Interview with Ryan Mergen

Ryan Mergen, the host at JibberJabber and an associate of the Baltimore Slam Team, was kind enough to grant me an interview after tonight’s performance. I’ve here recorded, as best as I can, the discussion we had. He had a lot of wonderful information about both his personal experience and slam as a phenomenon!

Ryan said that he’s been performing Slam for ten years. He got started as a college student in San Jose, California, by performing poetry for friends and coworkers. He was invited to a poetry event, which turned out to be a slam. While there, he felt sure that he could out-perform the winner, so he tried his hand at slam. He won his first performance with a poem about stage fright – from which he happened to be suffering at the time. However, for Ryan, slam became an “addiction.” He was moved by the “love of the word” and the finesse of the art. He felt like it was “sculpting a three-minute moment for other people”.

Ryan continued to describe a difference between different types of poetry performers. E doesn't do slam, indicated Ryan. It's hard being put in a situation where he is wholly vulnerable to critique. However, E is very good on the page. Also, Ryan pointed out that the crowd “looks for different things in the spoken word than on the page”. Ryan advocated slam as a democratic art form, describing how there are five judges who tell him “whether they think my thoughts are worth anything or not.”

In slam, “the focus is all about winning at the start”, said Ryan. However, “As you perform, you realize that you will beat everyone and that everyone will beat you.” As the poet matures, he finds that there is a “game within the game”, and the name of that game is social change. The poet realizes that he has the ability to change people’s minds, providing “edutainment”. Ryan said that he feels like it’s the poet’s duty to “contribute to the world, to make positive changes”. And they do this by reaching out to the audience and providing them topics to ponder and issues to mull.

However, not all poems are suited for the audience. Ryan described how he’ll write twenty to thirty poems in any given year. However, “only two to three cut it”. Only two to three are of the sort that the audience will relate to and appreciate. However, Ryan observed that the types of poems that will be appreciated vary greatly between different areas due to regional differences. Ryan also noted that “it is difficult to be completely innovative in slam” because the audience comes to expect certain patterns or behaviors from the poet. Ryan observed that first person narrative and storytelling are the most common tropes, which relate directly to the origins of all performance of the spoken word: ancient story-telling. “Slam is descended directly from the beats” said Ryan, but, even more anciently, from these story-tellers. Also common, however, are hip-hop and confessional style performances.

Ryan listed Denver, British Columbia, San Francisco, New York, and New Orleans as the major hubs of slam performance in the United States. However, having lived for some time in Prague, he was also familiar with the German scene, which is now about ten years old. He said that the German Nationals is really international, and teams from Austria and Switzerland also compete there. Ryan was able to complete in German slams. Though he performed in English, enough of the German population knows English that he was able to be quite successful. However, aiding this, Ryan was also careful to tailor his poems such that they were easier for native speakers of another language to understand. Also interesting, the Germans are supportive enough of the arts that they are able to have strictly professional artists. Meanwhile, the American populace is not yet sufficiently supportive of performance poets for our poets to subsist by their art alone.

I’m very grateful to Ryan for his time, and I’m looking forward to seeing him this Sunday at the SLAMicide, at the Baltimore Slam Team’s new headquarters, the Den Lounge.