Nikki Germany is the winner
It was a tight contest--full of thrilling rushes, dramatic comebacks and clutch performances that finally ended in an exciting come-from-behind victory. No, we're not talking about the Buffalo Sabres Friday night overtime victory over the New York Rangers in the NHL playoffs.
The other contest in town that night was the second annual Buffalo Poetry Slam Championship in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's Clifton Hall, which saw eight finalists compete for four slots on the Buffalo Poetry Slam Team that will compete in the National Poetry Slam Aug. 7-11 in Austin, Texas.
In an evening when urban hip-hop stylists outpointed cooler ironic types and women generally outscored men, Nikki Germany rallied from the middle of the pack with strong second and third round performances to narrowly edge last year's champion Howard Smith and win the 2007 Buffalo Poetry Slam Championship.
Germany, who currently lives in Lockport, and is an accomplished performance poet scored well with three-minute pieces that dealt with body image and self empowerment issues, an angry and vulnerable repudiation of a former lover, and a powerful closing piece "I Want To Be That B----" that took a familiar gender stereotype and reclaimed it as an assertion of feminist prerogative.
One didn't need to wait for the randomly chosen slam judges' scores to realize that her final piece was a momentum turner.
I won't claim any special expertise when it comes to evaluating hip-hop poetry--the last time I checked, my "street credibility" was less than zero--but any close listener will recognize that what differentiates Germany's work from her peers is the sophisticated use of enjambment and internal rhymes, her jazz-influenced use of inflection and line breaks, and ability to superimpose a monologue-like narrative over a fairly complicated rhythmic scheme.
If you'd like to sample some of Nikki Germany's work for yourself--listeners should be warned that some of her work contains "coarse language"--you can do so at her Myspace page. Here is a link to that page: www.myspace.com/nikkigermany
Finishing a close second to Germany was last year's winner Howard Smith, whose body of work is probably the most consistently excellent of any Buffalo-based spoken word artist. I've never seen him give a sub par performance, and there's no mystery why. As I was approaching Clifton Hall from the Francis Bacon Exhibition Opening Friday night in the Albright-Knox's Main Building, Smith was alone pacing the sidewalk vehemently rehearsing his one of his pieces.
His work is notable for its linguistic intensity--think of it as a torrent of urban vernacular language pouring into the room like a well spring, or perhaps to use a more appropriate simile, a fire hose. In fact, the sheer velocity of his work over the length of a three minute piece poses some problems in terms of its comprehensibility. It's not as if he's speaking nonsense, it's more like one requires special listening skills, and maybe some recording equipment with playback capabilities, to parse all his sentences.
Finishing third and fourth in the competition, and thereby earning the final two slots on the Buffalo Poetry Slam team were one young woman known as Nickie D. (whose smart and edgy rap based performances led the competition through two rounds) and another known as Lovely, whose performance style one might call "urban confessional."
Il in all, this was a terrific evening. Special thanks go to Gabrielle Boulaine, who hosted and coordinated the event for Nickel City Poetry Slam, Inc., and Michael Kelleher of Just Buffalo Literary Center, the event's co-sponsor, whose cell phone text messages kept me up to date on the Sabres score.
