| Sumario: | In the United States and beyond, the poetry slam is at times the subject of haranguing from the literary world, embodied concisely by Harold Bloom's infamous lament that the poetry slam represents ‘the death of art,’ given the form's populist, amateurish tendencies in both reception and production. I contend that Bloom and other like-minded critics are not necessarily incorrect, but that the slam's slaying of ‘art’ ought not to be mourned. It is precisely the slam's amateur, non-professional traits that imbue the oral poetry practice with the generative potential to develop, reshape, and redefine new economies of cultural value through its particular formation of ritual competitive performance. Based on ethnographic research of youth poets in New York City affiliated with the organization Urban Word NYC, this article represents an attempt to redeem the ‘amateur’ as a radical modality that serves as a counter-conduct to the disciplinary segregation between the social and the aesthetic. Youth slam poetry, as anamateurform, generatively blurs the border of professionality erected between the aesthetic and the social to discursive generate new economies of aesthetic value. Through the paradoxical institutionalization of the amateur, the youth poetry slam as a liminal site of cultural contestation facilitates the development of a youth poetry aesthetic that valuesparrhesia, or courageous truth-telling, and in doing so serves a vital role in subject formation and authentication for youth poets in New York City. Thus, the slam can serve as a potent intermediary for youth to express, produce, and reflect on their political agency and efficacy.
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