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Tim Stafford (pictured) and Dan Sully put on a hilarious show of slam poetry with personal accounts of growing up as well as humanitarian statments.

Slam poets shocking, comical

By: John Bailey

Posted: 10/9/08

They weren't part of a comedy series, they weren't a headlining Family Weekend event and in fact most of the audience had probably never heard of Death From Below before Wednesday night.

So what were these guys all about, anyway?

"There's two things we're known for," spit the slam poetry duo on the stage of the Student Union Theatre. "Breaking hearts and punching throats."

And they meant it, too. Any audience members feeling secure about their tracheas had to reconsider after the SUBOG-hosted beating delivered by Dan Sully and Tim Stafford. Death From Below's poetry, while often light on subtlety, was heavy on snarl and testosterone-fueled whimsy.

"I was shocked," said Adam Apicella, a 1st-semester history major. "It was a lot better than I expected."

Shocking indeed was the Chicago-based pair's candor. From "The Poem About Kicking Your Ass" to the snickering, grade-school "Lessons Learned at Baboon Island," they avoided high-minded depth and flashy vocabulary for austere, often hilarious observations about life as a bored, short, sexually frustrated American boy.

"Not once did I find the treasure," Stafford complained about the woeful inadequacy of his sex education. "I feared for my penis."

While a slam poetry group seems like a different direction for SUBOG-hosted events, the group was a perfect fit for UConn, said Caroline Wolfenden, a 5th-semester communication disorders major and chair of the SUBOG Fine and Performing Arts committee. "We try and get a diverse amount of acts to come. They're funny and they're [poetic] so they appeal to multiple student audiences on campus."

Sully and Stafford often substituted blunt, steamrolling diatribes for lyrical calisthenics, an approach that sometimes paid off and sometimes felt cheap.

On capture the flag: "We take it seriously like pregnancy tests and dodgeball." And they were funny, sure, but "Pile back in the hatchback" and "Parental papparazzi" were about as complex as the flow ever got.

The duo did take some time from their busy schedule of laughs to throw some emotional bite into their act. "Pens," for which Sully won a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, turned the basic implement of the writer into a statement of freedom and bitter artistic resistance.

"One [of the members] was funny and the other used more emotion," said Mike Williams, a 1st-semester exploratory major. "I thought they blended really well."

The pair closed with what they described as "their only cover poem:" an emotionally charged tag-team reading of Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer."

The finale perhaps showed their greatest weakness: while they were enjoyable at a slam poetry show, they'd be terrible on the mic in Rock Band.