been more like a resurrection. For them, slam poetry is a small but growing renaissance – an Enlivenment if you will. Although developed and popularised in the US, Slam Poetry has its roots in the dub poetry of poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mutabaruka. In the past few years, it has been slowly making its way home to speak with poets like Jamaica’s Kei Miller winning small but hotly contested competitions in England and elsewhere. In Trinidad, a monthly gathering of young poets, Writers’ Block, features mainly slam poetry – along with jazz and rhapso – with notable performers like Muhammad Muwakil and Ivory Hayes.
In Guyana, the organisational impetus behind a slam poetry movement comes from mainly two places. Asafa George, Upscale Restaurant proprietor has been pushing Open Mic poetry for five years now, inspired by slam poetry events in the United States where he spends much of his time.
“Poetry nights have never really been a money-making venture me,” he told Pepperpot after Upscale’s Slam Poetry competition held last month, “In fact I’m pretty sure I made a loss tonight.”
When he revived the monthly poetry month last year, he decided to see if he could get some corporate support for the effort. The only company to respond was Scotia Bank – every month, the bank generously donates $20,000. The money is divided equally among a group of around eight regular performers. Still, it is not as much as he would like to see the poets receiving for their efforts.
He is hoping to change that within the next month. Last Tuesday, a special poetry night hosted by the Rotaract Club of Georgetown Central, was quite possibly the last Open Mic poetry night at Upscale – in the form people have become accustomed to. He is planning to move the restaurant from the middle floor of the Quality Building near the East Coast car park, to the ground floor. He intends to install a sports bar there as well, with a smaller restaurant area.
The aim is to have a more sporty and accessible place where patrons can pay an entrance fee to enjoy some poetry or comedy on select nights. The door price for the poetry is intended to reward the poets.
Recently, George was introduced to Natasha Martindale – the other major impetus behind the promotion of slam poetry in Guyana. Martindale herself was first introduced to slam poetry after being taken to the Nuyorican Café by her husband and some of his colleagues. She developed a passion for the art, and dedicated herself to brining slam to Guyana. She has sponsored one slam competition and is currently working on an ambitious programme to bring slam poetry into local schools. While that project is still in gestation, she has been working along with George to give the art form a higher profile. She has made official slam rulebooks, scoring cards and DVD videos available to Upscale Restaurant and its budding slam artistes.
These include Darren along with other young poets like Kojo McPherson, Roschelle Christy, Raule Williams and Trevor Smith. They are bringing a new impetus to the Open Mic contests with their own particular brand of slam, as angry and as clever and as intelligent as anything coming out of the Nuyorican Café. These poets deal with a wide range of topics from love and sex, to politics, the frustration of youth, poverty, even touching on the cell phone war that has recently erupted.
Along with more traditional poets – like Lady Hilda and Jerome Hope – they have been providing patrons of Upscale Restaurant with a unique type of entertainment, the first Tuesday of every month.
Most of the poets come from Georgetown or close by but Darren travels down to Georgetown every time there is a poetry event at Upscale. His commitment has been rewarded in recent weeks – not only does he receive the small stipend as one of the regular Upscale performers but last month he walked away with the first place trophy in the restaurant’s first Slam Poetry Event conducted along official Slam Guidelines.
The $20,000 prize was undoubtedly a welcome reward – so is the trophy, a small wooden microphone. The money’s good for offsetting his travel expenses and to buy him and his friends a couple of drinks and dinner while he’s performing, and the trophy will look good on a shelf or wherever he puts it. But his dedication to developing and spreading the art of slam poetry is what keeps him returning to Upscale. Even if that means the possibility of a long night at the park waiting for a bus to take him home to Linden.