How Falling in Love is like Owning a Dog

The American poetry slam movement is rooted in the ancient and intimate tradition of oral storytelling. For thousands of years, storytelling has been a principal tool in passing on cultural knowledge and beliefs from one generation to the next. Stories in this tradition instruct, but they also entertain, ensuring the continuation of this practice throughout history due to its fluidity.

Contemporary oral traditions, such as spoken word performances, combine the rebellious, jazz-inspired pacing of the Beat generation with a more confessional style modeled after other poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s. Author and researcher Susan B. A. Somers-Willett discusses the tenets of modern storytelling in her critical essay, “Slam Poetry: Ambivalence, Gender, and Black Authenticity in ‘Slam,’” highlighting the influences, evolution, and the places that oral storytelling and modern slams hold in contemporary times.

Poetry slams are “competitive versions of local poetry readings [that] emerged in the late 20th century as a literary-performative genre of protest and celebration” (Somers-Willett, Susan B. A. “Slam Poetry: Ambivalence, Gender, and Black Authenticity in Slam.” Text, Practice, Performance Journal of Cultural Studies, 3.1: 37–63, 2001). Similar to ancient Greek poetry competitions, slam poets “perform their own work in three-minute time slots, which is in turn judged Olympic-style from zero to ten by randomly-chosen members of the