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“That’s what I like to see: a room full of virgins,” announced Marcus Moore to cohost Sara-Jane Arbury, at the outset of the sixth Ledbury Poetry Festival Slam. He was referring not to the sexual maturity of the hundred strong audience, but to the fact that, for many, this was their first ever poetry slam. Whenever I try to explain slams to those who have never been to one, they always sound horribly gladiatorial. Here, for example, is how tonight’s worked: fifteen poets competed in five heats of three; the winners of each heat, plus the highest scoring runner-up, progressed to the semi-final; the two highest scoring semi-finalists went through to the final, where the highest scoring poet was crowned winner. What’s more, the poets were scored by three sets of judges who, working in pairs, awarded marks for the quality of the writing, the quality of the performance, and the warmth of the audience response. At this point I can imagine the cries of dismay as readers recoil at the very thought of awarding grubby numerical values to our exalted, and inherently un-measurable, art. On paper, it does all sound rather brutal. In reality, it was anything but. This was thanks in no small part to our poet-hosts, Marcus and Sara-Jane, who have somehow devised a winning formula which manages never to seem formulaic. Looking after us throughout, they created an atmosphere in which competition was keen but good natured, and in which the true and undisputable victor of the night was poetry, in all its inventive, eclectic, unpredictable glory.

In the first round the audience got to hear not only poetry, but also each slammer’s self-penned introduction. For the most part, these were whimsical or self-deprecating, although these being poets, there were odd occasions when vanity prevailed in its eternal battle against self-awareness. The dreaded opening spot went to Simon Lee. Dreaded because however fine a job the poet does (and Simon did, with the amusing, ‘I can’t dance’, delivered in his endearingly dead pan style), they are invariably warming up audiences and judges for benefit of other poets. Alas, that’s the luck of the draw. Other highlights of the first round included Sally Clarke’s tragic-comic enactment of a stuffed Bengal tiger, Wild Bill Bolding’s re-imagining of the domestic fridge as devourer, not a preserver, of food, Catherine Crosswell’s typically surreal take on dieting and weight loss, and Chris Vickers’ gleefully bleak parody of daytime TV adverts. Each represented slam poetry at its best; immediate, clever, funny, sad, and above all trusting of its audience’s intelligence. All of this goes, too, for Peter Wyton and Sonia Hendy-Isaac who, following a break-neck semi-final that whizzed by, went head-to-head in the final.

A common, rather sneering, complaint about slams is that they reward comic, shallow poetry, over more serious, deeper work. Apart from its dubious implication that the comic is necessarily trivial, whilst the serious somehow carries an automatic stamp of profundity, this complaint simply misses the point. Our two finalists showed us why. Peter Wyton used humour subtly and deceptively. From his opening round lament on post office closure and New Labour’s disregard for the working class, it was clear that here was no simple jester, but a witty commentator with something to say. Sonia Hendy-Isaac, meanwhile, took us on the proverbial emotional roller-coaster. Her funny stuff certainly got us giggling and on her side, but her most powerful poems were gag-free. There was little to laugh at, but much to be moved about, in a monologue on the often unspoken impact of breast cancer surgery, or an exploration of how the personal becomes political when people respond to seeing a black son with his white mum. Crucially, all Sonia’s poems shared both the desire and the ability to connect with her audience, and that’s really what good slam poetry is all about. Tonight in Ledbury, she owned the stage, and proved a worthy winner.

I’ve seen numerous great slams in the last few years, but this has to count as one of the finest. For the virgins in the audience, I think it’s safe to say, their “first time” proved anything but a deflating or under-whelming experience.