The lobby of Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art thrummed in anticipation April 12 as a dozen poets and an audience of 50 gathered for a poetry slam, a quasi-competitive event whose real purpose is to share the enjoyment of performing poetry. Student poets fidgeted in their chairs, high-fiving and hugging friends or intently scanning verses. Suddenly, the voice of emcee Kate Geenberg '08, a linguistics major, tore through the chatter:

What's the scenario Q-Tip incarnate?
Flip eight tracks for four years back
to screaming A Tribe Called Quest
flicking a Marlboro out of the window
of my brother's black Cadillac
Timeline diviner divinating first revelations
on first nights into new constellations of verse ...

The expletive-spewing yet eloquently articulate Geenberg then introduced poets to read at the open mic, and the first of two slam rounds began. Six slammers, whose majors included natural resources, government and visual studies, signed up.

"You guys all probably have this crazy conception of what slam is or what slam could be, but I'm telling you what I want my slam to be," Geenberg said. "My three rules: Audience members, respect the poets. Poets, respect your audience. Most of all, poets, respect each other."

Randomly selected judges held up scores that were greeted with outrage or thunderous approval. In addition to the applause crackling off the I.M. Pei-designed concrete lobby, the audience indicated approval by snapping their fingers, Beatnik style. Others emitted lusty, ear-splitting whoops. But winning or losing was hardly the point. This was a joyful communal happening at which participation mattered.

"This could determine the rest of our lives as we know them," Geenberg joked with the judges. "These poets' egos are on the line!"

Performances varied wildly. Some poets broke into song, chanted or read in rapid-fire syncopation. Others incorporated cultural references and song lyrics. The rhetoric scaled lofty heights, plunged into guttural raunch, then jerked 180 degrees into unexpected realms of oratory. Some poets enunciated beautifully, others slurred their words into sometimes-indistinguishable mush. Almost every poet performed from memory, usually at a very fast clip.

Slams are held on campus throughout the semester. Alexandra Harlig '10, a linguistics and dance major, was among Cornell students to participate in the seventh annual College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, April 5-7, at Eastern Michigan University.

"It was incredible," she said. "Slams are really a community thing. Even if it's an offensive poem or really political, you're sharing. They always say, the points are not the point. The poetry is the point. I've met friends I never would have known otherwise through slams."

According to Harlig, certain themes predominate. "There's the sex/love poem, the political poem, the 'I'm-so-good' poem, the 'poem about poems' poem," she noted. "You'll hear poems about the poets' families. Then you see the work of the words, because these are not inherently poetic topics. It's refreshing. What you really want is someone with great writing and great delivery." One of Harlig's final stanzas, from a poem titled, "This is how you write a love poem," reads:

Don't shy away from paradox;
Embrace the juxtaposition like any other position:
I want to open your door,
Crawl into bed, and have sweet, bitter
Morning sex tonight.
I want you to open the door;
I'm hoping you'll hear the pulse raging inside me,
open the door, and pull me in.
Don't even say my name,
Just pull me inside and I'll pull you inside,
And when we're done I'll be a little more dead inside
And when we're done I'll be a little more alive.