What do you think are the major differences between Slam Poetry, Page Poetry, and Open Mic Performance Poetry?
Dixon-I can’t give a definitive answer to this question, but I’ll share a few impressions. Slam poetry is about performance and writing, and the best Slam poets attend effectively to both. Slam poems, because they must engage a live audience and be comprehensible on a first hearing, often tend toward dramatic monologue. The competitive aspect of a Slam, though not always my preference, promotes intensity in the performances. In my experience, some open mic poets perform and others do a straight reading from the page. It obviously depends a lot on the particular audience and venue as well. Open mics seem to catch a little bit of everything. Good “page” poetry makes effective use of lineation, and it has greater liberty to work with nuances of language or ideas that might be missed on a single hearing. Poets who write exclusively for the page should still be concerned with musicality, with how the poem sounds when read aloud. There is ultimately no dark line between these different forms
