Before a wildly hooting audience of 300, New York University trounced Bard and Sarah Lawrence Colleges when their teams clashed in the latest trend to hit campuses: competitive poetry performance, or ''slam.''

Borrowing from such disciplines as mud-wrestling, goldfish-swallowing and un-Hamletlike tearing a passion to tatters, the event at Sarah Lawrence in Yonkers, N.Y., last Thursday was billed as the World's First Intercollegiate Competitive Poetry Performance.

The slam consists of several poets reciting their work before a panel of judges. The more boisterous the better. The lyrics are frequently raunchy and the atmosphere rowdy, with performers being cheered, booed, hissed, challenged from the floor and -- on occasion -- actually tackled, or slammed, into silence.

The slam, so named in the mid-1980's by Marc Smith, a Chicago barroom poet, was until recently confined to coffee houses or taverns, like the Green Mill in Chicago where Mr. Smith still holds forth. But today, the slam has become so popular that some English professors call it a new art form while others denounce it as fiercely, as if staving off an assault by barbarians. It is sure to be a hot topic at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco later this month.