Las Vegas poets prepare for grand Slam

Friday, Aug. 29, 2003 | 8:38 a.m.

Forget the solo journey on a Greyhound bus. Life on the road these days is pretty cushy for slam poet Big Poppa E.

Crossing the country in a black Ford minivan dubbed the "Black Widow," he and his girlfriend, slam poet Hilary Thomas, listen to Harry Potter audio tapes to break up the long drives, and park the van to watch rented movies on a laptop connected to a surround-sound system.

Friends and fellow poets provide a place to sleep for the Austin, Texas, slam team deep into its national coffee-shop-and-bar tour.

"We're couch surfing across America," said an exuberant Big Poppa E, whose real name is R. Eirik Ott, in a phone interview from somewhere in Omaha, Neb. "It feels primal and important. We've given up everything to do this. It's a life-affirming adventure. At the end of it you've got 150 new friends and couches."

Ott and Thomas are members of Broken Word, a slam collective that Ott formed in 2002 with Austin poet Matthew John Conley. On Monday they will perform at Cafe Espresso Roma's weekly open-mike reading on South Maryland Parkway.

The stop is one of 40 performances scheduled in 27 states where Ott and Thomas participate at slam competitions and poetry readings. Venues include Sam's Burger Joint in San Antonio and the more obscure "Paul White's house" in New Mexico.

The reward for their efforts is an enthusiastic exchange with young audiences devoted to the art of slam poetry, a competitive form of performance poetry that usually welcomes anyone with original words, and $50 that will hopefully fund their drive to the next city.

"It's about what we'd make as assistant managers at Taco Bell," Ott said jokingly. "Only we're not assistant managers at Taco Bell."

The 36-year-old Ott is known among the performance poetry circuit for his "Wussy Boy Manifesto." The poem is a tribute to the sensitive heterosexual male unimpressed by football and "Budweiser poster girls."

Energetic and inspired Ott rants with the fervor of a rapper/Southern minister in original poems such as "Jesus Moshpit," where he fantasizes about being the "biggest guy" in a moshpit full of "shirtless teenagers in their prime."

"I got arms like I-beams, fists like anvils, neck like a sewer pipe, head like a Volkswagen," he declares in the poem.

In "Chain Record Store Blues" with strained vocal chords, Ott relays the despair of a store clerk working Christmas Eve: "I'm on the edge man, after listening to hours and hours of Kathy Lee Gifford singing 'White Christmas' and I'm flying high on Nyquil and 17 Jolt colas and I haven't had a break in five hours ..."

"It's poetry. It's pure poetry," Ott said, referring to his and Thomas' performances. "But we also draw on the energy of standup comedy and dramatic monologue. It draws on jazz, hip-hop, punk rock ... It's us holding a microphone white-knuckled inches from your face."

Ott was part of a slam team that won first place at the National Poetry Slam in 1999 in Chicago, and has organized slams across the country. He graduated from Chico State University in California with a journalism degree and dabbled in the field. But touring has become his main interest.

In the summer of 2000, Ott bought a Greyhound bus Ameripass and performed at 65 slams in 27 states toting only a backpack. It was that summer Ott met Thomas on the 2000 Slam AmericaBus Tour that traveled coast-to-coast in 30 days.

Thomas was part of an Austin slam team featured in the documentary "Slamnation." Compared to Ott, her work is more sentimental and fluid and focuses on relationships and gender.

In a poem titled, "the dream i had," Thomas writes, "i'd run into you at a roadside steakhouse somewhere and we'd leave together in a flurry of empty coffee cups and one-dollar bills a Willie Nelson tune singing us out and away toward the blueness of the highway.

"we'd get married in the Grand Canyon. we wouldn't have children we'd find them feral and hungry and brilliant, and we'd make our home somewhere where there are mountains and trees and where it snows in the winter, a place where you have to draw water from the earth itself."

In 1994 Thomas was hosting an open-mike poetry reading when she first learned of slam poetry and was drawn to its "unfoiled energy."

"It's raw, it's intentional, it's emotional," Thomas said. "The slam connects the poet with the audience. It breaks the audience out of their cage."

Broken Word usually tours the college circuit, but created the "Going to the Trouble" tour as a pre-college adventure for Ott and Thomas to share.

To make herself available for the "Going to the Trouble" tour, Thomas took a semester off from college.

From outside Boheme Bistro in Ames, Iowa, where the two were getting ready to slam, Thomas reflected on the experience via telephone.

"It's very welcoming," she said. "It's very open. Even if the crowds are small, they're enthusiastic. People come up after our show and we'll just talk.

"It's about how we can give the best show we possibly can and make money to eat."

And Broken Word is not the only slam poetry team on the road.

"There's at any given time, dozens of slam poets making way from coast-to-coast."

The night before, Broken Word performed at The Green Room in Iowa City with two other slam poetry tours passing through.

"The paths all crossed in this starry-eyed moment," Thomas said. "We did a Haiku death match. The energy just went straight through the roof."

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