poetry slam?

(cross posted at Midcentury Modern Moms)

I have to admit, I've never heard the term...until last week. Jen sent me a text telling me "Joe and I are going into the city for his poetry slam." I consider mysefl a sophisticated New Yorker and a patron of the arts, not to mention that I majored in English back in the day, but I had to google "poetry slam".

(OMG, the 21st century is creeping into my vocabulary. I didn't look it up, I "googled" it.)

Anyhow, it seems that a poetry slam is a contest, where poets are given a set amount of time to recite their works and judges are randomly selected from the audience. I suppose it's somewhat avant garde ...

Until recently I wouldn't have imagined that this type of entertainment would appeal to Jen. Or that the boy she's going with (a young man she's known since middle school) would turn out to be one of the poets.

Or, for that matter, that Jen would choose "English" as a major. Education majors must double major in a subject area, and she chose English as her subject.

If Jen's 9th grade English teacher heard that Jen was voluntarily going to any event involving poetry, the teacher might actually keel over from the shock.

Oh, the irony of it all.

Jen hated 9th grade English. Or, more specifically, she hated her 9th grade English teacher. Tuned the teacher out completely. Didn't pay attention in class, didn't do assignments, didn't study for tests. with predictable results. At the time she didn't grasp that her behavior was self-defeating, that she was hurting herself and not the teacher by her lack of concern for the curriculum. Instead of going to travel camp that summer, she found herself behind a desk with a literature book in front of her.... managed to walk out of summer school with an "A" in the class...

My, how things have changed.

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