The Saint Rose Chronicle

Issue date: 4/2/08 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: courtesy photo: Alex Brook Lynn Shappy Seasholtz and Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz to perform Thursday night.

Two popular slam poets are scheduled to read their work at the Neil Hellman Library at The College of Saint Rose on April 3. Shappy Seasholtz and Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz will be at the visiting writers reading series, Frequency North, at 7:30 p.m. for a night of "aggressively eclectic" slam poetry readings and comedy.

Seasholtz is a slam poet, playwright, and comedian, as well as a bartender. According to Seaholtz' website he has had two books published by Kapow! Press. One of them won a Firecracker Award for best poetry in 2000.

O'Keefe Aptowicz is also a poet, and according to her website, http://www.aptowicz.com, she is "founder and host of the three-time National Poetry Slam Championship venue, NYC-Urbana." O'Keefe Aptowicz has also written four poetry books and has performed her work world-wide.

O'Keefe Aptowicz said that anyone planning to attend Frequency North should be prepared to participate.

"Shappy and I both come from the Poetry Slam background, and so we like to bring that energy with us when we perform," O'Keefe Aptowicz said. "We want to the audience to be a part of the experience, and not just witness to it, if that makes sense"

The series was created by Saint Rose English Professor Daniel Nester in Spring 2006 to bring popular writers to the Saint Rose campus to read and perform their works. Some of the past visitors have been champion slam poets and experimental essayists, ranging from Patricia Smith to Wayne Kostenbaum,. He used to run a similar series in Brooklyn called the Frequency Reading Series.

"When I moved up here and started at Saint Rose, I wanted to start a series," Nester said. They asked for a name for the series, and it was just the first name that came to mind."

For those who are unfamiliar with the term of slam poetry, it is an "amorphous term," according to Nester.

"Generally, it's poems that are performed at a poetry slam, which is a competitive poetry reading event invented in the late 1980s in Chicago by Marc Smith, and later spread throughout the country," Nester said.

Audience members are also asked to rate the poets anywhere from zero to ten.

O'Keefe Aptowicz also says that people debate on whether or not slam poetry even exists.

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