Capital Slam 2011 Finals

Jessey is a writer, digital communications strategist, and the founder of Local Tourist Ottawa.

I’m not sure that when people think of the Nation’s Capital, they often think of poetry.

Well, they should. In 2010, Ottawa won its second-consecutive national slam poetry title, and on Friday night the city’s 2011 team was decided. If the passion-filled show these inspirational poets put on was any indication, their competitors sure have a challenge ahead.

Ottawa’s 2011 slam team is:

1. Sense-Say
2. Loh El
3. Bruce Narbaitz
4. Sean O’Gorman
5. PrufRock 

The city’s 2011 champion was Sense-Say – and he really blew the audience away.

Check it:

Rusty Priske was one of my favourite poets of the night. Unfortunately he didn’t make the team this year, but I absolutely loved his performance.

I also really enjoyed Poetic Speed, who wasn’t in the running for the evening but instead acted as the “Sacrificial Poet” – a performance to set the barometer of the randomly selected judges.

All of the poets were amazing, and I was really inspired by the bravery in all of them to stand up on that stage and bare their souls so beautifully.

Trust me, the quality of the videos above and any of the other clips you’ll find online do not do their performances justice, so please do watch for the Capital Slam 2011 CD that will be released soon – and get out to Ottawa’s local slam events!

Capital Slam is the second longest running slam series in Canada, and every year from September to June local poets compete to win their chance to represent the city at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. To learn more about Capital Slam, visit www.capitalslam.com. 

‘Poetry can be all around you’: Kathryn Hunt recounts sharing random acts of poetry

Photo Credit: Brian Pirie

Kathryn Hunt  is a displaced Maritimer who first arrived in Ottawa 15 years ago. A published poet and freelance writer, Kate blogs, performs and talks the city’s budding literary scene at every opportunity! She also enjoys cycling and rock-climbing in her spare time.

A volunteer at the Arc Poetry table during ArtsPark

Last weekend I spent a day helping to man the Arc Poetry Magazine table at ArtsPark in the Parkdale Market in Hintonburg. ArtsPark has been running since 2004, helping to boost and celebrate the burgeoning arts district that Hintonburg has become, but this is the first time I’ve been able to go. (I used to live in Hintonburg, but it was a rather sketchier part of the city back then…)

When I arrived at the Parkdale Market it was a misty day — not quite raining. But that didn’t seem to have affected the crowds, who were already milling around the stands, sipping local coffee and munching local snacks. I locked my bike up to one of the (many) bike racks, and headed in to the collection of tables, stands and canopies in search of the Arc table. I found it just inside the park, under one of the permanent canopies, next to the ArtsPark information table. It was already staffed by a cluster of poets, some of whom had been wandering around the park performing ‘random acts of poetry’: stopping passersby and offering to read them a poem from a collection of chapbooks and small press publications.

Photo Credit: Brian Pirie

We had a ‘poetry factory’ set up: two metal boards covered in magnetic words, so that anyone passing could spend a few moments moving words around and creating a poem. Anyone who created a poem would get a chance to draw for a prize – a free copy of Arc, or even a year’s subscription. There was also a typewriter , which drew a lot of attention, where volunteer poets would, for a dollar or two, compose a poem on the spot for passersby.

It’s kind of amazing that there are some people who, when you ask them, “Hey, would you like a poem?” look at you in suspicion, mumble something like, “No thanks,” and sidle away as though you just offered them –- oh, I don’t know, a political tract or a credit card application. But it’s also amazing that there are people who when you offer them a poem written, on the spot, just for them, light up. “Really? You’ll write me a poem?”

Kids stop by the Arc Poetry table

People asked for poems for their children — often poems for infants in arms who won’t be able to read the poems for years. (By which time these poems will probably all be recycling: One of the interesting thing about the whole poetry factory idea, for me, is that all the poems are ephemeral. They’re not high art, they’re not going to last forever. This was a celebration of the fact that poetry can be all around you, and it can be just for fun, and it can be not meant to last.) They also wanted poems for occasions – there were at least two birthday poems composed, that I saw.

Mayor Jim Watson stops by the Arc Poetry table

The Mayor came by the table, wrote his own magnetic poem,  tossed his toonie into the jar and asked Pearl Pirie, who was manning the typewriter just then, to write a poem about Hintonburg. Others reached into the jar for a random subject (words and phrases cut out of magazines). A young man in a Yasir Naqvi jacket asked for a poem about public service. And inevitably, when they were handed their typewritten sheet with their typo-laden, brand-new poem on it, their faces burst into grins.

Meanwhile, around us there were  kids playing in the still-empty wading pool and on the large orange spheres that are scattered around the new Parkdale Market park, stands selling local crafts and foods, and a stage with alternating musical and spoken word performers. (We were a little too far away to catch every word of the sets by PrufRock, Ian Keteku and John Akpata, but phrases drifted over to us from the stage from time to time.) A unicyclist appeared, juggled for a few moments, attracting a crowd of young children who would run to grab the pins when he dropped them. After a while I spotted him unicycling around the park with a cluster of small children running after him in a stream like the tail of a comet.

Photo Credit: Brian Pirie

We packed up around 5 pm, along with the rest of the fair, and went our separate ways from the Arc table. I didn’t get out to see much of the rest of the festival (although I made a couple of trips to a nearby vendor’s table, where they were serving coffee that tasted, slightly, of cinnamon). But from where I was standing, behind the poetry table, it was a success. The sun even came out for the last hour or so. And I got to spend a day making poetry fun for people. Reminding them that poetry doesn’t have to be deathless, it doesn’t have to be scary or complicated or hard to understand, it isn’t made in isolation or in some strange artistic trance: Poetry can happen anywhere.

Wow! Thanks for sharing! And Kathryn will be performing with her poetry/storytelling troupe, the Kymeras, this Saturday at 8 p.m. in nearby Almonte, at the Old Town Hall.

Bridging page vs. stage: VERSeFest brings poetry communities together

All photos are courtesy of Pearl Pirie

Kathryn Hunt  is a displaced Maritimer who first arrived in Ottawa 15 years ago. A published poet and freelance writer, Kate blogs, performs and talks the city’s budding literary scene at every opportunity! She also enjoys cycling and rock-climbing in her spare time.

The closing night party might have summed up VERSeFest almost entirely.

VERSe Ottawa, a new coalition of poetry fans, reading series and slams across the city, just wrapped up its first annual festival, VERSeFest, running from March 8 to 13, and the feeling in the room at Arts Court was celebratory. Actually, it was better than that, it felt like something new, necessary, and long-awaited, had happened.

PrufRock at Capital Slam

Poetry is a strange beast. It’s hard to define, and within the blanket term “poetry” you find a wide variety of styles and artistic opinions. It’s as though you lumped all “music” into one category and then had to compare Lady Gaga to Tuvan throat-singing, Noh opera to Haydn. The term “poetry” takes in everything from hip hop lyrics to sound poetry (which, in turn, crosses over into performance art and experimental music). And at VERSeFest, for the first time, one festival took in the same wide range.

Nathanael Larochette

Sooner or later, you get the impression that poetry is split into two camps. The big divide recently has been “page” versus “stage.” At a broad sweep, “stage” poetry might be characterized as appealing to a younger, louder, “hipper” demographic. Its content is often political, and its style is often influenced by the traditions of hip hop and jazz poetry. “Page” poetry, in contrast, is often stereotyped as being academic, quiet, sometimes difficult to understand at first reading or hearing, It can be very experimental in its use of language and sentence structure, or very formal in meter and structure. Or both. “Page” poets will probably be hawking their latest chapbook, rather than a CD of their work, at the end of their readings.

I am, personally, a poetry omnivore, with a foot in either side. I volunteer regularly at Capital Slam, the city’s oldest competitive spoken word series, and I also used to help with the Dusty Owl Reading Series, which is fairly “page.” My own poetry is page-oriented and I just don’t get up to compete on slam stages. However, I’ve also memorized and performed my work, and the performance group I belong to contains two storytellers, a spoken word artist and me, the page poet.

Local Tourist, Kate, at VERSeFest

Which is why the closing party for VERSeFest was so much fun for me. There used to be a sense of “never the twain shall meet” about the two domains, which was blown away as the room was treated to everything from haiku, to love poems, to rhythmic slam poems, to soft, stark, stripped-away and syntax-busting poems, to a dose of sound poetry. (It involved the audience participating by making “tockatockatocka” sounds for about ten seconds at one point in the poem, interrupted by a building roar/scream from the poet and a few people placed in the audience: a strange stereo experience for those of us sitting in the middle of it.)

It was fun for me — throughout VERSeFest — to watch members of the audience from the “stage” side of things snapping their fingers (a spoken-word tradition) for good lines from the “page” poets. To hear the festival organizer getting choked up as he talked about the new friends he’d made among the “stage” community and the new kinds of poetry he’d discovered. And to start seeing the continuity between the different styles — to hear some of the same tricks of repetition, word play, and imagery happening in much of the poetry being read.

If you thought poetry readings were staid and stodgy, you’d have been astonished at the audiences that sold out the Arts Court Theatre until they were sitting in the aisles for the Urban Legends Slam, rocking the room with cheers for the performers. You’d have been shocked by the burlesque routine that wrapped up the Voices of Venus erotic poetry show, surprised by the audience that rose to their feet after an open mike poet read her impassioned description of the hardships of a homeless shelter, and puzzled at the music floating from the room at the Songwriters’ Circle. And you might also have been mesmerized by long, lyrical pieces, found yourself laughing out loud more than a few times, strained to hear through more than one voice performing simultaneously, and learned to listen very, very carefully as unexpected images rose from the reader’s voice.

The thing is, poetry has a long tradition of being performed aloud for a reason. People come out to poetry readings for a reason — because it’s enjoyable. Poetry and music are akin, and the sound of the language is most of the point of any form of poetry. This inaugural VERSeFest illustrated that handily; I can’t wait to see what they bring to the stage next year.

(Photo credit: Pearl Pirie)

 

VERSeFest’s participating reading series, organizations and slams where you can check out local poetry: Urban Legends Slam, The AB Series, In/Words, blUe mOnday, Dusty Owl, Sasquatch Writers Performance Series, Voices of Venus, Tree Reading Series, Plan 99, KaDo Haiku Ottawa, Factory Reading Series, and Capital Slam.

And if it’s literary, and taking place in Ottawa, it’s probably on the bywords.ca events calendar.

(Photo credit: Pearl Pirie)

 

Thanks for sharing your experience, Kate! And the beautiful photos are courtesy of Pearl Pirie. Do you want to highlight a live performance taking place in Ottawa? Drop us a line.

Nathanael Larochette