My wife and I ran the “Running Water Poetry Slam” at the Acoustic Café in Eau Claire – damn near once a month, year round, for seven years. We started in the fall of 2000, and it’s one of the coolest things we’ve ever done.

Our big mission statement for the local poetry slam was “giving poets a reason to write.” Basically, I was just out of college and found myself less and less motivated to write the (trust me, outstanding) poetry I had been churning out for classes. I saw the need for some kind of regularly scheduled writing deadline. People were actually holding occasional poetry readings at the time, but the only regular open mics where either on campus (NOTA) or kind of hard to get to (White Pine).

There needed to be a reliable open mic every month located outside an academic setting. At the time, the national poetry slam scene was just finishing up its first golden age, and people around here were finally talking about it. At a slam, poets sign up to read open mic-style, but they only get three minutes to wow you on stage. Louder, more aggressive material is popular but not required. The audience is encouraged to be almost as vocal as the poets, and audience members actually score the writers. A “winner” is chosen at every slam. What’s not to like?

A lot, apparently.

Some of the area’s established writers balked at the concept of “scoring” poetry and all that it implied about the Creation of Art. The whole slam concept was kind of a joke to them. But back in college, as part of UW-Eau Claire’s speech team, I had spent countless weekends traveling around the country to perform literature (much of it my own stuff) in front of random judges who gave me a score and ranked me against other competitors. So the slam format made total sense to me. The competition drove us to improve, revise, and reinvent our craft. It was awesome.

Watching your neighbor totally destroy a room full of people with three minutes of poetry is pretty inspiring.

But should our art be driven by the need to be better than others? I don’t know. Probably not. But for my wife and I, the poetry slam wasn’t about artists trying to outdo each other. It was about writers trying to out-inspire each other, for lack of a better term. Watching your neighbor totally destroy a room full of people with three minutes of poetry is pretty inspiring. And a loud, vocal audience ready for a good time sure helps grease the ol’ creative wheels. We knew not everyone’s creative drive worked that way, but we figured they could start their own damn open mic.

And beyond that, if you’re not ready to have your favorite piece of writing rejected by a room full of strangers, then perhaps you should get ready. Every serious writer I’ve met seems to experience a lot more rejection than non-stop high fives and post open mic make-out sessions.

Which reminds me of a little detail often lost in the haze of nostalgia. Was all that poetry we heard over the course of seven years ... good? Ha, no. A thousand times no. But some of it was. Some of it was fantastic. And some of those poems made you jump to your feet with tears in your eyes. When’s the last time that happened to you in front of your television?

We weren’t a traditional slam, if there is such a thing. Most of our readers were not slammin’ their poems, and while our audiences could get nice and loud at times, they were still Sconnies at heart – polite, respectful, and kinda quiet. But it worked. We weren’t the Nuyorican Poets Café, but we weren’t boring. Usually.

I’ll admit, the slam got a tad wonky towards the end. We had more and more high school age readers (and younger) and we think this caused older readers to shy away. Unfortunate, but understandable. Attendance was unpredictable, and the regular stand-out writers kind of disappeared. Then my wife and I had our first kid, and we decided it was time to pass the slam over to someone who could devote more energy to it. By then, the city was seeing precious few poetry readings, and the only regular open mic was on campus.

But things are changing. As you may have read (in this here magazine), Eau Claire’s Poet Laureate Bruce Taylor has leapt into the murky swamp of local writers with an open mic series back at the Acoustic Café on the first Wednesday of the month, in addition to readings at the Janet Carson Gallery. He says, “These types of things used to go on all the time in Eau Claire, I figured it was time to try and bring them back.”

And he’s right.