Why slams and what makes good slam poetry?

With a week to go to the Hammer & Tongue national poetry slam final, I thought I’d put some thoughts together about why we have slams and what I think makes good poetry.

The job of the critic, said T. S. Eliot, is “the elucidation of texts and the correction of tastes.” You might not like the sound of the latter phrase, but let’s follow its implications more carefully; elucidate it, if you will. Now, if you believe that all experience of art is subjective (i.e. there is no such thing as good and bad art, just what different people like) then ‘correcting tastes’ might seem a pointless, even elitist task. And so it is if only a predestined elect get the job of taste-correction. Indeed this may be what snobbish, protestant Eliot would have wanted.