Matt Flumerfelt recalls:
The Americus team set out for the Knoxville regional Slam probably around 9 or so in the evening. Margie Wood was driving, and Lorna and I and Brian were supposed to ride in the back while Marty and Frank Wiley were riding in Marty’s truck. I wasn’t happy about it because I didn’t want to be stuck sandwiched in the back seat, with an elderly woman driving in the wee hours to a strange city on unfamiliar roads. Besides, Marty only arranged it that way so he and Frank could smoke cigars in Marty’s truck on the way up. I said I wouldn’t do it, which pissed Marty off royally. I offered to give Frank gas money when we got back if he would drive his van. It was agreed, and Marty drove his truck. At one of our stops, Marty read me the riot act and I read it back to him as best I could.
As I remember, we arrived and checked into the fleabag motel. Marty called his wife Rhetta and was describing our room to her. It looked like someone had sprayed the ceiling of the room with silly string and then painted over it and the towels were like sandpaper. We slept two to a bed, me and Brian Ferguson-Avery and Marty and Frank on the other. It was then that I first developed feelings for Brian—just kidding.
I can’t give a chronological account because it’s been too long and I confuse memories of the Knoxville Slam with my memories of the regional Slam the year before in Greenville, SC. On that occasion, Marty and I had another fight about transportation, this time because Tracy Outlaw offered to let me ride up with her and her boyfriend James, and I innocently accepted, only to find out that Marty expected me to drive my car. He chewed me out on that occasion also, and I gave in and agreed to drive. Marty, Lorna and I drove to Greenville and we laughed our asses off most of the way because we were still high at that point on the whole Slam experience.
Lorna could be described as a kind of survivalist. She had packed a lot of stuff. As she told us what all she packed, it got weirder and funnier. She had a lot of trail mix, herbal teas and various snacks, a snake bite kit, a claw hammer, and I can’t remember what all. She really thought she might need the snake bite kit and the claw hammer was just in case we drove off the road into a pond so she could smash out the windshield and save us, or herself. Marty and I kept up a constant repartee of surrealist humor and we were all in stitches pretty much the whole way there.
One or two things I remember about the Greenville Slam—my first regional. When we all showed up for the first round, of course many poets were practicing, which they did by audibly reciting their pieces over and over to themselves with appropriate gestures at key moments. It was in The Handlebar—a local hangout. The first person who got my attention was Pat Storm because he was barefooted, noticeably drunk, drinking straight from a pitcher, and his underage girlfriend was wearing a bedsheet with arm holes cut in it. I understood there was some rivalry between Pat and Marty. Following Pat’s first round performance of “I’m a red-headed action figure, spiritualized for your protection...” he went to leap off the stage, slipped and just missed falling flat on his ars. He came up to Marty prior to the performance and advised him to “Get up on that stage like you own it.” Later we turned it into a joke like everything else we touched. “Yeah, get up on that stage like you own it, and try your level best not to fall off.”
I wanted to mention briefly how I got started with the Slam. I had been president of the local Writers Guild. One year we hosted a conference at which my former Slam team member Lorna Slaton was present. Lorna was all the way wild. Very vocal, very unconventional. During our conference, she mentioned that she had participated in trying to save the Friendship Oak that was slated to be made into mulch in Albany to make way for a three way crossing. She had camped out in the tree so it couldn’t be bulldozed, despite having small children to care for, throwing down deer piss on city workers who attempted to dislodge her. After the conference, the Writers Guild members referred to her as The Tree Lady.
Lorna had encouraged me to drive to Americus to meet Marty and take part in the Americus Slam at Pat’s Place. Sometime after that, I attended a writer’s conference of sorts in Albany at which Marty Evans and Vic Miller were two of the guest speakers. Up till then I had written fairly conventional verse. We were seated in a small auditorium in an old brick building on a tree lined street in spring—amphitheater seating—Marty Evans was up right after Vic Miller. Vic’s reading was pretty tame but entertaining as he always was.
As Marty ran down the sloping aisle toward the stage, he boomed : “Good morning America.” He leapt onto the stage. “Bang! Hemingway’s brain hits the breakfast table...” He continued through his poem “Where Are the Poets,” completely from memory. Poetry changed for me that day and hasn’t been the same since. After the performance, he came over to me in the audience and we spoke briefly. I bought a couple of his books on the veranda. Sometime later, Lorna persuaded me to come to Americus to see what the Americus Slam was like.
I was single then and drove my ’63 Plymouth Valiant to Americus, following Lorna’s directions until I found her old farmhouse in the country near DeSoto, GA. She shared the house with goats, chickens, guinea fowl, various cats and dogs, and occasionally her husband Buster, who dropped in just long enough to get her pregnant. I met Lorna’s mother, Maggie, who also read poems at the Slam. We ate at Lorna’s house. She cooked some kind of bean soup and spaghetti. She had meant to thaw out spaghetti sauce and thawed out bean soup by mistake, so we ate the soup on our spaghetti. The kids complained. Spaghetti strands dangled from the ceiling in places because Lorna tested it by tossing it at the ceiling. When it stuck, it was done. She never bothered to take down the strands from former meals. I had to brush the roaches off the table as we ate because Maggie had adopted a Buddhist philosophy and had taken to feeding the roaches as part of God’s creation. They went forth and multiplied.
We loaded into Lorna’s old car. She had to chase a chicken out of the car. There was a used yogurt cup on the dash. I asked her about it. “I use them for cups. It’s cheaper than buying cups at Wal-Mart.” I asked her about the apple core, also perched on the dash. “I save them for the chickens to eat.” Lorna was hard core conservationist. We ate first at the Talking bean, a local hangout. Lorna was a coffee addict. We both were. Espresso wasn’t safe near us.
We had been asked to take part in a reading earlier in the day at a local art center. Tracy Outlaw was one of the readers. I felt she saw me as a threat. I saw her as a challenge, a petite, blonde spitfire. After the reading, we went back to Lorna’s house to pick up Maggie. It was summer. We made the trek with Maggie in the back, all the windows open.We settled into Pat’s Place. Marty made his appearance, all slicked back hair, leather pants and vest, enough cigars to get him through the evening. There were some hot chicks there. Marty read the rules.
I signed on and when my turn came, I read a short but powerful poem. It was too short. It was over before they had even gotten ready to listen. That was my first lesson in what we dubbed the “School for Demagogues.” Get the plebs’ attention before you launch your oratorical galleon. Three minutes or less.
During the Slam, we struck some themes that were to become common with us. Maggie tried to get us to buy her a drink when Lorna wasn’t looking. Lorna warned us Maggie might try to get us to buy her a drink or give her a cigarette—she had emphysema--and begged us not to. Marty smoked and flirted. I flirted and drank. The Slam was at Pat’s Place and Pat offered $25 dollars to the winner, not a bad incentive. There were 2nd and 3rd prizes as well. I decided to start writing for the event. My own poetry had reached an impasse. I felt stagnant so this would bring a welcome change. I went on to win some first and second prizes and eventually qualified to be on the regional team.
Back home at the writers guild, members noticed a change in me, not entirely welcome. I became an apostle of the movement. I asked Marty to come and do a reading and offered to pay him. He rode his motorcycle down. He performed at the So. Ga Regional Library for mostly older women. They said he was the worst speaker we ever had. One elderly lady wrote a poem comparing Marty’s poetry to manure. Marty joked that the library gig was perhaps the toughest venue he had ever performed at.
Greenville had been a really emotional experience, with quite a few highs and lows. Lorna was especially manic, since she was away from Buster and the kids for a few days. At one point we were returning to the hotel as another team was leaving. Lorna whipped out a water bottle she was carrying, held it between her legs and sprayed the other team with it. Marty noted the look of terror in the other team’s eyes as Lorna’s mock-piss cascaded over them.
We got back to Americus around sunset. Word reached us—as if we needed any more drama by that time--that Buster had phoned, concerned because Lorna hadn’t showed up at home yet, even though she had plenty of time to get there. We debated whether she might be suicidal, having to return to Buster, the old crumbling stone farmhouse, her elderly disabled Mom, six kids and assorted domestic animals. It turned out she had only taken a detour to decompress and enjoy the high of the Slam a little longer before facing reality again.
There was an after-party at one of the regionals, probably Knoxville, held in the country at an old farmhouse owned by one of the participants, a sweet, attractive brunette lady. It was a long way out along a dark country road, but we found it alright and settled in for a night of drinking and impromptu mayhem. Some old dude had gone off the curve just before the entrance and asked a bunch of us to come help push his car out. There were about 15 poets trying to push the old drunk guy’s car out of the muddy ditch, but it wouldn’t budge. I finally left, since I hadn’t come for that. I was standing next to Lorna as she sat on the hood of someone’s car. She wore a bandana around her head, a flannel lumberjack shirt, and work boots. The old coot who ran his car in the ditch was trying to get Lorna in the sack, and at one point proposed to her, but she wasn’t having any of it. Someone else told Lorna she looked like Paul Bunyan’s wife.
At some point, six or seven of us guy poets gathered around the reverend Jim and someone proposed he say a prayer. We formed a circle, putting our arms over each other’s shoulders. “Gentlemen,” he began, “go wherever it is you go when you want to be with your God.” He concluded, saying I don’t know what, but it was as good a prayer as I ever heard at church. At the final round in Knoxville, Reverend Jim had taken the stage with a half-gallon of Jack Daniels in his hand. He was going for broke, prepared for Armageddon if need be, and trying to cushion the blow of losing.
The last Slam I attended was the one put on by Marty and hosted by Americus. Rhetta, Marty’s wife, told us that day that she was pregnant so, in addition to organizing the event and hosting a bunch of poetic maniacs, his plate was pretty full. I got up that morning and hurried to cut my yard, using a push mower before driving my wife and myself the 2 ½ hours to Americus. Things were running behind, so by the time my turn came to perform in round one it was late in the evening, around 10PM if I remember right and I was very fatigued. In retrospect, I wish I had waited to cut the grass. I had a good poem, Solomon’s Seal, that I had pored over, loaded with content but swift paced and witty, etc. It didn’t score well; too intellectual for the judges.
Various things happened. There was an erotic poetry session as on previous occasions, but this time some of the poets were downright raunchy. One fat black poet with an eye painted in the middle of his forehead performed cunnilingus on the microphone. It was a different feel than the erotic reading in Greenville where Craig Legg performed a poem about breaking up with his girlfriend, and how he tried to eradicate her smell by baking a big pot of baked beans and eating them, going outside and rolling in dog crap, then dousing himself all over with whiskey, imbibing a good bit in the process. The last line of the poem was something to the effect that, when he woke up the next morning, a stinking mess, he realized “All I could smell was you.”
Clebo Rainey was present and did a poem during one round that I requested—one of my favorites—At The Bar; “I like it, at the bar...” I got to see Mike Hoerman perform one of my all time favorite Slam poems, “I’ve pulled the wool over hundreds of eyes, hiding on stage in a poet’s disguise.” Pure genius.
The Final Round was held in the Rylander Theater in Americus, a restored 1930’s era theater—very ornate, with gold trim, a high balcony, classic fresco paintings and fancy woodwork. As the poets and spectators entered the theater, a musician was playing the big, beautiful theatre organ that sat directly in front of the stage. He was playing classic show tunes such as Some Enchanted Evening, etc. The poets seemed totally unaware of their surroundings. They hooted and climbed over the backs of the velvet seats. It was like a zoo had been loosed in the Louvre.
I hadn’t qualified, so my wife and I sat next to Mike Hoerman, who was trying to get picked to be a judge, since he also didn’t qualify to be in the final round. It was a total Jerry Springer act from start to finish. A skinny black poet—Ayodele-- last year’s winner, won again with a poem about eating ribs. The grand finale was Clebo Rainey—even though he wasn’t really a finalist but just “Poet Emeritus” or something—ripping the shirt off his fat body during his poem “I was Rarefied in Arkansas.” Marty also didn’t qualify for the final round, which kind of pissed me off because his poetry is better than 99% of what was read and you’d think he would have gotten some recognition, but didn’t.
The whole experience was so depressing to me that I didn’t want to attend the after party. I just wanted to go back to my hotel room in the Westminster Hotel and crash. But I got in a fight with my wife on the way there because she had suffered through the whole event just to go to the party, dance, and have a little fun. Already feeling low, a domestic squabble didn’t help. So we agreed, I’d go back to the hotel alone and she went back to the party and danced. When I went back to the party to make sure she was OK, she was dancing with some young non-qualifier who was obviously blitzed. Marty said he’d keep an eye on her safety etc. When I went back the second time, another poet—a black guy who did a poem about “but I never had a Princess...” was trying to convince my wife to go back to the motel with him and get naked. Anyway, that was the end of my Slam career.
Team Americus went to the nationals that year. I didn’t go with them. That was one circus I planned to avoid. But they went, Marty, Lorna, Frank Wiley, and I don’t know who else. It was a circus by all accounts, but the clowns weren’t funny. I think Taylor Mali won, or Patricia Johnson.
