Get Ready for Your Mind to Explode

The latest from Scoop Jackson. The guy usually just race baits. But this article is infinitely worse than that.

CHICAGO — For 12 years, there has been a tournament that is more intense, more sincere, more remarkable, more brutal, more honest, more powerful, more moving, more salient, more life-altering, more life-discovering, more life-saving than any other in America. Maybe the world. The reason no one has recognized it for what it is and what it does: It has nothing to do with sports.

Well there you go, Scoop. Stop writing this article. You write for the self-proclaimed World Wide Leader in Sports, not the World Wide Leader in Comparative-Adjectival Goodness of Non-Sports.

Those who have found the strength and courage to recite are the ones who put bravery on display. The 12th annual Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival proved to be the battleground no sport can match. Throughout the NCAA-style tournament, 50 teams of poets dug deeper into their personal mental fitness than probably Lance, Tiger or Michael ever have had to.

Aside from the horribly mangled ending to this paragraph…who cares?

The places the competitors came from are all different, and not just geographically. There was a semiautobiographical feeling in every word and verse, with each poet telling parts of his or her life story in stanzas of less than five minutes. The memorization of thought, phrasing, verbal agility and precision is equal to a gymnast’s preparation for the Olympics. Some are too young to go through the things their words say they’ve experienced or witnessed. Too young to have to tell the world the troubles their eyes have seen and minds have thought.

It physically pains me to read this. It’s such awful writing. If only Mr. Jackson had offered some thoughtful phrasing and verbal agility. What’s that, Scoop? You want to know what you’re hoisted upon? Why, that’s your own petard.

Yet they faced their peers in battle. This was their World Cup.

Ugh…using soccer as a metaphor for youth slam poetry. Makes me want to vomit.

When sports is at its best, it is about finding one’s self. When sports is at its best, it is about the competition, not the outcome of the competition. When sports is at its best, it has nothing to do with winning.

That’s just patently false. Sports are about winning. Sure, you can grow as a person, and learn something about humanity. Sure, there is dignity in giving it your all, but losing. In the end, however, sports are about winning. Also, did you see how I used the correct form of the verb “to be” there?

As someone who has covered sports for the past 20 years, I’ve never witnessed or experienced a scene like this — more than 200 young adults displaying sincere love for one another before they go on stage with the unintention of being better than anyone and everyone who shares that stage. A blood sport in which no one bleeds. A war in which no one dies. A battle in which there is no fight.

Stupid. Stupidstupidstupidstupid. Stupid. “A battle in which there is no fight.” I think you overshot a bit with your gravitas. Also, please, someone…tell me what an “unintention” is.

That’s what Brave New Voices has become. It’s a competition in which in the end there is victory, but no victor; where the figurative overrides the literal. Because emotional attachment is something that is impossible to judge, the scores teams get for presentation and performances exist only so something tangible can be attached to what they’ve done.

So…the scores exist to judge something that can’t be judged and for which the victory is that there is no victor? You’re trying too hard here, buddy. It’s just not working.

After 12 years, poets have become jaded by scores. They don’t care. They enter this battle to be heard — to be felt — not judged.

As one poet from the Jacksonville, Fla., team said about the bastardization of culture and significant insignificance of judges, HBO (which documents the competition) and what winning a freakin’ contest has had on the lives of all the poets there: “This is what happens when scores speak louder than words.”

Significant insignificance? The real problem with this article (other than the fact that it’s explicitly not about sports) is that Scoop Jackson tries to give it more weight by pointing out the deep, metaphysical nuances of the thing (which, by the way, over halfway through the article, I still don’t know what said thing is), but really all he’s doing is throwing out a bunch of contrary phrases and hoping they’ll confuse people enough so that they’ll think: “Shit, man, this shit’s deep.” Well, Scoop, you are in deep shit. Cause I’m calling you out.

Who wins when a judge has to determine whose poem is more significant: the kid from Hawaii who’s seen so many body bags that he calls them “zipped-up hoodies,” or the three girls from New Jersey who recite in vivid verbal detail the effect of terminal cancer?

No one wins—not because a judge has to judge it, but because it’s really depressing.

Or when a poet from Miami asks four questions inside a poem as if he were a weapon: “Can you see me? You mistake me for a wallet or in the hands of a Pakistani kid. Can you hear me? Gave birth to ambulances. Make Baghdad sound like the Fourth of July. Can you feel me? Pushed to the back of your head. Can you stop me? These are not the confessions of a weapon. This is a plea to put me down.”

What does this even mean? A wallet? Birthing ambulances? I’m a weapon, but don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger. Pure nonsense.

Who wins?

This year, Hawaii did. Again. A repeat. But no one gave a damn. Including the team from Hawaii.

Sports is not supposed to be this deep. Which is probably why poetry, even in the form of slams, is not considered a sport. But competition is this deep. Yet the voices of the brave still stand and honor each opponent after every performance, every presentation, every poem in ways that remind their peers that the opportunity for them to express themselves is always greater than the feat of winning or the feeling of victory.

Writing an article that explains why poetry is not a sport is just a complete waste of everyone’s time.

They hug. They cry. They share. They know.

This doesn’t sound better than sports. This sounds like a whole bunch of depressing idiocy.

What if I were to call you up and in my best downer voice said: “Hey, brother.” –I’m sure they all call each other brother and sister. –”Hey, brother. Wanna go hang out under the viaduct and alternately, and in semi-verse form, trade escalating tales of woe and tragedy?” I bet you’d hang up. And maybe move. Now, if I called you up and said: “Hey, man. Wanna get a pick-up game going down at the park?” You’d at least consider it, right?

When sports is at its best, it is about finding one’s freedom. When sports is at its best, it is about the process, not the end result. When sports is at its best, it is has nothing to do with someone besting someone else.

Is the true definition of sport competition? Or is sport defined by winning?

It’s both. Argument over.

Or — as exemplified by the poets at this year’s Brave New Voices — when done correctly, can sport be something else altogether?

But…but, you said that poetry isn’t a sport. But…but, now you’re saying slam poetry exemplifies sports which are…well, you don’t know. Something else. You know. Deep, man, deep. But that can only be accomplished when sports are done correctly–like when exemplified by slam poetry. This is so utterly confusing I can’t go on. I’m sorry. I never should have brought this upon you all.

Also, kids, remember that the third person plural form of the verb “to be” (are) goes with plural verbs such as…say…umm…well, just off the top of my head, the word ”sports.”