Grand Slam

Essentially, it’s poetry performed onstage with the staccato rhythm of rap, often accompanied by breakdance moves and bits of music.

But when Colman actually starts speaking or rapping or poem-ing, if there is indeed a word like that, the very way in which he bends words to his literary will and the depth of thought behind them keeps you wide awake, like the harsh pitter-patter of rain on your insular life’s tin roof.

The 33-year-old, yet boyish-looking, Colman began his career at the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and collected several more commendations on the way, the most prestigious being the Tony Award earlier this year, which he shared as a co-writer and star of Rusell Simmon’s Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.

“I started on this trip as a ‘grammar poet’ on the PBS adult literary TV series and the director wanted to make it look like a Gap commercial,” says Colman, laugh lines grouping together at the corners of his eyes.

The show was apparently shot Gap style, but that hasn’t stopped Colman from voicing his opinions in his own inimitable way about issues as diverse as racism, Iraq, and mass-market entertainment.

His experiences might be mostly American, but in a small world, there are many that generate instant identification. “I see myself as a voice. A dissenting one, a protesting voice whatever, because it’s important to get people out of their cosy corners,” says Colman who, in one of his poems is going to Paris, Because they killed democracy in Florida/Quick call the coroner.

Says Colman, “Although slam poetry resembles rap, the literary standards are higher. You could turn your rap into poetry, but when you take the music away you have to say something a little more profound.”

But will social change, even the least-est bit, be possible through the form? Will there be the slightest shift in attitudes? “Slam poetry is a lot more accessible and whole generations have grown up on it. Sometimes, I feel we’re in with a chance, though change takes its own time. At others, I feel writing is just an indulgence for me.”

An indulgence, it might seem at times, but it is deeply illuminating nevertheless, like these lines from one of his earlier poem, Hip-Hop Scotch, about growing up white in a black culture: At first they thought I was a snake/because I shed my skin/Then they saw how I could shake,/that’s why they took me in.

As the meeting comes to an end, you ask one of the world’s best slam poets about the world around us. “I see these as the best and worst of times. An insular America now knows where Afghanistan is, though it needn’t have happened this way. There are contradictions and inequalities galore around us, but as long as there are dissenting voices, everything is not lost yet. Hope still floats.”