POETRY / Seconds out, line one: There was no sign of James Fenton or Adrian Mitchell. But fists were flying, so to speak, at the USA vs UK poetry slam. Kevin Jackson reports

There was no obvious sign of Adrian 'Slugger' Mitchell or James 'Rocky' Fenton, and no one actually had to pick up their shattered teeth from a puddle of body fluids, but in most other respects this was just about the toughest, most hard-punching and antagonistic an evening of iambs and spondees the West End has seen since John 'Crusher' Dryden had his nose slit by footpads in Covent Garden. One of the night's sparring bards, name of Vic Lambrusco, was so outraged by the low score given to his audience-participation poem 'Dismal' that he went off in search of the referee: 'Who are the judges? Who are they? No, no, I'm not gonna hurt them or anything, I just wanna frighten them a bit. . . '

Now, this is not the sort of chat one usually encounters at poetry readings on the South Bank or at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature - not even these days, in the turbulent wake of Mr Mitchell's notorious challenging of Mr Fenton to a no-trochees-barred slug- out for the title of Top British Poet. It is, however, said to be rather more common on New York's Lower East Side, where the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe has not only provided a home for a revival in spoken word performances but has also introduced Americans to the 'Poetry Slam' - an open competition for both established and aspiring versifiers.

Five members of the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe (Nuyorican being a portmanteau of 'New York' and 'Puerto Rican') are now on tour in Britain - Tracie Morris, Dael Orlandersmith, Willie Perdomo, Edwin Torres and Mike Tyler - but though Saturday night's proceedings began with a warm-up from each of them, the real point of the evening was to show us Brits how to stage a deadly combat by verse. And so the ICA's theatre was duly mocked up as a cafe - tables to the fore, bleachers behind - a team of judges picked from the crowd and issued with numbers to hold up, and 25-odd (a sceptic might want to omit that hyphen) hopefuls stepped up to the mike to flex their strophes.

The slammers soon proved to be a decidedly mixed bunch, from the polished young black performers from Brixton's UPS (or Urban Poets' Society, whose unpublicised readings draw up to 400 listeners at a time) to the unpopular old hippie, roundly booed and heckled by the audience, whose mercifully brief offering ended with the line 'I'm just another sexist git'. Some of the material screamed out for a recording contract, but a lot more sounded like a patchy Amateur Night at the Pig and Bladder.

Richard Allen delivered a swift body blow with his inspired comic narrative, school of John Cooper Clarke, about a close encouter with a great white shark. At the other extreme of real or imagined autobiography, a painfully earnest American woman inflicted some vers libre reminiscences about her sexual development, which included the resonant line: 'That summer I spent a lot of time inserting things into my vagina,' before going on to detail all the objects in question. 'Uhh. . . , yeah, OK, very personal', the compere summed up for us, helpfully. Grande-Bretagne, 10 points; Etat- Unis, 0 points.

Between each of the five groups of competitors, the Nuyorican hosts provided a second sample of their wares. These, too, were pretty mixed. In the US, the Nuyoricans are quite big news - they've had slots on MTV and PBS and won rave reviews from the New York Times as well as Rolling Stone, but, on this showing, a lot of their repertoire has an unexpectedly fusty air: too many hand- me-downs from Uncle Ginsberg and Grandpa Ferlinghetti, too much watery surrealism and smug whimsy: 'I have such a giving urinal', 'I just love these new self-debasing turkeys' etc etc.

The best moments of Saturday night's show, at least, came from Tracie Morris, whose first piece was a superbly performed, near- abstract jazz riff around a few key words, and whose second poem began with Gershwin's 'It Ain't Necessarily So' before modulating into one of the few of the evening's many political verses to carry a real emotional sting. Runner-up was the hugely charismatic Dael Orlandersmith, though her lines about the affinities between Harlem and Belfast were more notable for their generosity than their historical acumen.

And so, after three and a half hours of strict and wobbly metres, to the Slam-Off: a knock-out round between the survivors, including Brother Niyi, fresh into London from the Gambia; Jessica d'Este, both the most elegant and the most mature of the performers, whose delicate but sharp verses (notably the haunting 'Syllogism for James Baldwin') kept the rowdy audience in a respectful hush and was the surprise triumph of the slam; Remi, one of the team from UPS; and Richard Allen, with a scabrous, pell-mell fantasy about how John Major was born with buttocks for a head.

It was a closely fought game, but, despite the great surge of enthusiasm for Jessica d'Este, it was comedy which weaved around the audience's political defences and delivered the killer punch: Richard Allen was the champ. A revolutionary night in British poetry? Scarcely, particularly since Mr Allen's material, for all its neat contemporary allusions, is squarely in the tradition of the music-hall reciter; but a feisty, enjoyably raucous night all the same. That low whirring noise faintly audible thoughout the proceedings was caused by F R Leavis rotating ever more rapidly in his grave.

The Nuyorican Poets' Cafe Live tour continues: 7 Sept, Reading Central Club (0734 574421), 9 and 10 Sept, Nia Centre, Manchester (061 227 9254) and 11 Sept at The Green Room, Manchester (061-236 1677); then in Salisbury, Nottingham, Huddersfield and Southampton, returning to London (Tabernacle, W11: 071 243 8621) on 21 Sept

(Photograph omitted)