The Great Debate, #632: Is Freestyle Poetry?

Many say it isn't. I say, it depends.

One of the arguments against it that I hear the most is that it's unfair to pit a freestyle against a poem that's been crafted over time, edited and revised, etc. If you picked up some slam bias from the "unfair," you nailed the issue. Freestyle is impressive to an audience, generally scores high and, therefore, e=mc2 and freestyle is not poetry! There's also the question of how much of the freestyle is actually improvised, with the inference that the prefacing of a piece that may incorporate pre-existing work as a freestyle is gimmicky, not befitting the honorific of poetry.

In the slam, it's all about connecting with the audience and, more specifically, with the five random judges picked from that audience. There's a number of ways to do this: humor, politics, personal narrative, rant, memorized or on page, brand new or moldy oldie. Whatever angle a poet chooses to come from is legitimate and the poetic value of their work is not based on which categories it falls into but on the substance of the work itself. We've all heard some unpoetic stuff in slams before, probably more often than not. But, introduce the element of spontaneity and suddenly, the poetic value is no longer based on substance, rather on the form chosen to express it.

IMO, freestyle is as valid as reading that new piece straight out of your notebook. Sometimes it's raw, sometimes it comes out perfect. The fact of the matter is that freestyle takes practice, a continual honing of one's craft, not unlike the process a poet who writes everything down goes through. Does the freestyler hit a false note here and there? Surely. But probably no more than the poet who spends hours revising, looking for the perfect word or turn of phrase.

I used to hate funny poetry. Still have a bias against it but I've come to appreciate the fact that poetry can be funny and part of my early dislike of it stemmed from my inability to incorporate humor into my own work. I've lost slams to funny poems. Heard poems I loved get beat by funny poems. Just like I've been beaten by hyper-political poems and identity poems at times.

Shit is random in the slam. That is a fact. A 10 doesn't ultimately mean a thing, and neither does 0. That's another fact. Complaining about freestyle is like complaining about comedy, dumb judges and old poems. It is ultimately - no pun intended - pointless. ;-)