Another mega slam last night – thanks to everyone for coming out in the cold weather. We ended up with just under 20 poets performing in the slam, plus two big sets from the entertaining Randall Stephens.
Top three poets were:
CJ (with an amazing ‘party’ piece)
Jacinta (aided by a chorus of uncooperative Greek nonnas)
And now for… Judge Judy judging a poetry slam. No it’s not what you think it is (how cool/bizarre/intimidating would that be?) but, rather, a warning to producers of all spoken word events that you make sure you pay your poets!
Next slam is Friday 30 October so be prepared for some sort of Halloween (eve) silliness. Probably.
In the same week I discovered (thanks to this blog) that pogonology is the study of beards (or facial hair to be precise), I also found this amusing poem from Big Poppa E on Mongo’s livejournal.
This slideshow gives you a really quick idea of fLight, a zine of my poetry wonderfully illustrated by Amina McConvell (with an amazing cover by Jenn Arthur). Amina copied the pages and pasted them up at the decomissioned Belconnen bus interchange, as part of the in2CHANGE festival.
This week I did a spot at a CIT creative writing class on performance poetry. It was a bit rough but the students seemed to enjoy the pieces. One of the ones I performed was mentioned in this earlier post which has links to a video and transcript. On the subject of video, you can now watch the grand final of the 2008 Australian Poetry Slam on the ABC website, as well as pieces by indiviudal poets.
E-news subscribers already know this but, for your benefit, the next slam:
Friday 24 April
7.30pm – 11.30pm
The Front Gallery and Café, Wattle St, Lyneham
Featuring new local band ‘ah, pandita!’
I’ve just done a long overdue update of the events page as well as sent out an e-newsletter (subscribe). I’ve been finding it quite hard to stay on top of promotion as it’s pretty much just me booking, organising and coordinating things. If there’s anyone out there who has experience in promoting events and a bit of time on their hands please get in touch – there’ll probably be a bit of money available to cover your time.
Ok, so the main upcoming event is the first slam at The Front for 2009, happening next week:
Poetry Slam
Friday 27 February
7.30pm – 11.30pm
The Front Café and Gallery, Wattle St, Lyneham
On the very next day, I’ll be joining some of Canberra’s finest spoken word performers doing a group piece specially written for Corinbank festival.
Spoken Word Showcase with Seung Baek, Fenella Edwards, Adam Hadley and Omar Musa
28 February 2009 – 4:45-5:00pm
Corin Forest Mountain Resort
I figured it was about time I posted this most wonderful of poems by Anis Mojgani.
I was introduced to Shake the Dust by Daniel Ferri at his performance workshop last year. I don’t have much else that I can say about this piece other than it was a perspective-shifting experience. So I’m going to shut up now so you can watch the video.
Oh and you might like to know, there will be another free (for people under 30) performance workshop, run by Daniel Ferri, happening during National Youth Week, on 29 March 2009. More info here.
I just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone who came along to the slam last Friday at Benedict House in Queanbeyan. Despite some weather issues (it started raining so we moved inside and then it stopped raining for the rest of the night) and problems with my amp (crazy freaky shaky clicky sound) it was a wonderful night. And such an amazing venue!
First prize went, quite appropriately, to Queanbeyan boy Omar Musa who did a touching homecoming poem. Seung came second and Hadley, third.
The aforementioned poets, myself and Daniel Ferri had a good meeting on Sunday planning the group piece for Corinbank Festival. The five us (including Fenella Edwards) will each be performing a three minute piece starting and ending with the same line – ‘This is a warning to everyone’ – and including as many of four other lines as will fit easily, and then ending with the five us repeating the five lines together. It should be something splendid to see. Oh, and we also watched a bunch of group performances from US slams, marvelled at the poets’ beat-boxing skills (watch Running a Race for a good example) and learnt from Cicero the perfect way to gesture.
And I have to say a extra special thank you to Julia, who serenaded us with so much beautiful music on Friday night.
Something a little more substantial this time. One of the friends I made last year, Daniel Ferri, is a teacher and poet originally from Chicago, now living in Canberra. He’s helping me out with a few of the Traverse Poetry events this year, most immediately as the director/advisor of a performance taking place at the Corinbank festival, on 28 February. This will be collaborative poetry performed by Omar Musa (winner of the Australian Poetry Slam ’08), Seung Baek (winner of the 2008 Night Words poetry contest), Adam Hadley (winner of the 2009 Woodford Folk Festival poetry slam), MC Fenella (all-round hip-hop all star) and yours truly, based on the themes of play, fire and soil… more info on that later.
I wanted to mention Daniel because of a very cool poetry competition he created in 1995, called Head to Head Haiku (and the related form, Toe to Toe Tanka). From Daniel’s description, it’s a very intense competition in which the judges have about 30 seconds to make a decision on which of two poets go through into the next round. He said one of the most remarkable features of the contest was the silence and focus the develops in an audience as the event progresses.
We’re planning to run a Head to Head Haiku competition later on in the year so we’ll see if we can get the same level of focus here in Canberra.
Meanwhile, this was the only video I could find, which is a battle (between Jonica and Tazuo Yamaguchi) rather than the sort of competition I described, but it still gives you a good idea of the style. Check it out and let me know if you’d like to have a try at it!
Ok it’s late and it’s damn hot. Too hot to think about work or anything else (so hot in fact, three snakes tried to crawl their way into my office building today), so rather than and write anything insightful I’m going to post this video of Big Poppa E performing the Wussy Boy Manifesto, which I originally heard about through the excellent IndieFeed: Performance Poetry podcast. It’s not the best performance I’ve seen but the recording is very good and, well, you get the idea. Enjoy!
www.traversepoetry.org
