Forty-two poets from across the country will converge first on stages in Bryan, then in Rudder Theatre for the fifth annual Texas Grand Slam Poetry Festival this Friday and Saturday. The Battalion Life & Arts writer Taylor Siskind spoke with some of the festival’s competitors as a part of a week-long series about the poets. Here are some of the artists’ takes on their work.

Bill “Good Ghost bill” Moran

Richmond, Texas

Class of 2010, Creative writing graduate student

THE BATTALION: What do you slam about? 

MORAN: Yeah, my sort of aesthetic, my approach, my style has changed over the years. Many times. Right now I’m writing more abstract stuff in terms of form, very abstract. But yeah, I write a lot about. Really, really happy topics, like substance abuse, mental illness, stuff like that. I guess if you want to like, loop it all together, what I kind of do is like poetic Bildungsroman, which is like a novel of becoming. It’s a German thing. So, it’s the struggle of sort of like becoming a coherent person entering into adulthood, and how that work is sort of never finished.

THE BATTALION: Whathas inspired your style throughout the years?

MORAN: I mean I want to say just getting bored in my own work and getting bored with writing the same poems over and over again. That’s a pretty good way to change. But yeah, I don’t know. Just different topics, different things I’m interested in…There are a few constants I always latch onto. There’s imagery — you know poem comes down to being images. That’s the starting point. Image before language. 

Piper “Rasberry Pi” Reid

Austin, Texas

Astrophysics sophomore at Texas A&M

THE BATTALION: What do you slam about?

REID: I slam about a lot of things. I suffer from anxiety, so I slam about anxiety a lot. I also slam about like, just general controversial issues that bother me — women’s rights and especially like, women in the scientific community and abortion — kind of like hot-button issues like that. 

THE BATTALION: Is that what inspired you to start slamming in the first place? 

REID: Oh, well, I actually watched Neil Hilborn’s YouTube slam, which is OCD. And I listened to his poem OCD, and it was about his OCD. And I just like watched that. I was just really interested in slam poetry. So I just kind of started slamming from there, but I’ve been writing poetry since I was little. 

THE BATTALION: Why is spoken word important to you?

REID: A lot times you’ll see like, news outlets and things trying to talk about these issues but not really like reaching [people] in a way that I feel like slam poetry reaches people.