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Keeping your word
By Rita Wold
rwold@mscd.edu

Photo by David L. Yost • dyost2@mscd.edu Lady Speech, a Denver slam poet, reads original material at an event sponsored by Café Nuba at the Loft. The Denver slam team will compete at this year’s National Poetry Slam Aug. 7 in Austin, Texas.

Bobby Lefebre doesn’t underestimate his role as a poet.

“I have learned that poets are special people, and I don’t take the responsibility lightly,” the 25-year-old Metro alumnus said. “We document our existence and the world around us in an attempt to adequately do justice to our being.”

Along with four fellow poets, Lefebre will bring his words and his performance style to the 2007 National Poetry Slam on Aug. 7 in Austin, Texas. They will tackle some of life’s most private experiences, such as love, identity, politics and sorrow, in a very public forum. Slam poetry is meant to be heard live, and these poets have no qualms about sharing their experiences with a large audience.

“The team has an amazing amount of talent and education behind it,” Lefebre said. “All of my teammates are people I respect and have a great deal of faith in.”

Eighty teams are expected to compete in this year’s tournament, which will last for five days. Known as the Super Bowl of slam poetry competitions, the National Poetry Slam will feature teams from all over the U.S. and Europe.

The five poets won their chance to represent Denver by competing in Café Nuba’s slam-off. Café Nuba has been hosting slam poetry, live music and independent films since 1999. Last year, the Denver slam team took first place at nationals. With the help of his teammates, Lefebre is hoping to live up to last year’s example.

The slam-off competition involved three rounds by each poet, which judges scored on a scale of zero to 10. The scores were based on the poets’ writings and their performance, a rubric that encouraged poets to focus on what they were saying and how they were saying it.

Lefebre volunteers as an actor with the El Centro Su Teatro, a cultural arts center that produces theater, music and visual art that specifically deals with the Hispanic experience. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 2004 and has returned to his alma mater to lead spoken word and poetry workshops in Chicano studies classes.

Lefebre is not the only poet on the slam team who wants to take spoken word to new heights. Jacqualynn Harris, 23, is a UCD student working on a bachelor’s degree in theater, film and television.

Harris says her painful childhood drove her toward spoken word poetry. Her mother was a drug addict and her brother was shot and paralyzed. Never meeting her father, Harris was raised among gang members, drugs addicts and dealers. “For a long time, I was an angry child and I internalized my feelings because I didn’t know how to express them,” Harris said.

“The first time I got on a stage with a microphone and an audience, I felt this unexplainable energy. I could hear these ambient sounds that pushed me to speak louder. I saw these eyes glaring at me, as if they wanted to know more … For the first time I realized I was not alone.”

Targeting a less educated audience, Harris said she writes to make sure anyone can understand her message.

“I want to expose the truth,” she said. “I want people to stop hiding from the issues that make them uncomfortable … I want people to tell me that something I said changed them, that they stopped settling for defeat and are now claiming victory.”