Cartography of Care: On Mentorship and “Post” Pandemic Poetics

Arrivals

I am writing this on a July afternoon in a Las Vegas coffee shop, windows and doors closed to the dry neon hum. I imagine that somewhere on the Strip someone hit it big on blackjack tables while someone else lost it all. Miles away from the sanctuary of hope and lost wages, in a townhouse, five young poets, Sammi Walker, Penehuro Williams, Elle Hope, Johnny Swoopz, and Demetri Manabat, rehearse for a regional slam. Their voices ricochet off concrete. Elle and Sammi, in a poem in which they compare women's rights to the U.S.'s preoccupation with the right to bear arms, yells, "THEY ONLY CARE ABOUT US WHEN WE ARE CARRYING." Johnny, Pene, and Demetri, in ways that would make any food scholar proud, use rice farming to explore the ongoing global colonialism; ask, as one does when washing rice, "is it [the connection] clear now?" They are twenty-something, brilliant, and a little terrified. I, mid-forties and happily jaded, have been asked to coach them and, by extension, to testify here about what spoken word has become since I first stepped onto the Da Poetry Lounge stage three decades ago.

"Exit Page," our cluster title, feels uncannily apt. In web analytics it names the last URL a user sees before clicking away. In slam, it might be the poet who closes a bout, the score that tips a final. In immigration bureaucracy, in which the U.S. is currently drowning, it is the document that allows a body to depart one sovereignty and enter another. Spoken word, especially in its post-digital phase, is forever negotiating these exits: from page to stage to stream; from local dialect to global traffic; from analog intimacy to platform capitalism, in other words, continually departing one "sovereign" space to enter into another. What exits, however, does not vanish; it caches in bodies, playlists, memes, and syllabi. The poem becomes a passport whose stamps are applause, reposts, and sometimes, unfortunately, hate comments.

I want to chart one route through that traffic. Because I coach in Las Vegas, a city of ersatz pyramids and quick fortunes, I start there, but the narrative braids outward to #SlamAfrica, the World Poetry Slam recently held in Mexico, São Paulo's sarau resistance, Dublin's bilingual bars, and the online rooms we built when COVID-19 sealed nearly every door. If the essay sometimes reads like a travel journal, if it seems like it is wandering all over the place, that is deliberate. I argue spoken word, now more than ever, is a practice of way-finding.

Desert Premise

Las Vegas is world-famous for spectacle and almost unknown for poetry. When Hope first searched for a dedicated venue in 2018, she found only variety shows filled with comedians, cover bands, a stray sonneteer, and more. She drove four hours to Da Poetry Lounge, my home venue, the place I began doing poetry on stage more than two decades ago. Elle stood in line with 300 strangers, and returned possessed of a mission: build something at home so the next generation would not have to leave town to learn craft. Having accomplished her goal, Elle no longer regularly drives to from Vegas to Hollywood to experience poetry. Two years later her open mic, Spotlight Poetry, became the scene's de facto conservatory.¹ In the manner of an older sibling, DPL has graciously mentored other Southern California poetry venues, including the San Diego Poetry Slam, as well as open mics and slams throughout the Inland Empire, Long Beach, Orange County, and beyond. Many of these Southern California poetry scenes were established shortly after DPL by poets closer in age to its founders. Because Las Vegas poets are, in most cases, twenty to thirty years younger, however, the relationship between DPL and Spotlight feels less like one between peers and more like one in which elders offer the kind of sage advice that only time and experience can provide.

Sammi came up through youth slam, winning state titles until COVID shuttered every classroom show. "We had two Zoom slams," she remembers, "and the Internet froze on the punch line."² The scene collapsed. She now teaches metaphor to high-schoolers online, hoping to seed the soil she inherited scorched.

Johnny and Demetri are pandemic converts: one found poetry while doom-scrolling heartbreak clips, the other, after his father's funeral convinced him medicine was not his calling. They talk about algorithmic labor as casually as earlier poets argued enjambment—how to crop vertical, when to drop captions, why 30-second reels out-perform three-minute masterpieces.³ In Vegas, this homework feels natural, the city understands the economics of show, of spectacle.

Genealogies in Motion

When I began, Chicago's Green Mill was still mythic. Marc Smith's experiment, give five random drinkers score cards, had morphed into a national circuit where suddenly scrappy cafés hosted poetry slams. By 1998 the National Poetry Slam felt like an Olympic Village of wanderers: showbiz-bound talent from Los Angeles, hip-hop heads from New York and Philadelphia, scraper riders and queer punks from various parts of the Bay, soulful lyricists from all over the South, all trading metaphors, stories, jokes, and, sometimes, cigarette lighters at 3 a.m. The ethos was populist, anybody could sign up, every poem got a number, and if the number hurt, you wrote a better poem or wrote an angrier poem about numbers.

The early 2000s added television. HBO's Def Poetry Jam put slammers beside Kanye West and Lauryn Hill—proof that poetry could speak in prime time, and a caution that the industry swallows what it screens. When the series ended, YouTube virility became the benchmark. Button Poetry, founded in 2011, perfected the form: HD camera, tight three-minute arc, jump-cut thumbnail. Neil Hilborn's "OCD" collected 100 million views and the ad revenue paid his rent longer than the applause ever could.

Then 2018 happened. Poetry Slam Inc., the nonprofit that owned the National Poetry Slam, filed for bankruptcy on the very stage where the slam competition began. While I recognize that spoken word poetry predates this and has roots all over the world, here, I am uniquely speaking about slam poetry. In that respect, the poetry slam was birthed at the Green Mill in 1980s by a Chicago construction worker named Marc Smith.⁴ That it was Chicago again creates a neat narrative loop for historians but a brutal severance for communities that planned yearly pilgrimages.⁵ Some blamed mis-management, others burnout, still others the rise of a digital slam whose scoreboard was follow-counts, not judges' paddles. The debate continues.

Transits and Translations

While the United States argued over the corpse of Nationals, the genre's center of gravity somewhat decentralized.

• Caribbean: Dub Forward. 1970s Kingston dub, with its hypnotic bass and patois prophecy, seeded a griot-DJ fusion that now resurfaces on TikTok as Afrobeats-inflected performance. Rachel Bolle-Debessay maps the lineage from Linton Kwesi Johnson to today's Carnival sound trucks where poets rhyme over soca riddims.⁶
• Kenya: Sheng Flow. Nairobi's matatus—the graffiti-bright minibuses that serve as mass transit—play Sheng rap at stadium volume. When Kenyan poets step onstage, they sometimes mirror that code-switching traffic: Kiswahili for elders, English for policy critique, Sheng for the youth.
• Austria: Subsidized Cypher. Vienna's Yasmin Hafedh, stage name Yasmo, raps with a big band one night and wins the German-language slam championship the next. Austria's arts councils subsidize both ventures, proof that state support can coexist with hip-hop bravado.⁷
• Brazil: Saraucity. On São Paulo's south side, the Sarau da Cooperifa turns an overpass into an open-air agora where Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ poets testify against police violence. Fabiana Oliveira de Souza calls it "performed oral literature," a counter-archive to official forgetting.⁸
• Ireland & England: Post-Lingo, Climate Bars. Dublin's Lingo Festival lasted three triumphant years; Brexit and funding cuts ended it, but its alumni now run bilingual nights across Belfast. Claire Palzer sheds light on the festival through her research.⁹ Across the water, Birmingham-based poet Rupinder Kaur Waraich illustrates that poetry can be used in multidisciplinary formats.
• Australia & India: Classroom Circuits. In Sydney, Jen Scott Curwood integrates slam into secondary curricula, measuring gains in critical literacy.¹⁰ Bengaluru's Airplane Poetry Movement turns frozen yoghurt shops into popup stages for verse, bypassing elite lit-fests entirely.

These circulations confirm a hunch I've carried since I wrote Killing Poetry: slam's most enduring genius is infrastructural. The microphone is portable, the pedagogy is peer-to-peer; the archive is repeatable. It is no surprise the form thrives wherever bandwidth and a borrowed speaker can coexist.

Virality, or, The Score Rewritten

Today's U.S. poetry slam scene is different from the one I participated in and wrote about in Killing Poetry. For starters, there is no singular national event, instead there are a series of major regional team and individual competitions. One of the core arguments in Killing Poetry is that young slam and spoken word poets killed off the old in order to make way for something new, something more fitting of the moment. The young poets of today are doing something similar. Where a national scene could no longer survive, they created decentralized platforms in live regional tournaments and others in the digital sphere. In other words, I began my latest coaching journey in a new poetic landscape that was both familiar and uncharted.

After we took home the title in our first major slam tournament, the first time any team from Las Vegas has done so, we had two poems that went viral immediately.Consider the scene. For the Spotlight Poetry LV team that I coach, the poets' phones are buzzing nonstop. A clip posted online has begun its climb. Two thousand plays become five become fifty, become one million; the dopamine glow is real, and so is the work that follows. Someone commented "This saved me," someone else called it trash. A stranger DM'd a feature request. By midnight, we have designed thumbnails, scheduled captions, and chosen the next upload window. "We slam in an age of different kinds of numbers," Demetri quips. The economics are cruel. Elle's viral videos were uploaded by third-party channels, they earned no royalties, yet they aided fully funded workshops for the channel owners.

Ankolika De and Zhicong Lu call this "algorithmically mediated craft:" every creator must stage both the creative gesture and the meta-performance of visibility.¹¹ The algorithm rewards consistency, brevity, face-forward framing, and triggering first lines. It penalizes nuance, digression, and slow build. The risk, as Susan Somers-Willett warned in 2009, is that populism becomes formula, that the loudest poem drowns out the strangest.¹² Perhaps the loudest, most visible poems and poets have gone viral for valid reasons. Our task is not to reject metrics but to refuse their tyranny.

Mentorship as Repertoire

Coaching this Vegas team has clarified the stakes beyond virility and popularity. When Johnny does a gesture, one that reminds us of the great Rudy Francisco, I stop rehearsal. "Imitation is a great place to start, it is a terrible place to finish," I joke, but the point is ethical. Diana Taylor reminds us that performance knowledge is transmitted through repertoire—live bodies, not books.¹³ Repertoire has the capacity to resist citation; it feels like instinct, which makes it powerful and dangerous. I taught Elle and Sammi to listen to poets in a way that allows us to instantly identify whose workshop they took or work they most resonate with, learned from. Pene, drawing on Sāmoan tulāfale tradition, fears the genre could ossify into stock poses if mentors are not vigilant.¹⁴ The remedy is generosity without cloning: teach the mechanics of poetry and the poetry slam but steeped in the ethics of community and history, then insist each poet break the mold.

In order for younger poets to understand this, older poets must return as coaches, mentors, elders and keepers of craft and embodied history. Where mentorship fails, gate-keeping blooms. Demetri's explosion to twelve million TikTok views earned him threats and, ironically, disdain from local elders who felt he had not "paid dues." Elle's first mentor demanded loyalty without offering craft, a dynamic feminists have diagnosed across art worlds.

When I mentor these young poets, I try to teach them the paths my past teams walked toward success—winning titles, going viral, appearing on television, publishing books, winning awards, booking shows—while being transparent about every misstep. We inventory the shortcuts that cost us voice, the poems that scored high but felt thin the next morning, the contracts we should not have signed. The lesson is less a map to trophies than a field guide to success and consequences.

So we make lineage visible. On a whiteboard, we sketch our family tree—mentors, the mentors' mentors, scenes, communities, YouTube channels, important cafés, classrooms—and name our debts to the history that paved our way out loud. We practice saying influences into the mic: "after Ebony Stewart," or "in conversation with Yesika Salgado." Citation, performed in this way, is an antidote to ventriloquism; it turns resemblance into relation. It also decolonizes the archive by insisting that living poets—often women, often queer, often from the Global South—be credited while they can still benefit from being named.

Then we build exercises that pry the poem loose from imitation. We run a "gesture embargo" round—hands at sides, voice and image must carry the piece. We do "shadow takes," performing a teammate's poem at the opposite temperature to discover what the text can hold. We record with the camera off so tone precedes face; we rehearse to a metronome to feel where breath betrays the point of the poem. The point is not austerity; it is specificity. I teach my young poets that the only thing slam asks for is perceived honesty, not authenticity. Authenticity implies that there is some fixed, stable, unmediated "true" self a poet must faithfully reveal and that performance could provide transparent access to that essential truth. Perceived honesty, by contrast, names the relational effect and effect between poet and audience, the sense that the performer is fully invested in the language, stakes, and emotional world created and shared through the poem. In other words, because the audience cannot verify whether every aspect of the performance is autobiographically "authentic," the audience, who needs to believe and feel that the poet is telling the truth of the performance, judges whether the poet appears emotionally, ethically, and rhetorically invested in what they are saying. With that in mind, I try my best to introduce themselves to themselves, while highlighting the history of giants they are standing on. In this way, technique becomes an extension of who they are and not a costume.

Mentorship is also a deeply reflective act, as I try to model an elder's two hardest sentences: "I don't know" and "That's not mine to teach." Knowing when to refer a poet elsewhere may be the most responsible pedagogy we have.

Finally, we write a small contract with ourselves: the poem should outlast the score and survive the upload. When I forget that, I tell them the stories—about chasing a laugh and losing the poem, about a TV edit that sanded off the politics, about the book rejection that saved a manuscript from becoming merely clever. They deserve not just a toolkit but an ethic: make something so precisely yours that the algorithm can host it but cannot explain it.

Slam in the U.S. is currently mapping new geographies, paving new roads, and building new institutions. The cure, again, is infrastructural: healthy mentorship that aids aides in but not eclipse the newer slammers in finding their way, new community models that make sense for the moment but learns from the successes and failures of the past, transparent and fair community agreements.

Breath in a Pandemic

COVID-19 was cruel to a form that requires breath shared in a room. Zoom slams helped some: Nairobi's Matatu "Poetic Fridays" Instagram lives attracted thousands, blending spoken word with civic education. Vienna's Yasmo turned her kitchen into a hip-hop cooking show, raising funds for freelance tech crews. Yet the screen could amplify voice but not vibration. When rooms reopened, audiences arrived starving for resonance.

The skills acquired—OBS overlays, live captions, cross-time-zone collaboration—remain gifts. They point toward a hybrid Nationals 2.0: regional prelims feeding a multi-camera final with real-time captioning in three languages, streamed cooperatively so profits circle back to poets. My LasVegas team dreams of such a stage.

Exit Page Poetics

What, then, do we do as we click away from one era and load the next? I offer ten working proposals, sketched briefly here and elaborated in the footnotes for practitioners who wish to adapt them:

1. Repertoire Registry—an open-access library of annotated drills, from breath counts to persona switches, contributed by mentors worldwide.
2. Revenue-Fair Capture—licenses guaranteeing poets at least half the ad and sponsorship income on any upload of their work.
3. Algorithm Clinics—quarterly community workshops demystifying platform changes, caption hacks, and data privacy.
4. Hybrid Nationals—regional leagues feeding a streamed final governed by a rotating board with youth seats.
5. Decolonial Citation—onstage shout-outs that build sonic genealogy across languages.
6. Climate Poetics Fellowships—global cohorts scripting verse for UN climate summits.
7. Youth-Elder Tandems—co-writing projects that pair younger poets with elders whose stories rarely reach microphones.
8. Griots-in-Residence—community historians paid to document emergent slang, creating living dictionaries.
9. Accessibility Charter—budget lines for captions, ramps, sensory-friendly lighting at every slam.
10. Rapid-Response Poem Packs—48-hour digital anthologies whose sales fund mutual aid during crises.

None of these ideas are mine alone; they remix practices already alive in the scenes I have described. The point is to weave them into an infrastructure that outlasts individual organizers.

Coda: Refresh Stage

Back in the townhouse, rehearsal ends. Scores will come, applause will come, algorithms will scroll on. What sticks, though, is the moment Johnny closes his laptop and Demetri claps and offers verbal notes, an embodied amen. I watch Sammi jot a new metaphor, Pene rehearse a cadence perhaps drawn from Sāmoan oratory, Elle send the venue owner a thank-you text. That is the work that survives the exit page.

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks once wrote, "We are each other's harvest."¹⁵ The line lives on Instagram now, mis-quoted beneath sunset fonts, but its wisdom endures. Spoken word is not a route to clout; it is a relay of breath. When we do it well, we leave rooms, physical or digital, better ventilated, ready for another generation to inhale.

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Javon Johnson (@javonism) is an Associate Professor and Director of African American & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with an additional appointment in Gender & Sexuality Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, where he also completed advanced training in Gender Studies and African American Studies. A scholar of Black performance, poetics, and cultural politics, his work spans Black popular culture, slam and spoken word, Black feminist and queer theory, and ethnography. He is the author of Killing Poetry (Rutgers UP, 2017) and co-editor of The End of Chiraq (Northwestern UP, 2018), with essays appearing in The Black Scholar, QED, Text & Performance Quarterly, and more. A celebrated poet and performer, Johnson is a three-time national slam champion and the author of Ain't Never Not Been Black (2020), with work featured on HBO, BET, CNN, and Showtime.

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References

1. Elle Hope, "Why I Built Spotlight Poetry," personal correspondence, 12 Feb 2024. ↩︎
2. Sammi Walker, interview by Javon Johnson, Las Vegas, 8 July 2025. ↩︎
3. Demetri Manabat, interview by Javon Johnson, Las Vegas, 15, July 2025. ↩︎
4. For a fuller discussion on this point, see Javon Johnson, Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities (Rutgers University Press, 2017), 45. ↩︎
5. "National Poetry Slam," Wikipedia, accessed 4 July 2025. ↩︎
6. Rachel Bolle-Debessay, "Dub Poetry: A Study Beyond Pre-defined Interpretations," PhD diss., King's College London, 2021. ↩︎
7. Calliope Arts, "Yasmin Hafedh aka Yasmo," accessed 5 July 2025. ↩︎
8. Fabiana Oliveira de Souza, "Poetry Slam in Brazil: Decolonial Practices," International Comparative Literature, 2024. ↩︎
9. See Claire Palzer. "Poetry Off the Page." https://poetryoffthepage.net/podcast/episode-2-spoken-word-poetry-at-irelands-lingo-festival, accessed 2 January 2026. ↩︎
10. Jen Scott Curwood, "In Their Own Words: Critical Literacy via Spoken Word," English in Education 57, no. 2 (2023): 147-64. ↩︎
11. Ankolika De and Zhicong Lu, "Navigating the Practices of Novice Poets on Instagram," CHI '24 Proceedings. ↩︎
12. Susan B. A. Somers-Willett, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). ↩︎
13. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). ↩︎
14. Pene interview, Las Vegas, 14 May 2025; see also "O le Tulāfale—The Orator, Language Way-Finder of Sāmoa," Te Papa blog, 30 May 2022. ↩︎
15. Gwendolyn Brooks, "Paul Robeson," The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Elizabeth Alexander, Library of America, 2005, p. 86. ↩︎