Slamapalooza encourages you to applaud the poetry, not the scores

Kwantlen’s poetry slam team raises funds to attend the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word

In a small café on Commercial Drive, under dim lighting and amidst the chatter of café patrons, Kwantlen’s poetry slam team—Slamapalooza—took the stage.

Their opponents that night, Oct. 10, were Vancouver’s VanSlam team, Vancouver’s Youth Poetry team, and the UBC Slam crew—all seasoned veterans in public speaking and the crafting of poetic scripts. The evening’s host called upon the various groups, who were then allowed to choose between performing a group piece or sending out an individual representative to slam their solo work. When the individual or group finished, the judges would reveal their scores which were recorded to ultimately determine the winner of the competition.

This was some serious poeting.

For these teams themselves, though, the prospect of winning a slam is far from the most important aspect of these events. “Everyone that comes here is bound to fit in, it’s a really safe environment  for people of every age,” says Siling Zhang, a member of Kwantlen’s Slamapalooza team.

VanSlam’s coach Al Mader had a similar opinion in the matter. “Poetry slams are many things. They are entertainment, politics, a social meeting place, and an overall safe haven for people who want to have their voices heard or grow as a person.”

This night, however, there was more on the line for Slamapalooza than a good time and a chance to spread creative expression. Team captain Leslie Stark took advantage of the nearly crowded house to inform the poetry-goers that her team was hoping to compete in a few weeks at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Saskatchewan, and to inform them that they did not currently have sufficient funds to achieve this.

That’s right, like something out of Glee or a hip-hop dance movie of the week, the team had to put on the show of their lives to raise enough money so they could make it to nationals.

“It really is like our nationals,” says Stark. “We are all very excited about going up against people who do this sort of thing for a living.”

The CFSW is Canada’s largest spoken word festival, and competitors from all over the nation meet once a year to square up against one another and battle for the title of Canada’s greatest slam poetry team. Every year the CFSW also seeks out professional artists and performers called “Poets of Honour” who are invited to perform their own sets during the festival. This year’s professionals are going to include Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards winner Joseph Naytowhow, spoken word activist and teacher El Jones, two-time ensemble member of the Victoria Festival of Spoken Word Sabrina Benaim and many more renowned artists from all over Canada.

At a local level, most of the Lower Mainland’s poetry scene is directed around the Vancouver Poetry House, which promotes slam events largely out of the Cafe Deux Soleils, where Slamapalooza decided to hold its CFSW fundraiser. In many ways, Kwantlen’s slam team is modelled heavily after the Vancouver Slam team.

“All teams have a very similar structure, and in a way we all form part of a bigger community,” says Stark, who, aside from coaching Slamapalooza, is also on the board of directors for the Vancouver Poetry House. “For Kwantlen and VanSlam, we have one slam a month and then the people who are the top performers compete to make the team.”

Inevitably, as the teams succeed and continue to improve their skills, the competitions get progressively more competitive. “Really as you get into the nationals you start encountering people who do this sort of thing for a living,” she says. “That’s when the stakes get higher. But for us we just want to do poetry which we love and it feels like all teams are somehow intertwined.”

At the end of the night, regardless of how any of the teams scored, Kwantlen’s slam team raised a significant amount of money through competing with their local neighborhood friends/rivals, and are currently in competition in Saskatchewan as of press time.