Slam captain Kim “Kimbit” Nguyen and other members of her slam team travelled to Saskatoon to compete in the Canadian Festival for Spoken Word.
Verses spat crackling like bonfire sparks or crooned honeysuckle-sweet, paired with eloquent gestures and jarring movements while poets prowl and strut to the rhythm.
This is slam poetry. This is why eight poets bussed, flew, and even hitchhiked to Saskatoon earlier this month. They’re competing in the Canadian Festival for Spoken Word and it’s not for the non-existent prize money, says Capital Slam team captain Kim “Kimbit” Nguyen.
The two teams – Urban Legends and Capital Slam – are in it for the title and to win bragging rights for a city where some say slam poetry is on the brink of renaissance and extinction.
This wasn’t always true. The festival may be taking place in Saskatchewan this year, but its roots are in Centretown. The first festival took place in 2004 at Library and Archives Canada, back when it was still known as the Canadian Spoken Wordlympics.
Burning out and flaring up just seems to be the name of the slam poetry game in this area, says Sean Hyatt, of the Daily Grind art cafe.
“(Slam poetry) pops up every couple of years, becomes big, then drops off again,” he says.
But if this theatrical style of poetry is to make a comeback, he says, Centretown’s diversity makes it the ideal place – and not just because it launched a national competition six years ago. Unlike suburban areas, Centretown is a melting pot of all kinds of people from different socio-economic backgrounds. This makes for fertile ground for new growth.
“In the suburbs there’s a membrane separating . . . different demographics,” Hyatt says. “Here, there’s not so much a membrane. It’s a mishmash of everybody.”
But across the street at Umi Cafe, barista John Bainbridge says slam is still big in Ottawa. The scene just went underground.
“There’s a huge artistic scene in Ottawa that just isn’t tapped by anything. Nobody cares, nobody listens, nobody sees it,” Bainbridge says. “It’s all very underground.”
Nguyen’s teammate, Khaleefa “Apollo the Child” Hamdan, says he agrees.
“The way that the CFSW works is they rotate between the five cities with the biggest scenes,” says Hamdan. Ottawa has hosted it twice – once in 2004, and then again in 2010.
The second time around, Ottawa is not only the host, but also the national champion. Bainbridge says this victory helped bring recognition to both the scene and the poets, and some began changing the way they wrote.
When she first started performing at Umi Cafe’s open mic events, Nguyen says she wrote a lot about breakups and heartbreak. As she became more well-known, she says she began to see the impact her words could have.
“I realized I should probably say things that people needed to hear, rather than just my own problems,” she says. “I tried to target other issues.”
Her recent poems deal with topics like suicide and hunger in the nation’s capital, but slam poetry isn’t all about politics and activism.
“It’s everything from poetry about your mother to poetry about socio-economics bordering on rants,” says Hyatt of the slam poetry he’s heard at the Daily Grind’s occasional poetry-themed open mic nights.
By opening up to new subjects, the poets also open themselves up to new audiences, says Bainsbridge.
“When you start in with political messages, at some point you have to talk about solutions as much as the problems,” he says. “There’s only so much angry ranting you can listen to in an evening.”
In Centretown, the slam poetry scene relies on open mic nights. But Ottawa’s two slam teams have made names for themselves on the outskirts of the area.
Capital Slam is held at the Mercury Lounge, which tends to be more of a wildcard audience-wise. Anyone can wander in, says Nguyen. Urban Legends, nestled in the Pit of Carleton University’s Architecture building, is harder to find. This makes the scene more intimate, Nguyen says, because the audience is smaller and usually made up of other poets.
But she has a simple solution for finding slam events in any area.
“Just Google it,” she says. Between Capital Slam and Urban Legends, there’s a slam poetry event for every weekend.