By BRIAN SLATTERY | New Haven Independent
On Monday afternoon, halfway through the Z Experience Poetry Slam, host Ngoma Hill remarked that this year — the event’s 27th — saw the event’s biggest turnout yet. It was a fitting return to in-person form for the slam, in honor of community organizer Zannette Lewis, as poets filled the O.C. Marsh Lecture Hall in the Yale Science Building and, for a few hours, turned it into one of the hottest slams on the East Coast.
The event — supported by the Yale Peabody Museum, which is midway through renovation of its own space — featured performances by Abioseh Joseph Cole, Ameerah Shabazz-Bilal, Goddess Tymani Rain, Hattress Barbour, Lyrical Faith, Ray Jane, Tchalla Williams, Slangston Hughes, William Washington, and Yexandra Diaz.
After an open mic hosted by poet Croilot Semexan, as well as a group performance by veteran poets Cole, Sharmont Influence Little, and Michael Peterson, Ngoma explained the rules for the slam. Each poet would get the same time limit to perform, with points deducted for exceeding that limit. Their work would be scored by five judges on a scale of 1 to 10; their score for each poem would be calculated by throwing out the lowest and highest scores and adding up the other three. There were also cash prizes: $1,000 for first place, $500 for second place, and $250 for third place.
All of that, and the fact that the room was full of people eager to hear what the poets had to bring, made for an afternoon where antes were upped, games raised, and, in time, souls bared.
Abioseh Joseph Cole’s opening move was a rumination on Blackness that dug into the history of his race consciousness and the way it gave him strength to face present-day racism. “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” he said, “because guess what: you are, too.” His poem drew a score of 26.8, even after including a penalty for running over time. The other poets would have to bring their best, and they did.
William Washington used a repeating phrase of “drip, drip” from his faucet to mix blood and tears together. “We are being murdered one by one, and as that one drop drips into the sink, I wonder if that one is safe to drink,” he said.
Hattress Barbour offered praise: “The women in my family are magic. I have seen them transform tragedy into triumph,” he said. “They withdrew pain from wounds I didn’t know I had.… That monument they’ve been waiting for has always been right here,” he concluded, pointing to his heart. His penalty for running over did not go over well with the crowd.
Ameerah Shabazz-Bilal talked about the work of developing a higher consciousness. “Can we just be Black and free?” She also ran over the clock, and it cost her.