Slam poetry packs emotional punch

If hip-hop can make it cool for men to wear more jewelry than a drag queen or the richest old… If hip-hop can make it cool for men to wear more jewelry than a drag queen or the richest old woman on the Titanic, then it can also revamp poetry, creating a fusion of song and speech where the two intermingle so often that it is almost impossible to distinguish.

Though Def poet J. Ivy performed a capella in the William Pitt Union Assembly room Monday night, he has also depicted his poetry’s ultimate fusion with hip-hop, slamming his poetry over “Never Let Me Down,” alongside Jay-Z and Kanye West on the latter’s Grammy-winning album The College Dropout.

Slam poetry is the term for this movement, in which the artists spew intense rhymes at varied paces, depending on the emotions of the verse. It flirts with harmony and rap conventions before slamming on the brakes and heading back to rhythmic speech. There is no iambic pentameter — just raw emotion thrust into both spoken word and hip-hop sensibilities.

Slam poetry is not spoken word like that from the latter days of William Shatner, nor is it like Baz Luhrmann’s tedious Top 40 public service announcement about the virtues of sunscreen. It is an intense monologue of emotion that just happens to rhyme.

“My definition is that all the emotion that is expelled during the time you’re writing the piece is how you deliver it to an audience,” said Sheba Gittens, who opened for J. Ivy. A winner of the Pitt Program Council’s Slam Poetry Contest two weeks ago, Gittens performed four original poems, including “Letter to My Husband” and “Letter to My Unborn Child: Black Baby Don’t Cry No More.”

Brian Francis, the other winner of the Slam Poetry Contest and the first act of Monday night’s show, delivered three emotionally charged, heavily alliterated, rhyming soliloquies that lost none of their intensity, despite technical difficulties presented by the microphone.

After Sheba’s act, the crowd that filled about a third of the seats was given an inadvertent intermission: The main attraction was running late because of inclement weather. After about five minutes, J. Ivy took the stage and immediately began to lament an accident he had witnessed on the perilous Pennsylvania Turnpike. He said he stopped to help when he saw that a young pregnant woman’s car had overturned.

The uncertain fate of the injured woman was a theme J. Ivy kept returning to between his poems — time that he also used to deliver an abridged autobiography and inspirational advice.

“I’ve been doing my thing for 11 years now, and for me it’s been blessing after blessing,” the poet said, citing his work with The RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan in New York City after having lived there for only four weeks.

The first black man to represent Chicago on HBO’s Def Poetry, J. Ivy has also performed at the Orange Bowl and done voice-overs for MTV shows like Snoop Dogg’s “Doggy Fizzle Televizzle.”

“It’s been a fun ride,” he said, describing his experiences with the Grammy-winning Kanye West album. “I didn’t get a trophy, I got a certificate, but it says ‘Grammy,’ so that’s fine with me.”

He rhymed quasi-graphic euphemisms about sex, lamented the loss of love, and made amends with his late father while still keeping a sense of humor, with poems about childhood addiction to Nintendo. The crowd laughed hardest, however, at “Blind Date,” a poem about a date that goes awry when a seemingly perfect women robs him, so appropriately, blind.

The poems that he performed tended to start out in quiet introspection before amplifying into intense, fast-paced rhymes, culminating in full-body poetry, then dropping down to slow-paced reflection that framed the pieces.