Vancouver Poetry Slam

Monday night, we went to the Vancouver Poetry Slam at Cafe Deux Soleil, Commercial Drive, there is another one every Tuesday at Main Street. You don't know poetry slam? It's a kind of fun competition in writing and rhetoric skills, where each author and performer has 3 minutes (sometimes 5 minutes) to present a self-written poem or story, only with help of his body - including dancing, singing, beatboxing but no guitar, no powerpoint or anything else. It seems rather new, but you might remember that already ancient Greek respected rhetoric competitions as the highest form of competition.

Poetry Slams take place in many big cities all over the world, so Hamburg had some pretty good ones, I still remember the great nights at Fools Garden and later, Molotov, in Zurich there is one at Xtra once a month, though the origin is in Northern America. And here we went, to see the original thing, this Monday feat. Brandan MacLeod (who is a champion for good reason, to tell you already).













Performer at open mic

The night started with the "open mic" where everybody had the chance to perform. To our surprise, suddenly, the quite girl at our table stood up and walked on stage to perform a great poem on cyberspace and all its issues. Afterwards, some already well-known local poets entered the stage to compete in front of a jury of five randomly selected guests. Somebody already suggested us to be judges, but for good luck, this got forgotten. In contrast to Germany, not the poets were booed here but the judges! So, you need good nerves to be a judge... What does this tell about the country? Anyway...

After the break, the already mentioned Brandan MacLeod presented some longer stories of his Christmas time, before the five best poets went into a second round, deciding who will win the green bath-tube-toy-special-price and who will win the 35$. To quote the master of ceremony: "Poetry is the lowest paid art in Canada. Even mimes get more although they don't have anything to say."

To give you an impression of the night, you might watch some of the following YouTube videos, which show two of the regular local poets, we also saw that evening. These videos are actually not from the same night, but same poets and same location.


Francis


Ms Spelt

Quak Quak Quak
If you don't speak Duck,
you're fucked
Quak Quak Quak