Kevin Holmes, a native of Walnut Creek and a student from UC Santa Cruz, is locally famous as the senior member of his campus’ Kinetic Poetics Project (KPP), an intercollegiate poetry team and slam organization.
Kevin’s talent has gotten him invited every year of college to a collegiate national. His first year, he got to go to Albuquerque; second, Michigan; third, Austin; and fourth, Pennsylvania. He has even competed against Poet High in the semifinals with the Berkeley team, consisting of Christian Drake and Steve Needs. Kevin has even competed in events that had Jamie DeWolf, a poetry slam legend legend, as the host.
So what is slam poetry? Kevin says it is a question that he gets asked in every interview. The slam itself is a semi-formal competition; the amount of contestants is unlimited and they all compete in the first round, each given three minutes for their poem. Judges are randomly selected out of the audience members and are given score cards. The scores range from 0 (the worst) to 10 (the best). The top 5 scoring first round contenders move on to the final round, where each is given five minutes. 1st, 2nd and 3rd place rankings are given. Props, music and costumes are not allowed.
After these formalities, the form of the spoken word performance is limitless and “democratic,” as Kevin puts it. The idea originated from the beatnik poetry scene of the 1950s and the Def Poetry Jam that started in the 80’s. The former thrived on a Dada approach while the latter featured hip-hop oriented deliveries. Nowadays, any type of spoken word can be named slam poetry. Kevin says he has seen people perform a dialogue as one person; switching from voice to voice. “Others do monologues, some do a hip-hop delivery over a human beat box, others do it completely deadpan,” he says. “Sometimes it rhymes, sometimes its stream-of-consciousness.”
The poetry slam is also not just an art form – it’s a type of therapy. Kevin asked me “where else can you go to with a room full of strangers and say whatever is eating you and just pour your guts out over a microphone and it be applauded?”
This is what makes a Poetry Slam different: anyone can perform however they want to. There are no sanctions for content or structure. The slam stage is where Tristan Tzara is more of a figure to poetry than Keats. “I saw a girl get up on stage once, and you could tell she had never done a poem before,” Kevin says. “She used a lot of clichés but you could tell it was on a subject she had never actually spoken to anyone about before. But she was from the gut and she blew away the competition.”
This was not the case for Kevin. When he went to his first poetry slam during his second week of college in 2004, Kevin had only ever casually written poems in high school. He did not plan on reading. Conveniently he had his poetry notebook and he decided to read one of his works aloud. Kevin says he “was terrible, but was instantly hooked and started practicing and writing rigorously and attending as many slam as possible from then on.”
He describes his earlier work as personal, almost like “journal entries,” except too “lyrical” and “poetic” to be categorized as either. Their content dealt with general shortcomings of the world, love, politics and identity.
Recently, Kevin has been writing unstructured, surreal poetry. He attributes this mainly to reading Tristan Tzara, one of the founding fathers of the Dada movement and later a follower of the surrealist movement. Kevin has also been listening to Nismoj Ghni, another local poet.
But Kevin describes the creative process as a combination of many things. “If you go to a slam regularly,” he says, “you get inspired by your peers and team members. We do have teams that go and compete and when you’re on one, those poets are going to influence your writing style. When I write with my friend, Jen Gigantino, I end up writing stuff more abrasive and graphic. Even the venue itself has an influence.”
The slam styles even vary regionally. Kevin, who has competed in Los Angeles, says that there there is a lot more hip hop influence. “I’ll walk into a room and be the only white male and one of the oldest…there are a lot more high schoolers than in Santa Cruz scene. Because of this, there are a lot of different issues that are dealt with. And these will all have an effect on how and what you perform…it’s interesting to test out the social atmosphere by seeing people’s reactions to certain subject matter.”
As an example of this, Kevin was honored this year when dozens of his peers at UC Santa Cruz requested that he perform a poem at graduation. “David Evan Jones, the college provost, was afraid of having my original poem read to old people since it had a mention to abortion as a metaphor,” Kevin says, “and it had various awe-inspiring double entendres about being f***ed. The message was ‘you’re going to get out into this world, it’s going to suck so deal with it but don’t forget the things you promised yourself here today and keep aiming high.’”
Originally, Kevin had dropped the expletives from his edited poem. Then graduation happened.
“I got so into it and audience’s energy, so I swore a couple times, dropping the f-bomb,” he says. “It showed how naïve I am and what four years can do to you. Sometimes when you’re reading a poem, you’ll add or cut a line, depending on the audience; I improvised a derogatory line about Bush. After the ceremony, I got a lot of compliments. But then Jones said he felt ‘betrayed.’ In an e-mail I got from a parent, I was called a ‘twisted psychopath.’ I learned a lot from that particular performance; you have to, especially when outside of a poetry slam, take more into consideration. I never thought about how the audience might take it but I was not inspired by the parents: I was inspired by the students. It was invigorating to read in front of my peers, particularly with people who had never been to a poetry slam. I made a rash decision that I would never repeat again.”
Before this, Kevin became known for his spoken word performances through the KPP, a campus group that organized bi-weekly poetry events. Yearly, KPP holds a contest of slam poets from around the Bay Area that compete in a five day tournament. The contest brings world-famous poets to host the event as “pallet-cleansers” for in between the rounds. In 2005, André Gibson hosted, 2006, Katy Worthsing and 2007 the Ammo Trio. This year’s tournament was able to nab the biggest name in modern slam poetry: Saul Williams.
The idea started while Kevin and his KPP poets were tabling. They were brainstorming ideas about possible hosts. They then started joking around about the improbability of getting as big of a name as Saul Williams. Then Kevin actually pursued it with an e-mail to Williams’ Blog, which got him a contact number for Williams’ agent. The phone call to the agent turned into two weeks of persistent follow-up phone calls, tracking and communications. Kevin’s effort got Saul Williams as their host for competition’s third night, though also at a monetary cost. KPP had to raise “a lot” of money and request some from the campus’ senate. But to Kevin, “nothing is impossible if you have a community that agrees with you and can back you up.”
Kevin is currently in L.A. interning with a production company. “Originally I was going to stop doing poetry in order to focus on the internship, which I am pulling more than fifty hours a week on. But poetry makes me happy and I can’t stop.”
Kevin says that the Bay Area poetry scene is amazing and you should check it out by googling the “Northcal Poetry Update.” It posts news about shows and events. There is a show by Jimmy DeWolf and the Suicide Kings that is getting national attention and just got nominated for the Best of the Bay Area Theater. The Bay Area is home to such poets as Mark Bathumie, Mike McGee, Jimmy DeWolf, Laura Yes Yes, Lucky 7 and Abraham and Isaac Miller.
Enough by Kevin Holmes
And the house band calls themselves the log cabins Our commotion rises into their cover song They had a banjo, an accordion, a washtub bass Couldn’t sing like the boys on MTV So we sung in tongues Out there the air stings like whiskey Out there our Polaroid memories age like wine Out there we’ve been possessed by demon called life
So in here tonight We sing exorcisms like salvation hymns We sacrifice yesterday like it was a sheep at the alter The alter is a keg We’re partying like we’re 17 again I am only 21 It is funny how 4 years can make these arms feel like a galaxy On a planet called earth where There are more arms than I can count There are more galaxies in the universe then human beings on this planet And this bottleIt tastes like pulpy orange juice when compared to the stuff That out there in the real world I’ve been sipping from these lungs Because out there We all have jobs and staplers and girlfriends and steering wheels and telephones and Styrofoam and that is the shit that will really get you fucked up
I swear That vodka will never be as potent as painting our goals And calling them a self-portrait I swear That if Jesus had said this is my wallet it is my body take it as communion We would have remembered that I swear That friendship and family look so much sexier when hope and breakfast and the inevitability of death are worn like beer goggles I swear The Angels spiked the atmosphere I swear You can’t get a ticket for breathing under the influence can’t get help for human beings anonymous And I swear I have seen something divine in the goofy grin refracted off of empty beer bottles Me I am an empty beer bottle Me I am standing in the middle of a room I have never been to before Trying to piece back together my first pre-teen kiss Because if I meet you here and you kiss me Can it be like the first pre-teen kiss again?
Wedding bells? Can you hear them The distant sound of beer bottles Clinking Clinking Like shovels Like knives As we re-open the scars of our childhood to the air And it stings Like fucking whiskey As we shout will you love me now Will you love me whole And quite possibly the holy trinity is me and the two friends I came to this party with We are holy because I saw you across the party’s mosh pit in a drunker stupor often mistaken as breathing Drunk on air We are nothing but rust Nothing but incomplete riddles with wholes naked And if there’s something more human then me standing here now and telling you -I am a worthless piece of shit and I’m okay with that
and -I love myself then show it to me
our mortality chug-a-chug-chugs along behind us like an aging car engine ‡ drown it out fl raise our voices like shot glasses and toast then ‡ fuck it all fl let’s go out on Pacific Avenue and ghost ride the reaper Let his scythe, chug-a-chug along behind us like an aging car engine As the days roll like wheel down an empty road to nowhere And get out and dance And dance And dance in the headlights like they were spotlights and this road This nowhere It is somewhere It is enough And if the air, didn’t sting so sour What would remind us to take a Polaroid memory of this nowhere has developed Into such a beautiful place To be aliveAnd us log cabins We’ve mistake ourselves for a house band The way our commotion rises Into a cover Song of blankets Song of goodnight
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