I haven't called myself a poet since… I don't know, maybe around 2018?

Between the years of 2009 to… well definitely 2017, and probably a little bit after that, I almost certainly identified as a slam poet. My sole extracurricular in undergrad was slam poetry, and the impact it had on my life was akin to a pebble causing pond ripples, although maybe the more apt metaphor is an unassuming shift in tectonic plates forever altering my brain chemistry.

There are several folks who I was introduced to as a poet and based on my subsequent interactions where I proceeded to share poetry, I can understand why that may have left a most lasting impression.

I haven't called myself a poet in a while because I haven't consistently written poetry in a while. I have been very good about my newsletter and media critique, so it's easy to claim those things as things that I am. But outside of the odd free write here and there, poetry hasn't been my medium of choice for a while.

Maybe part of it was being surrounded by good poets. Like really good poets. Poets who consistently produced phenomenal work that made me want to produce phenomenal work. Poets who were prolific and published, with book deals. Poets who were in no uncertain terms better than me.

But it's not like I was a terrible poet. I was well respected by my peers and through sheer determination of playing the numbers game, managed a handful of publication. It simply became a question of was this what I wanted to get better at, and the answer at the time was, “not particularly.”

So for years, there was a shift in my identity. From poet to just writer, a broader term, but more accurate term. I was never one to stick with one particular genre.

But flash forward to 2025, and I'm finding that I miss the game. Not slam per ce, but the game of language. The playfulness that comes with poetry. Part of this instigated by my 30 zines in 30 days project. Part of this instigated by my work with SLICE. Part of this spurred by my experimenting with riso printing. Part of this spurred by the omnipresence of this thing called “Generative AI” that has made my life is several ways, but at the same time has reminded me that I don't intrinsically need to be the “best" at a thing in order to do a thing or be a thing.

But I am also good at this thing. Maybe not live off my laurels good, but good like why deny myself a part that gave joy and still gives joy. Why lose the label, when it is still applicable to degree.

This ended up being a much larger preamble, but it's all pertinent so it all gets mentioned. But as I start thinking about April and National Poetry Month, and doing a 30/30 for the love of the game (and because quite honestly, I for some reason have a staggering amount of free energy now that I am actively offloading certain hats), I am in a particular mood to share the three of the most influence short form works.

G.A. Ingersol's Test

Ironic, this first piece is decidedly not a poem, although it is microfiction and there is a certain quality about it that is very poem adjacent but after reading this piece in 2012, it has been cemented as one of those tent pole pieces in my memory.

Part of that is very much conditional on the fact that it is a piece that reliant on and unbeholden to its form. This idea of a “test” with word problems, matching, short answer, essay, and the single most resounding end line ever:

“Extra Credit: Fully explain the ways in which you are wrong.”

I spend a lot of time thinking about how form defines function and vice versa. I think a lot of that is because of this piece.

I read lots of microfiction and hint fiction and other works in that singular undergrad course, but this is the one nearly a decade and change later that I still aspire to and still mimic. Fitting for it to be the top of the list.

Sam Martone's Open Water (II)

This one holds a particularly strange place in my heart, because it was one of the first pieces I ever approved as a reader for FreezeRay Poetry back during my tenure as a reader. I don't have nearly as much to wax poetic on, but the beauty of this piece was how much it existed simultaneously as a pop culture piece and as a poem that just slapped. There are plenty of allusions, but none so overtly overt.

But the line that gets me every time is: “Equip your rewards. If you you cannot find the hero you seek, it will have to be you. There is no other option.”

Maybe I'll get a tattoo of that at some point…

A lot of 2026 has been characterized by a “fuck it, I'll do it myself” energy. A “I guess I will be the change I want to see in the world” mentality. I think the sentiment form Sam's poem stuck. I think I missed that rush. The discovery of a line that requires a whole poem to uncover and understand. I think I am ready to play again.

Tonya Ingram’s I am Twenty Two

It would in fact be disingenuous for me to rattle off a list of seminal short form work without included one from my slam poetry days.

And honestly, I'm not sure this is necessarily the right one. I think it's the right one right now.

Part of me wants to cite one of my more direct contemporaries, a fellow WU-SLam poet, but on this particular day, I find myself thinking about a piece I heard in Oakland back in 2014.

I did not know Tonya Ingram personally. I watched her team win CUPSI 2013. I watched her rock this poem at the National Poetry Slam. The deftness of language. The interweaving and the intercutting and the turns of phrase. The narrative, the defiance, the mix of emotions.

Years later, I would rediscover this poem and see that Tonya had a passed away after failing to get a kidney transplant because we apparently live in a terrible, terrible world.

“The epitome of #ThereIsNoCure.”

Maybe I'm thinking about this poem because I'm watching the Pitt every week. Maybe I'm reckoning with my own chronic illness this week as I stab myself with a drug that is being used off label and I am still angry that my pharmacist once said “you got a good deal”, as though my well being was something to be haggled.

If you ask me again in a year, a month, a week, a day, I think I will probably have a different answer for you as “the slam poem that had the most lasting impact,” I think because impact is not a static metric. It wanes. It waxes. It ebbs. It flows. But this particular point of time, this is what I claim.

Post-Script

So due to the fact that most months only have four Tuesdays, I have gotten really used to my video, free write, mixed tape, and matching mixed media, that I have completely forgotten that some months have five Tuesdays and I know this isn't the first time this has happened, but I can't for the life of me remembered how I handled it and at this point, my archive is deep enough that I figure I can riff on things at this point and no one will point that lack of internal consistency for this rare occurrence and honestly I don't know why I'm dedicated so much time pointing all of this out, but hey, that's the fun of a blog y'know?