Remember: top 3 poets receive a Marvellous Magical Secret Surprise at the November event (26 November @ The Front). Next chance to raise your ranking: 24 September.
Quick post to remind you about the next Traverse slam: Friday 26 March at The Front. Following February’s well-attended slam we have the first lot of scores in the High School Table (top three were CJ, Hadley and Sean the Saw [possibly one of the guys who did music for this]). Your scores will grow with each slam you perform at so make sure you get along to each and every one if you want a shot at the BIG EXCITING MYSTERY SECRET EVENT in November.
Traverse Poetry Slam Friday 26 March 7:30pm-11:00pm
The Front Gallery and Cafe Wattle Street, Lyneham
$3 (free entry for performers!)
Book a slot in the slam from 7.30pm
Meanwhile, if you’re free this Sunday, I encourage you to check out Canberra’s World Naked Bike Ride. The reason I bring it up here is the organisers were hoping to get some poets to perform work at points during the ride. I’m not sure if there are fixed places for people to perform or they want poets on the move – probably the best approach is to get in touch with one of the admins for the Facebook event. The ride is happening on World Poetry Day, so it’s well worth getting involved!
As in previous years, the range was quite a bit different from the monthly gigs at The Front, with a much stronger focus on hip hop. We also had some much younger poets (including one 11-year-old rapping about illegal street racing… hmm…) and a few more ‘random’ (for want of a better word) performers, in particular a guy reading some gorgeous haiku off an iPhone.
There were too few women performing again. I’m hoping next year’s slams (and perhaps another all-women night sometime in the year) will encourage some more ladies to get behind the mic – there’s so much talent in our town!
Last year’s overall winner, Omar Musa, also did a smashing performance of the piece he did with Hadley, Seung, Fenella and I at Corinbank earlier this year.
So, this month we have a more low-key event, not really a slam at all (let’s call it a ‘sham slam’ shall we?) and more of an open mic:
Traverse Poetry Night
Friday 27 November
7.30pm-10.30pm
The Front Gallery and Cafe
Wattle Street, Lyneham
Free entry for everyone!
And, before I go, I need to plug the launch of issue 9 of Block journal, this week at Smiths:
Block 9 launch
Thursday 19 November
6.00pm-7.00pm
Smiths Alternative Bookshop
76 Aligna Street, Canberra City
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.
Wow! What a weekend. We managed to fit over 100 into the main room of The Front and were treated to fantastic new work by poets both new to the night as well as old favourites. And Santo Cazzati did a very fine job of taking us through a kaleidoscope of aural worlds.
The next day, the always delightful Vanessa Berry led an excellent workshop on zine making, each of the participants creating a their own one page zine.
On the subject of zines (and there’ll be plenty of news about it to come) I wanted to let you know that Andrew Darragh (who designed the awesome zine fair poster), Gemma Nourse and myself are starting up a zine distro called Long Arm, which will be running out of Smiths Alternative Bookshop. More details available on the Facebook page.
Oh, and, by the way, my A Zine about Canberra is back in print with a lovely colour cover! I’m selling them for $3 (cheap!) and should be getting some stock to Sticky soon, if you’re down south. Also considering making a PDF available if people don’t want to pay for postage.
In other exciting news, Adam Hadley tells me a new poetry slam is starting up on the third Tuesday of the month at The Phoenix. It’s called BAD!SLAM!NO!BISCUIT! (I kid you not) and apprently there’ll be cheap beer for poets. Yay! First slam on 21 April. More details to come.
I also hear Hadley is in need of young poets (25 and under) to perform at the National Folk Festival as part of hiJinx, in exchange for a day ticket. If you fit the bill then yank on Mr Hadley’s ear quick smart.
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 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!
You can now view videos of the winners from the ACT Australian Poetry Slam heats performing their poems in exotic Canberra locations… watch and find out how each of them answers tricky questions such as ‘What will you do if you win?’
*Featuring best ever unplanned interruption EVER!
**Thanks for the name check!
***What’s with cranking up the bass when you’re talking about what happens when stuff goes wrong – it’s a damned conspiracy!
I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed that I won’t be going up to watch these fine lads duke it out with the other Australian Slam winners. I just didn’t get my act together in time, and now I’m swamped… speaking of which, check back very soon for exciting announcements for 2009!
The Australian Poetry Slams are always a very different sort of poetry slam to our usual ones at The Front.
I think running two heats has positives and negatives. The positives are twice the chance for people to get up and give slam a shot and double the exposure for Canberra slamming in general. The main negative is spreading the possible number of performances too thinly. Last year the single heat was packed with an incredible amount of energy for such a huge room (the National Library foyer). Friday’s slam was quieter but still a rocking good night. I have a suspicion that next week we’ll get a few people over the 20 we’re permitted.
We were under this time and it was slightly disappointing that five of those who had registered didn’t show up to perform (where were you Tom?!?), but the suggestion of the nice Sound Advice guy of walking around with the wireless mic and persuading people to perform was a good one, and one which got us an enjoyable performance from a bloke named Nemo (no aquatic jokes please).
Human Cannonball Academy (AKA Adam Hadley) took the gold with a delightful comparison between dropping the bombshell of ‘I love you’ and dropping the bombshell of having sold all the paracutes as the plane plummets towards to ground.
The silver medal went to a new slam performer, Susan Carcary (winner of the 2008 NSW Bush Poetry Championships) with a hartfeld cry from a little orphan African boy to be saved from the greedy hands of from Brad and Jolie.
Seung was awesome as always, as was Professor Anarchy who has promised to perform another piece for us next Friday.
The crowd seemed to like my love poem which was heartening since I’d only written it three days before. Will put pen to paper to get another one down for next week.
The Cashews were a delight as always, making great use of the space, although not getting all the attention from the crowd that I think they deserved.
Roughly half of Friday’s performances were from people I’ve never seen before which is also what happened last year – I need to figure out a way I can get this talent to perform as part of the regular slams!
www.traversepoetry.org
