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Getting Slammed
By
Jan Steckel
My friend the Berkeley street poet Julia Vinograd says there are only four slam poems in the world:
(1) I'm Fat and I Can Beat You Up
(2) The Government is Evil
(3) I've Just Had Sex and It's the First Time Anyone Ever Has
(4) I'm a Victim and It's Your Fault.
I've decided to combine (1) and (4).
I'm feeling a bit beleaguered this week. It started when I tried to lie on my yoga mat in the back of a poetry reading. A bookstore clerk who thought I looked too much like a homeless person tried to harass me out of the place. I did my best to be charming and accommodating until her supervisor pulled her off of me with the apologetic look of someone yanking their out-of-control dog's leash. I refrained from quoting the Americans with Disabilities Act. I didn't say, if I had a wheelchair instead of a yoga mat, would you be trying to kick me out? I figured honey catches more flies.
Then on the Lesbian Writer's list the next morning, someone complained that a poem of mine sounded too much like prose. I responded with polite humor that most of my poetry was prose in disguise, but the critic kept worrying me through three e-mails like a little bulldog with lockjaw. How could she possibly critique my work, she demanded, if it wasn't really poetry? She got herself very worked up. You would have thought I'd said I wasn't either straight or gay.
Which brings me to the Bay Area Sappho e-mail list, where a self-described old-school butch lesbian violently objected to my advertising my upcoming San Francisco poetry reading by calling myself a "bi-dyke poet." She took offense because she thought I tried to soften the term "dyke" by putting "bi" in front of it and steal the credibility of real lesbians. Now, is that a very gentlemanly way for a real butch to behave? I call it catty.
The next day my sister-in-law objected to my referring to my queer politics in front of her kid, because "queer" was a dirty word. At the same family gathering, my aunt asked me what size I wore, then told me I shouldn't get too comfortable at that weight, you know she had just joined a gym. My cousin the rabbi called me "one of those Jews with Christmas trees" the same week that I had to listen to cute little baby poets of color raving in a café about Zionist conspiracies. I was beginning to feel like Daniel in the morons' den.
So now it's that time of the month, my claws have come unsheathed, I'm channeling Bette Davis, and you know what I've decided? No more Ms. Nice Zaftig Bisexual Lesbian Invisibly Disabled Jewish American Princess. I'm repatriating every epithet in the book. I'm taking back the whole damned dictionary. I'll call myself whatever the hell I want, and write the way I like it. If I want to read my shopping list for Good Vibrations aloud and call it a poem, I'll do that, too, because my shopping list makes better poetry than half of what I read and hear these days, anyway. And if anyone out there doesn't like it, they can just kiss my big, fat, fence-sitting, crippled kyke-dyke not-really-a-poet's ass.
Copyright © 2006 Jan Steckel
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