Working with a 24-team model, we will attempt the following:

- Each team will participate in two four-team slams on Friday.

- Each of these slams will be co-hosted by a pair of guest adult poets and the audience will be made up of Ann Arbor students field-tripped in from school.

- In these four-team slams, each team will perform four different poems. Up to 6 poets per team can participate in any combination, but no more than 4 poets involved in any one poem. No individual can perform more than one individual piece per slam. No specific poem can be used more than once on Friday.

- The Friday evening 24-team slam will allow each team to perform one more poem. It can be either a group piece or an individual piece but it cannot be one which was already been performed earlier in the day.

- The top 10 teams will compete in the finals, performing three pieces each. Teams can repeat earlier poems if they wish, but much of the audience in the finals will have attended earlier events and we’d dearly love to excite them all over again with fresh stuff, but that is up to each team. The other 14 teams will perform one poem in the Finals, but will not be scored.

Standard slam rules apply:

- A poem must be written by the individual presenting it (in

- Poems can be on any subject written in any style. There are no

- Judges will be chosen randomly from the crowd (though we may use

- No props can be used. The wallet/gun was ingenious last year, but let’s be fair to all competitors and encourage our poets to respect each other and competition by refraining from like extras. The microphone or anything else on stage that can be used by all poets do not count as props. Again, we don’t want to issue penalties here exactly...just do the honorable thing. We all know what constitutes a prop and what doesn’t. Play fair.

- Same as above for costumes. The art is in the words.

- Same as above for background music. Beat-boxing, singing --

- Time limit. There will be a time limit. Three minutes, with a 10-second grace period for individual poems. 3:15 with a 10-second grace period for group pieces. We will also count strict time penalties – the penalty will not be as severe as the adult slam -- two-tenths of a point per ten seconds over instead of five-tenths -- but we will assess them and they could potentially keep your team out of the finals. We ask that you encourage your poets not to go over time. We are not trying to restrain anyone’s creativity, but recognize that for the opening rounds we will be operating under a pretty tight time schedule and any team that monopolizes the mic will be causing other teams and audiences to wait for them.  Play fair.