Hah.

So. Poetry slam.

We went at around 8. The place is a little way off the Ashby Bart Station, in a bar called the Starry Plough.

The first thing you notice about the bar is the walls. Absolutely covered with photographs of personalities from the 70s, along with a call to revolution neatly scribed on one side. Looking around at the people sitting at the tables, you have no doubt the political stance they have.

It was wonderful.

I hesitate to say that this is what I came to college for, even though that’s what I said, because it reeks of elitism. It’s like writers who act like what they do is some lofty thing that’s above the lives of everyone else, who forget that they write about lives – of (relatively) ordinary people, and that they’re never above anyone else. The place was full of intellectuals, but it was honest. The cover charge of $7 made sure that any pretentious hipsters were driven away, and in the end you get something pure and simple. You had people who did spoken word and listened to spoken word because they genuinely liked it, not because it looked cool.

3 hours. 3 hours of freewheeling line and verse, with a girl talking about stagefright, a guy duo doing a piece about hip hop being an anthem of survival and not of violence, a 70 year old woman talking about getting off (you had to be there, it was fantastic), another one about motherhood, and on and on.

3 hours of spoken word. Everybody there pouring their hearts out, pouring their time and soul and words into something, not with pride but with humility. This is what college is about. This is the shit.