“The pen is mightier than the sword, and ink will be spilt.”
Days before Mother Nature gripped Baltimore in a white vise, Charm City hosted a death match of another kind. On Saturday, January 30, the Wind Up Space welcomed Todd Zuniga the Founding Editor of New York’s Opium Magazine. Zuniga was in town to emcee Baltimore’s first Literary Death Match (LDM), presented by Opium. In Opium’s words, an LDM is “a jolt of literary fun that blends the performative aspects of Def Poetry Jam, the rapier-quick quips of American Idol (without all the meanness), and the absurdity of Double Dare.”
This duel to the end with pens (or more likely laptops) went in three rounds, each round judged by a panel of three. Two judges were familiar stars in our literary firmament. Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody, judged the “literary merit” of each writer’s words and Rafael Alvarez, a journalist turned screenwriter for The Wire, judged each writer’s “performance.”
Jessica Myles Henkin, the co-creator of the Stoop Storytelling Series and the judge to review competitors’ “intangibles,” was unable to attend, so Zuniga recruited an audience member, Caroline, to stand in. While proclaiming this role her “lifelong dream,” Caroline excused herself from round two because, as she confessed, she was sleeping with one of the competing writers. Never have judges of any other competition been so truthful.
In each round, a Baltimore writer took on an out-of-towner. Competitors had just seven minutes to make a lasting impression. Despite the competitive format, none of the authors during Baltimore’s debut LDM took themselves (or the audience) too seriously.
The event began with a battle between Michael M. Hughes of Baltimore’s CityLit Project and Washingtonian Dave Housley, Editor of the literary magazine Barrelhouse. Housley spoke of celebrity and the dissolution of private borders in the digital age. My favorite line: “The iPhone is no longer more than a stone in my pocket.” Hughes shared hilarious personal recollections of his early career as a video editor for a porn shop on Baltimore’s notorious Block. There, he spent hours cutting and pasting images of genitalia. The judges offered individual reflections, huddled, and then pronounced Housley the winner. Clearly, celebrity trumped pornography. As Caroline mused, “Is porn a genre?”
The second round featured Baltimore’s own Jen Michalski, Editor-in-Chief of JMWW, the “journal managed by wicked women.” Michalski battled Writer and Editor Mike Young from Northampton, Massachusetts who represented Publishing Genius. (For those of you following the ethics, Caroline switched out as judge at this point.)
Mike Young won the round, but I was most captivated by Jen Michalski’s poem. It centered on an unidentified thing and its thingy-ness. I was with Michael Kimball when he pronounced her intangible rating as “off the charts.” While amusing, her words reminded me poignantly of just how much of our day-to-day conversation is preoccupied with things, not ideas or feelings, and in the final analysis, just how meaningless things can be.
So, we were down to Dave Housley and Mike Young. A new batch of judges was summoned from the audience. I was chosen (actually thrust forward by my friends). It turned out I may have been an appropriate choice: the final round was a drawing challenge! Dave Housley drew a pretty credible portrait, if I remember correctly, of one of the judges. Mike Young, drew, shall we say a conceptual rendition of a choo-choo train. I chose the train and so did my colleagues! Mike Young was proclaimed the victor.
The next war of words will be in New York City on February 18. You can vote here for future national and international LDM battle sites. I hope it won’t be too long before this heady event returns to Charm City.
Kitchen Sink at The Windup Space
In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to do, stop by the Wind Up Space and see Kitchen Sink, Wind Up’s second open-call exhibition, on view for only two more weeks. Curated by Jason C. Hoylman, it includes some really captivating work priced within reach.
Filed in: Literary Death Match, The Windup Space.
Doreen Bolger is always on the move because she can’t stop seeing, supporting, and writing about the arts in and around Baltimore City. Her lengthy love affair for the arts began in Long Island when her father, an executive in the textile industry, brought home breathtaking fabrics every night from the heart of the garment district. 
This sounds like a really great event, how many people attended? Do you know if most of the crowd was from Baltimore or if people from out of town were also in attendance?