Shakesperian Asides: Volunteer to be a Judge

by Brother Said

Want to know how hard the judges have it? Before you start your slam career, volunteer to be a judge. You may learn what I learned when I volunteered to be a judge: you make your decisions based on emotion. Most judges are instructed by the host or emcee to give the score they feel the poem deserves. And that's what judges do - but it ain't easy. There's some inner conflict with your logical self, but there is no time for complex deliberation. You want to be fair. I had my own personal criteria which I thought was rather informed and efficient since I'm a poet – but I ended up scoring some poems without much deliberation, but based on emotion. Some people I was biased against the minute they hit the stage.

There is some scientific basis for this. Modern technology has made it possible to see the brain working in real time. Over the past ten years of brain studies the old notions that human beings think logically has been dispelled. Peoples brains have been studied in real time to see whether they funnel decisions through the logical part of their brain in the frontal lobe or through the emotional part in the back of the brain. What's been discovered? Every decision everybody makes very rarely goes through the deliberative, logical front part of the brain, but most decisions are made with the emotional portion of the brain first, even the most crucial decisions.

And that gets to the main point about poetry slam: judges aren't taking your poem home to study it. They have from 30 seconds to a minute to make a decision right then and there at the slam. Since all human beings make all their decisions emotionally anyway, what is a slam judge going to do? Slam judges go with their gut feeling - which includes comparing your poem to the poems that just preceded you. That's where the second premise of positional truth comes from. The judges scores are based not just on how good your poem is, but also where your poem fits in the order. So don't take the judges score personally. And volunteer to be a judge to see what it's like. It just might make you a better, more understanding slam competitor.