Poetry Reading

I went to a “Story Slam” at Kieran’s Pub in Minneapolis. People went up and spoke short stories that had to be less than five minutes and then assigned score keepers would hold up scores from 0-10 and if you agreed with the score everyone would cheer and if you didn’t then people would boo. I thought the overall atmosphere was really fun and enjoyable to be at, but the stories and poems were really bad in my opinion. The theme was “rebellion” so people told stories about mostly college or their first job, people were getting high scores and I don’t really know why. One of the people said, “Half the pit was in the sun, and half of it was in the shade, so the black people should sit in the sun because their skin is used to it while the white should sit in the shade because our skin isn’t” (Talking about taxi driving). Which I thought was so not PC I was embarrassed that he said that out loud. Another part of the night that I thought was uncomfortable was when people talked either really quietly or really loud. One woman went up and read a poem about rebelling against conforming society which I feel like would have been a really great poem but she spoke so quietly my dad and I couldn’t hear anything. The only word I heard was “Wikipedia.”  All the other people were kind of creepy and if I didn’t voice record the entire show on my phone I would have completely forgotten what they spoke about.

The best part of the night easily was the M.C., she was hilarious and in between the people’s stories she would talk about her own rebellion and it was so funny. The best story she told was when she was talking about getting drunk before a Lutheran candle ceremony and she was “sticking it to the Lutheran church because she was catholic,” but she ended up setting her hymnal on fire. She would be the reason I would go to one of those again but otherwise it was awkward and I didn’t have very much interest in the readings.