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Poetic Prince of Denver: Connor Marvin and His Slam Poetry
Contemporary
poets take the stage one-by-one to engage the audience and openly talk about
some of society’s most troubling issues in a creative way. Slam poetry is the
competitive art of performi
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[dropcap class=”kp-dropcap”]C[/dropcap]ontemporary poets take the stage one-by-one to engage the audience and openly talk about some of society’s most troubling issues in a creative way. Slam poetry is the competitive art of performing contemporary poetry live. In some cases, judges
are randomly selected and seated throughout the audience, scoring each poet on a scale between one and 10. This isn’t the traditional poetry scene that you may be used to. In Denver, the slam poetry scene is growing with the rest of its vast arts culture. Denver even has a couple major slam poetry teams that compete on a national level.
Local poet Connor Marvin is a slam poet who is on the 2014 Mercury Café nationals’ team. Marvin has been performing slam poetry for about two years. He got started at the local slam poetry night at the Mercury Café a couple years ago and has been an active member of the slam poetry scene ever since. Marvin uses his poetry to reach out to others and can often be found performing on Sunday nights at the Mercury Café’s weekly “Jam before the Slam.” Marvin sat down with CULTURE to dive deep into his art and his world.
Tell us a bit about your poetry.
I think everyone starts writing from a place of personal catharsis. People start writing poetry and specifically performing poetry, as a way of self-expression. I got to a place where I realized that I could use the medium to heal people, to alleviate the suffering of someone in the audience. That’s why I do it. Hopefully, there is at least one person there on any given night that needs to hear the poem that only I can write.
What was it like being on the Mercury Café slam poetry team?
That was an amazing experience. It was a little frustrating at times, just in terms of the amount of practicing that we did. Working as a performance poetry team was a whole different thing I had never been exposed to and it helped my own poetry a lot. Going to nationals was a really surreal experience. I got to go to Oakland and be around a couple of hundred brilliant poets for a week and perform in front of almost a thousand people. All these things, I never thought I would be doing in my life.
How has the poetry culture in Denver grown?
There’s a lot of youth outreach being done, which gives me a lot of hope for the future. We’ve got a lot of established slam poets going into high schools and helping kids find their voice. There’s also a lot of activism. Inherent in the slam community, there are a lot of these conversations— People are talking about important things and so people become more socially and politically aware. They get inspired at a poetry slam or they get inspired by taking part in slam poetry and then they actually carry that out into the world show up to protests and start different organizations and things like that.
How do you feel legal cannabis has affected the art culture in Denver?
Anything that is going to increase people’s freedom is going to increase the artistic output of that area. I think both the quality and quantity of art in Denver is increasing. I don’t know if it’s direct byproduct of legalization, but it’s definitely involved.
What is the new website you are launching?
It is going to be an online publication. The idea is to market poetry more effectively. Poetry is seen as this thing old white people do. It is seen as this passé bourgeois thing, when in reality it’s a party. Poetry is fun and it should be fun. People are constantly posting different things online, but they are rarely posting poetry. Poetry hasn’t evolved to fit the contemporary social media world. We want to publish everyone who is writing poetry that is exciting in Denver, not just slam poets.
