Ethnography results, Week 5

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


Goal:
The goal of this outing was to once again observe poetry slam and get the reactions of the audience to get a general feel for the reason why they would go to a place such as Revolution.

Setting:
Again on a Sunday night around 10PM we ventured to the venue.  When we passed the parking lot was full but we could not see anyone outside in the courtyard.  We were curious but proceeded to park.  When we walked in most of the people were huddled inside with the windows open so those on the outside could hear.  There was camera equipment on the inside and we guessed there was a recording of some sort in progress.  There were about 20 people outside when we arrived smoking, talking, and listening to the poetry.  The outside group was less listening to the poetry and more talking to one another in seemingly the groups they came with.  There were about 40 people crammed inside sitting on the floor listening again to the poetry slam where people were reciting poetry.

People:
We recognized about six poets from our last adventure to poetry slam.  The Austin group was back (the feature of the last slam) and many of the local poets were back.  The bartender was the same, so we are thinking that he may be the owner of the place as he seems to have many connections.  There was the same host for the slam as well.

Feature:
We were only able to listen to about two poets before the feature presentation came on.  Outspoken Bean, a Houston poet (http://www.outspokenbean.com/ - which is currently out of date), was the feature and had a set list of a span of about an hour and a half.  He was doing a live recording at Revolution for Mic Check (I assume that Mic Check is what the poetry slam is at Revolution on Sunday nights).  He was encouraging people to support the arts.  About a third of the people there had heard him do poetry before.  He had a sound guy and another guy with him who occasionally aided him in his poetry.  These poems seemed of a bit more mature variety than you would find on any open mic poetry slam.  This is probably due to the fact that he is a bit older than many of the local poets (at age ~24).  For this everyone was encouraged to crowd the bar and roughly 60 people were seated in side at the height of the occupancy.  There were also still a few people outside.

Audience Response:
The audience was very receptive to Outspoken Bean, though not as enthusiastic as he wanted (since he was doing a live recording).  As the night progressed, however, the audience did build in emotional response as they connected more and more with his poetry.  His poetry focussed more on events going on in the world around us than personal testimony like it seemed the local poets were reciting.  Once again the audience did grow excited with snaps and claps of his resonances of poor self-image being unjustified, broken and stale religion, sexual and sensual references, and meaningful people in his life.