Transcripts

SPEAKER 1: Hundreds of the world's top spoken word artists are in St. Paul this week, competing in this year's National Poetry Slam. The reigning national champions are actually from St. Paul. And some members of that soapboxing team joined Kerri Miller today on Midmorning. One of them, St. Paul Slam master Matthew Rucker, talked about how an audience can make or break a performance.

MATTHEW RUCKER: There's what we refer to as an energy exchange that goes on between the poet and the audience, where the poet gives their energy to the audience. The audience takes that energy, adds to it, and then sends it back to the poet. And it continues to just rotate, rotate. And if there's no audience or a very small audience, then the poet is on stage alone with their own energy, and it's just not going to rise up.

SIERRA DEMULDER: It can also be compared to if you go to a sports game in a big arena, of course, these players are going to play as well as they possibly can in the game. But it sure does help to have 1,000 screaming fans.

And the same what Matthew was saying about the energy exchange, it sounds cliche, but it's really true. It's like an intimate conversation. If you said something very passionate to me and I have to catch my breath like, OK, that's an exchange. That's the best way. That's my favorite thing about competing and performing.

KHARY JACKSON: I want to add--

KERRI MILLER: And I say, yeah.

KHARY JACKSON: I want to add that it isn't necessarily a vocal response from an audience. I personally am usually very silent in the audience, but I'm taking in what's going on very attentively. And oftentimes, my favorite response from the audience is a very quiet one.

KERRI MILLER: Really?

SIERRA DEMULDER: Yeah, I understand that.

KHARY JACKSON: I have poems where they're whooping and hollering, and I love that because I'm like, I like being funny too. But my favorite response ever was when I read a poem and at the end, one person said, wow.

SPEAKER 1: That was Khary Jackson and Sierra DeMulder, members of the defending National Poetry Slam champions, St. Paul's soapboxing team, along with their coach, Matthew Rucker. They joined Kerri Miller today on Midmorning. And you can hear the full hour of their conversation along with acclaimed poet Geoff Kagan Trenchard at mprnews.org.

The soapboxers will compete against more than 70 teams to defend their title. This week, performances spread out over more than a dozen venues around St. Paul, with the Championship Slam held at the Roy Wilkins Auditorium on Saturday.

One of the side events to the National Poetry Slam was today's head to head haiku competition, where poets took the stage to battle by verse. This afternoon at the Lowry Lab Theater, more than 20 haikuers recited their most entertaining and thought-provoking material.

SPEAKER 2: Passion is the coin on which love and hate are struck, so easy to flip.

SPEAKER 3: I wonder what priest guilty of molestation confessed to themselves.

SPEAKER 4: Gandhi and Jesus are roommates in heaven. Their fridge is empty.

SPEAKER 5: Hungry children cry. Worried mother looks on. Welcome to our country.

SPEAKER 6: The worst time to have a heart attack is during a game of charades. I had heart brains. It was the cowardly lion. She clicked her heels left.

SPEAKER 1: Those were some of the competitors in today's head to head haiku competition, just one of the side events at the National Poetry Slam going on in St. Paul this week. You can find the full schedule of events at mps2010.com.

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