Poetry Smackdown

By Mark Kaufman
A recent piece that accompanied an article on the contemporary poetry scene. In order to show the friction between today’s so called slam or performance poets and the traditional book poets my first instinct was of course to show violence or ‘rassling poets. I’m glad I kept my baser instincts in check. I opted instead to use typographic and calligraphic elements to infer the supposed conflict. The poetry is mine as well. Oh no he didn’t!