Torres on Torres

Poet, performer and visual artist Edwin Torres is interviewed in the new issue of Rain Taxi. Torres is the rarest of all poets: a writer who straddles multiple scenes (slam, avant-garde, performance) without contradiction. He discusses his eclectic taste and style in relation to his desire to do away with intentionality, and implicitly suggests that a certain openness of taste is one way to rid oneself of ego. Interestingly, he also discusses the special role of the stage, and the transformations that slam has undergone since the 90s:

When I was involved in the slam scene, the poets were writing for an audience of poets; we had a gathering of ears that were tuned into the subtleties of language and structure. So each week, for maybe eighteen months, the poets were riding on this enormous wave of creative exploration, trying to outdo each other more in writing than performance. The stage was an afterthought, a vehicle for the content. When the stage became the content itself, when the audience changed to money-paying non-poets, slam became more popular but less challenging poetically. Now it serves as a great accessible entry point for a wider range of people who may never have thought of poetry as a cultural force, let alone entertainment.