Poultry in Motion
Ever since last week, when we
introduced the concept of the Chicken
Powered Cart (CPC), we have sensed
* change in the public. There is a new
hope in this country, an optimism that
has not been seen in our lifetimes.
The Chicken Powered Cart holds out
the possibility of a new solution to
ancient problems: starvation, disease,
poverty. There may even be unfore-
seen benefits the Chicken Powered
Cart has for posterity.
Realizing that it was only a matter
oftime before someone else tried to
take credit for this invention, we hur-
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The lunatic, the lover and the poet come home to the Heidelberg's poetry slam
iedly contacted the U.S. Patent Of-
fice to register the Chicken Powered
Cart. We summarized the concept to
a longtime Patent Office employee
named Jeneatte Devins:
"The idea is to take a cart, and to
put a long pole on the front, and have
chickens pull it."
"Well, why would they be pulling
it?" she asked.
* "Well, it's mainly for energy," we
explained. "You see ... the problem is
you use a car for a couple of months
and then it stops working, right? But
with a chicken, the chickens pull the
cart and then you can eat them."
"Oh!"
"It's renewable energy."
"Oh, okay."
"And see, the way we see it, this
hasn't been harnessed ever before.
il the other people who are in favor
of cars or horse-drawn carriages, they
don't see that there are other purposes
that you can gain from your transpor-
tation energy."
"Oh, okay, okay."
"And also, I've read that you can
use the body heat of chickens to heat
your home."
"Oh."
Having sold the government on
the idea, our next step was the more
difficult task of enlisting the scien-
tific community behind the Chicken
Powered Cart. Naturally, we contacted
the Animal Science Department at
Michigan State University.
Professor Richard Balander, a
poultry specialist, initially expressed
some doubts as to chickens' ability to
ull together and move the cart:
"They have very minimal strength
in their legs, and besides that you
couldn't get them to all pull in the
same direction anyway." This of
course, is the same sort of false, hate-
ful stereotype used historically to keep
various ethnic groups out of the
workforce. But we believe in the
American chicken. We feel that the
American chicken wants to do its part
* improve, the efficiency of farming
communities.
Professor Balander did concede
that the strong breast muscles of chick-
ens could allow for a cart driven by
flying chickens, but this energy could
only be kept up for a short period of
time. "I suppose that you could use it
for 30 seconds," he said.
We see this as introducing more
ses for the Chicken Powered Cart.
hickens could walk for normal Cart
use, but they could fly if the Cart was
needed to, say, help children escape
from a burning barn or rush an elderly
person to the hospital.
Some argue that chickens are not
the most effective cart-pulling poul-
try. Professor Balander rejected this
hypothesis. "Turkeys are even more
uncontrollable than chickens," he
*ined, "You might as well train a
brick to pull a cart."
.iProfessor Jim Hermes of the Poul-
try Science Department at Oregon
State University took a more optimis-
tic view of chicken leg strength. While
Professor Balander pegged the num-
By RONA
KOBELL
P aul Stebleton sees some
thing in thrift shops that
most of us miss. "Value
Village, a not quite
renovated grocery
store, full of families and couples
searching shelves of second
hand junk stocked by women
with missingteeth,"the young
poet belts out in a Vegas-
lounge singer kind of voice.
Nice imagery, Paul.
Good body language. I give
it an eight.
What is this, dance fe-
ver? Not quite. It's more
like Robert Frost meets The
Gong Show. It's called the
Poetry Slam, and it's hap-
pening right here in Ann Ar-
bor.
According to Wolf Knight,
a local shop worker who moon-
lights as a poet, the Poetry Slam
was started to "free poetry from the'
academic establishment and return
it to the people." Knight, with his
honest demeanor and pension for
raw, unpretentious poetry "that
comes from the heart," is typical of
slam contestants, where the regu-
lars are a bit irregular, and phrases
like "Fuck you, polyester crack-
pot" can sound as melodic as
Shakespeare's "My mistress's
eyes are nothing like the sun".
You ain't in English class
anymore. Good poetry is no
longer packaged in conclud-
ing couplets and iambic pen-
tameter. At least, not in the
not-so-hallowed halls of the
Club Heidelberg on the first
Tuesday of every month. The
night begins with an open-mike i-
forum, where six poets read for
about five minutes each. Fea-
tured readings are also sched-
uled. After the reading, five or six
poets can choose to "slam."
The slammers perform before
five judges, who rate them on a scale
of one to 10. Audience cheers and
jeers can sway the verdict on the poetry.
The highest and lowest scores are thrown
out, and the raw score stands until some-
one with a higher mark knocks them out.
The two remaining poets duke it out for the
grand prize of the night - a crisp, clean, $10
bill.
Who is qualified to decide whether or not poetry is
"good"? Some poets claim that these random members of
the audience who are wooed into judgeship by a free
pitcher of beer do not always decide fairly. "Generally,
some people stack judging so that certain people win, or
you get some smart-asses who push through the poem that
seems to be the worst. It becomes sort of a mockery,"
Stebleton stated.
Stebleton would rather that the judges be "people who
were educated in poetry." But according to Larry Francis,
emcee of the slam for over a year, these sometimes
inebriated listeners are as qualified as anybody else.
"Anybody's qualified to judge poetry, that's the whole
damn point. When you set criteria for judging and start
excluding people, then you're going against the original
notion of the slam."
about elitism, not about giving poetry
back to the people."
Knight and Francis agree that the
past national competitions have
been marred by disorganization,
unfair judgment calls and lousy
emcees. For Knight, that unfair-
ness inverts the progress he has
made in trying to convince
people that slam poetry is a
true art form. "Outsiders see
(slamming) as a game for
kooks, primal screamers and
swishy little boys from the Vil-
lage," Knight wrote in letter to
the organizers of the national
slam. "We can be all of the
above, but we must attract and
hold outsiders long enough to
bring their own poetry forth." If
the national players don't clean up
their act, Knight fears that slam po-
etry will "turn inward, go baroque,
and die."
While Knight, Marsh and Francis
think about the national picture, many
other Heidelberg slammers are just
thinking locally. When Connecticut
native Ken Cormier first discovered the
slam two years ago, he was searching
for any available, local performance
venues. Now Cormier, a student in the
Master's Program for Creative Writ-
ing at Eastern Michigan University,
books local readers at the Guild
House poetry reading on Monday
nights. He likes the idea of a slam,
but feels the contest works best if
it doesn't carry over to a national
level. "The slam should stay lo-
cal and never get more serious
than that," Cormierstated. "Once
you get to the end of the contest
and pass out the $10, that'swhere
the competition should end."
Paul Stebleton agrees that
sometimes poetry is best under-
stood when contained locally. A
midwesterner at heart, Stebleton
feels that his work is often regional.
"I've found that I can transcend re-
gional barriers. But it's still a little in-
timidating when I take my stuff some-
place else and get a different opinion from
a different region."
Other regions are also not always as
tolerant of nervousness as a local audience
might be. New York City is one example of a
place where a maverick poet might be subject to
flying wads of paper or loud humming during a not-so-
well received performance.
"The New York audience is a much more challenging
art community to deal with. They can be insensitive and
tell poets they're crappy.In smallertowns, people are more
willing to listen," explained Joe Maynard, who runs the
Rightbank Reading Series in the Williamsburg neighbor-
hood of Brooklyn. He added that such brutal honesty is not
necessarily detrimental. "At least in New York you know
when you're stumbling on useless words, when something
you're saying is bombing."
Maynard's reading series grew out of the neighbor-
hood painters' request for a "place to meet and discuss
ideas." Five years ago, a few local painters read once in
a while. Now Maynard estimates a turnout of 20 to 30 at
the bi-weekly meetings. Although his series is not a
slam, this Benton Harbor native has attended several
Illustration By
JORDAN ATLAS
savings, Francis added, will go towards the National Poetry Slam
Contest, which will be held this year in Asheville, North Carolina.
The roots of the National Poetry Slam competition were sown
about seven years ago by Mark Smith, who began slamming at The
Green Mill, a Chicago bar. Local Vince Keuter brought the idea to
Ann Arbor in 1988, making Michigan the second state in the
country to host a slam. The rest, according to Knight, is slam
history. "Four years ago, the first national slam was invitation only.
San Francisco got a hold of Chicago and said, hey, let's have a
contest, and we'll bring the people from New York and Boston,"
Knight remembered. "They had so much fun that they decided to
open it up and make a national thing out if it." In the past, the contest