The Blue Door is a coffeehouse. Twelve tables, a counter, a couch with a spring that will get you, and an actual blue door. Six nights a week it's a place to read and drink coffee and argue quietly. On Tuesday nights it is not quiet. Tuesday is slam night. We've been doing it since the spring of 1998, when a regular talked us into moving the tables back and putting a lamp on a milk crate, and it has gotten so we have to turn people away at the door by 8:15. So come early. Bring a poem or bring your ears. Both are welcome.

A slam is a poetry reading turned into a contest. Poets get up one at a time and perform their own work, from memory or off the page, and judges picked out of the audience hold up scores like it's the Olympics. The crowd is allowed, encouraged even, to cheer, groan, boo the judges, and generally behave in a way that would get you thrown out of a library reading. The point isn't really the winning. The point is that a slam makes poetry something that happens to a room full of people at once, instead of something that happens to one person alone on a couch. The scores are just how we trick everybody into caring.

The slam started in Chicago in the mid-1980s, in a bar, with a poet who was tired of readings that put people to sleep and figured a little competition would wake them up. It worked. By 1990 there was a national slam bringing teams from different cities together, and by now there are slams in coffeehouses and bars in just about every city in the country, including this one, on Tuesdays, at ours.

If you've never been to one: come at 7:30, get a coffee, sit near the back if you're nervous and near the front if you're not. You don't have to read. You might get picked as a judge (say yes; it's fun and nobody will remember your scores by Thursday). If you do want to read, put your name on the sheet. The first-timers get the loudest applause of the night, by tradition, no matter what they read. We take that tradition seriously.

Taped to the wall by the sign-up sheet, and read out loud by the host every Tuesday at 8:00, whether or not anybody's listening.

Every Tuesday. Sign-up 7:30, first poet 8:00, done by 10:30 or so. Every Tuesday winner is in the Finals. Special nights marked.

No slam December 7 through the end of the year. The Blue Door takes its holidays. Spring season starts up again in January, date on the chalkboard.

Dominique has won three Tuesdays in a row, which ties the house record (set by a guy named Paul in the fall of '98, who then moved to Portland; we've forgiven him). She's a nursing student, she writes about her grandmother and about hospitals and about buses, she never uses the paper, and she has a way of getting quiet at the end of a piece that makes the whole room lean in. Her round-two score on the 21st was a 28.9. She says the mug is hers. She may be right.

The chalkboard, as of tonight: DOMINIQUE · 3. And under it, in somebody else's handwriting: "somebody do something."

We don't put the slam poems on this page. They belong to the people who wrote them, and half of them don't exist on paper anyway. But so newcomers know what a slam piece sounds like, here's a short one by Bev, who makes the coffee and has never once entered the slam, and who wrote this on the back of an order pad on a slow Sunday and said we could use it. It's about fifty seconds out loud. Read it out loud.

© 1999 Bev. Used with permission. She would like you to know the coffee is better than the poem. We disagree.

It's a coffeehouse. We'd be lying if we said the slam was the whole reason people come.

No cover on slam night, ever. We ask that you buy something, because the lamp on the milk crate doesn't pay for itself, and the tip jar by the register goes to whoever's hosting. Water is free and you'll need it if you're reading.

The Blue Door is on Grand Street, below the gallery with the big windows, the one with the blue door. If you're standing in front of a blue door, you're there. Open 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day but Monday. Slam every Tuesday. Questions, poems you'd like to be talked out of, requests to host: [email protected]. Sign-up is still only in person. Rule 7.

Neighbors we like: Ines sits in the back on Tuesdays and draws the poets, and someday we'll get the drawings on the wall. Ray shot the room in black-and-white last spring and the prints are over the couch. Poems from the Attic is poetry of the quiet kind, for the other six nights. And Theo runs the ring we're on.