“Slam came to Pittsburgh in the early ’90s, and it still has a home here. But two long-time practitioners also saw an opportunity for a look back. In the Shadow of the Mic: Three Decades of Slam Poetry in Pittsburgh (Bridge and Tunnel Books), a new book co-edited by Jesse Welch and Adriana E. Ramirez, celebrates the people, places and verses that have made Pittsburgh’s slam scene special.” – Bill O’Driscoll (“A New Book Honors Pittsburgh’s Slam-Poetry Scene,” WESA)
From the Publisher: “In the Shadow of the Mic: Three Decades of Slam Poetry in Pittsburgh celebrates the history, culture, and community of the Steel City Slam, from its founding in the early ’90s to present day. In this collection, editors Jesse Welch and PEN America Literary Award–winning writer Adriana E. Ramírez present twenty-nine poems from thirty spoken word artists, including Stacey Waite, Davon Clark, and Leslie Ezra Smith, who are representative of the life and breadth of three decades of competitive slam poetry in Pittsburgh. Each poem is a deep dive into the individual, the collective, the city, and the spirit of the slam. Interviews with founder Christina Springer, Slammaster D.J. Brewer, and the Shadow Lounge owner Justin Strong tell the origin of Pittsburgh’s slam poetry movement, the highs and lows in the slam’s storied past, and their unique roles in creating a space for budding and established spoken word artists. Every city has its own style, and Pittsburgh’s, simultaneously blue collar and deeply academic, is uniquely ours.”
About the Editors: Jesse Welch is a poet, father, and untalented juggler. He is the co-founder and host of the Nasty Slam, Pittsburgh’s head-to-head deathmatch slam. He has competed at the National Poetry Slam for Chicago, Seattle, and Pittsburgh. He has been performing his poetry since he was twelve years old and appears in the award-winning documentary Louder Than A Bomb.
Adriana E. Ramirez is an award-winning nonfiction writer and poet. She founded Pittsburgh’s infamous Nasty Slam, co-founded the Pittsburgh Poetry Collective, and was the Slammaster for the Steel City Slam from 2006 to 2016. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, ESPN’s The Undefeated, Literary Hub, and Guernica. She won the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her nonfiction novella Dead Boys (2016, Little A). Her first full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner.
Critical Condition
Leslie Ezra Smith
What’s going on in this mixed maze of craze? Seeking the blaze of the sunlight only from the outside, ignoring the light that lies inside our being. Our essence is so much more than fear, false evidence appearing real. Here in the City of Steel, our vision is so rusty; trust me, watching the news any time of the day disgusts me. Seeking unity in illusions of divisions, conditions of subliminal submissions, hypocritical traditions of religions, creating congregations of condemnation, destroying our nation, creating a false sensation of elation, no celebration, just prostration with trembling because we fear the light, our true identity that we often take flight from, right from the beginning when we were taught they were up and we were down, they were white and we were brown, one was better, one was worse, one is a blessing, one is a curse, but, in reality, we were all born from the same cosmic seed, before time and space, fast speed or slow speed, we’re all grown from the same cosmic roots, so, until we proceed forward in unity, we will always be in a critical condition.
I keep my head up high, never keep it low, unless it’s time to pray for the brothers and sisters who don’t know how to flow with the breeze or just chill in the rain, deal with their pain, how to heal with no shame, I wanna leave some hope or some change, forget my name or the fame, if the minds in our hoods in this world remain the same, stagnant, broken-hearted and charted for self-destruction, people claiming, “We got the answers!” so, why we lunching? Why are “positive” people so divided, separated, not motivated or stimulated to do something, to be something, to move something, to see something new? 4-1-2, we gotta get it together! I gotta get some loot cause brothers are broke, the streets they provoke rage, time to turn the page of this hood story, there’s no glory for the folks that got grilled, for the folks that got killed, from a chrome black steel, shit is ill when I see the news, a brother starts catching the blues when I hear an eight-year-old is killed in Homewood, that’s no good for no hood to see that, RIP to Troy Miller and C-Black, Mallet, L.A. Mar, Boots, and whoever else picture that you got chilling on your dusty shelf, just take some time out, and write a rhyme out, stop playing y’all, get focused, love, and cry out! When you need to see through all this bullshit, that the world feeds you when it thinks you’re foolish, for crying out for help, for crying out your pain, these people don’t even know you, don’t even know your name, we’re getting fame, but really, what does it all mean when every time I hit the hood all I see is a dark dream? Until we proceed forward in unity, we will always be in a critical condition.
I got a mind persecution causing mass confusion, what is negative, what is positive? This world is an illusion. Dwelling on a self-destructive plane, full of tribulations and pain, driving us dwellers insane in our brains. A world full of noise, never silence, psychological damage to our mentals brings this world violence. Demons of all colors rule this world of doubt, they got us so messed up, we’ll take our own parents out, we’ll take our own friends out, we’ll take our own children out, we’ll take our own selves out. But, I’m a warrior trapped until the breakdown of my physical, surviving these mind wars, which seems like a miracle. This war of good and evil I will fight until my last breath . . . choosing the Valley of Life over the Valley of Death.
Oh, yes, until we proceed forward in unity, we will always be in a critical, critical, critical condition.
On the Occasion of Being Mistaken for a Man by a Waiter While Having Breakfast with My Mother
Stacey Waite
Let’s just cut right to the chase. The waiter says,
“You and your son have exactly the same smile.”
My mother starts scraping the black burnt off her toast
and the dark chips are falling in her butter
like dead ants. And I can’t drink my juice,
which doesn’t really seem like juice anymore.
I just want to go back to before,
before tomboy turned into butch,
before my father’s will pulled me down from treetops,
before I started making Barbie kiss the Cabbage Patch doll named Lena,
before baseball and the movie Dirty Dancing
(because don’t we all want to be Patrick Swayze?)
before collecting frogs and running from the kissing girls on the playground
(you know those girls who run around and kiss the boys? well, they kissed me, too)
before I stopped being escorted to public bathrooms by my mother,
before high school cheerleaders who were “just experimenting,”
before giving a blow job, before giving another blow job,
before this breakfast with my mother in which she is chewing
her eggs like they are lint from the screen in our dryer, which is always broken.
I just want to go back to before, but I am not before.
I am after, after fourteen lovers and trying to stop counting,
after thirteen have left me for other women,
after three black leather jackets and no bike,
after three phases of lesbian haircuts,
after realizing I am now afraid to climb trees,
after five brands of lesbian chic cigarettes,
after loving straight women like Sappho poems,
after therapy,
after touching the first breast that was not mine,
after hanging out at sports bars because in the eighties it was the only place
to find a dyke who was really serious about being a dyke,
after reading Leaves of Grass,
after hanging my hat on bedposts,
after all, after is all about posts,
I am after, I am post, post-feminist,
post-structuralist, post-partum, post-lesbian,
post-gender, I am the un-gender, post-capitalist,
post . . . office, but I am not sending away for anything,
not mailing anything out. I am after that.
I am post. I am posting up a sign and it says,
“Stand back,” cause not every move I make
is the move of a woman, says the waiter.
I am after, I am after my mother who is still before.
I am after the stupid ice bobbing up and down in her drink,
so stupid it doesn’t even know it is always already
made out of wet. It is always before, as I am before,
before gender, before poetry, before my rattling knees,
before you—I am before you.
Black Momma Math
Kizza
Momma Math
If a jar of jelly is $2.98
& a loaf of Hawaiian bread is $4
Then how much bail money will I need when I kill everyone
in my house
for eating all the bread and jelly in 5 minutes?
Black Momma Math
If a Black Momma has a two 17-year-old Black Boys
What is the probability
that one of them will come home
in a body bag
in the next 5 years?
If Son A leaves Ferguson at 3 p.m. at 60 miles per hour
and Son B leaves Baltimore at 5 p.m. at 50 miles per hour
both driving to Florida,
what time and which morgue
will their bodies be delivered to
when their music and Black Boy Joy inspires a stand-your-ground tango?
Better yet,
what is the cost of a funeral
times 2 if the police
pull them over?
If 6 out of 10 people have math anxiety,
Then how many Black women out of 10
have murdered baby anxiety?
Everyone says Black women can’t math
But we have been Black Momma Mathing
since the beginning of time
They have been long-divisioning us
since Africa became too valuable to keep as a whole
We get
reduced down like fractions
Told we’re not equivalent
Compared to and found wanting against each other
even though we have the same common denominator
Then we get
factored out like quadratic equations
Our squared roots have been cut in half
Our ancestral variables are left unknown
We’re always left the why
If distance equals rate times time
And the rate of Blacks killed by cops
is 9 times more than everyone else
Then how distant are we from
legalized lynching?
Black women are the most educated women in the US
Black Mommas not only Math,
we Black Momma Philosophize
If I let my son play outside with a toy gun
and there are no news cameras around to see it,
when the police shoot him
is it murder or self-defense?
Black Mommas already know
whether justice is a basic human right
or just a Blue illusion
We already know which harsh truths
everyone ignores
until someone not Black
validates us
Is it possible that some people
are just genetically predisposed
to hate?
How free is our will
if our fate
is decided by our melanin
What is the meaning of Black lives
when so many people don’t think
we matter?
Black Momma Math
If a jar of jelly is $2.98
& a loaf of Hawaiian bread is $4
But I’m too scared to let my babies
go to the grocery store
What is the probability that I am just delaying
the inevitable?
This excerpt from In the Shadow of the Mic: Three Decades of Slam Poetry in Pittsburgh is published here courtesy of the publisher and should not be reproduced without permission.
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