1.   Anthony Morales shouted during a recent Friday night poetry slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, asking for the Puerto Ricans in the house.

2.   Draft a paper on the subject and deliver it at a poetry slam.

3.   Larenz Tate and Nia Long play Darius and Nina, artistically inclined twentysomethings who meet one night at a Chicago poetry slam.

4.   She has won prizes at poetry slams and crisscrossed the Continent on reading tours, leaving entire rooms in silence after working her words into music.

5.   The coffeehouse competitions caught on, so much so that a national poetry slam draws teams from around the country every year.

6.   These poetry slams involve teams of poets competing in the shouted word, I mean spoken word.

7.   Ultimately, Browserday, located at internationalbrowserday.com, is a sort of poetry slam for artistically inclined techies.

8.   Welcome to the subculture of the poetry slam, a battle royal where three-dimensional showmanship trumps two-dimensional words on a page.

9.   Whether poetry slams and the mass marketing of poetry CDs prove to be more than a passing fad remains to be seen.