Autograph Penis: An Adventure in Competitive Performance Art

Day 0 - The Hook

I was a nine-year-old with buck teeth and glasses, on a school bus full of hyena mouths chanting my name in a taunting roar. I was a lovely teenager in a white dress, leaving the podium of my high school graduation stage, having just read a prayer in Jesus' name. I was an unwashed, greasy drudge in a Chem lab at Carnegie Mellon; I led a videoconference with Procter and Gamble's European and American directors; I was in a pretty good book club.

Then I moved to California and was introduced to an art form so fringe and despicable that MFAs retch when you even mention it, an event so irreverent and uncensored that I don't tell the parents of my kids' friends about it, a means of expression so potent that I've devoted my life to supporting it and my career to studying it.

I'm a slam poet.

This is the story of the 2011 National Poetry Slam in Cambridge, Massachusetts-72 poetry teams from coast to coast, verbally slugging it out for reasons we can't totally define.

* "Hooks gotta fit, hooks gotta hit, hooks gotta hit hard in the heart..." from Taylor Mali's "How to Write a Political Poem."