Ethnography Results, Week 4

By Evin Schuchardt, Jeremy Nelissen, Ryan Kerbow and Wesley Konderla


Setting:
This outing was personal as there was only one member at the show this week.  This was a Sunday night and there was an actual poetry slam going on.  A poetry slam is a poetry competition in which there are judges who judge contestants poems and presentations.  This is opposed to the regular open mic nights that are usually at Revolution.

The night was windy.  We arrived around 9:15PM.  The competition was held outside to accommodate all the guests.  There were about fifty people present.  This night was a black tie event (which we did not know about).  We guess this was just because of the judges present.  about a third of the people there were dressed up.  Most of these dressed up were poets in the competition.

People:
This seemed to be a very important night for all the poets, so most of the regular poets were seen there.  The MC was someone who had never been MC while we were present.  The poets who usually seem most influential in the happenings of open mic were involved in the slam along with some others.  There were about eight poets involved in the slam.

Slam:
There were about eight poets in the slam.  Each recited two poems: one poem per round.  They were judged on a ten point scale.  The four poets with the most points advanced to the third and final round.  Each round corresponded to the number of minutes the poems were to be.  Out of the final four, the one with the most cumulative points won first place.  The prizes were $20, $10, $5, $5 from first to fourth respectively.

Poetry:
The poetry of the first two rounds almost exclusively dealt with relationships - usually that between a girlfriend/boyfriend or a father.  As it advanced to the last round the poems became more diverse speaking of situations and politics.

Responses:
This was more difficult than in past times to tell how the crowd reacted to the poems.  None of the poems seemed new, but repeats of what the poets had done in the past.  This along with the fact that the audience had to clap for the receiving of points made it hard to gauge how well the audience liked each poem.