WHAM! IT’S A POETRY JAM

Guaranteed to get even confirmed classroom drones out of their seats and into an audience’s face, this high-energy manual is a poetry slam-dunk, combining plenty of easy practice pieces—“The guinea pig has fleas, / there are grass stains on my knees, /AND IT’S ALL MY FAULT?”—with pithy advice about voice, gesture, rhythm, and other aspects of solo, paired, and choral performance. Except for a closing note to adult “coordinators,” Holbrook (Walking on The Boundaries of Change: Poems of Transition, 1999) addresses young “jammers” directly, delivering a mix of practical tips and inspirational exhortation, inviting experimentation with the original examples she provides, emphasizing that attitude and technique are equally important, and finishing with suggested rules for poetry competitions. Glazner’s Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (2000) remains the older slammer’s bible, but younger readers looking for ways to get poetry “from the page to the stage” will get plenty of help here. (Nonfiction. 10-15)