Mark Hopkins was surprised when he was asked to speak -- he was the Volunteer Coordinator for the Spoken Word Festival. But going along with our rule that everybody is a poet and all the rest of us are audience, Mark talked about his Web sites and how he started a reading series called Spoken Scribblings (hey! Orature in Action!). He says, we’d read Keats, and then go home and get drunk. He started the originality of Orality Online 0000. He’s a poet of the future.
Kevin Matthews from Ottawa couldn’t sleep. So he headed out and started going to slams. The only poetry he had known was by a professional élite, and he had to pay money to get in. Now all of a sudden he was in a land or culture that belonged to everybody. He had been waiting for this, he was dying to hear it, he didn’t know it was there. People liked what he was reading. They liked what he was saying, uh huh, he’s getting encouraged. Two years, as he says, sharing work, and whoops -– he’s working with the Winnipeg Symphony. He worked with prisons, he worked where the work was wanted. He put together the Canadian Spoken Word Olympics in Ottawa, and is moving to Vancouver to host the event there this year. And oh yes, he is looking for somebody to work with him on his Traveling Suitcase of Poetry, imagines the suitcase would show up at your venue chock-full of chapbooks, CDs, can be yours for the purchase, yours for the trade. After your venue holds the suitcase for a week or so, someone would have to take it to the next spot on the Poetry Suitcase Circuit.
Randy Jacobs is next, pen name RC Weslowski, came to poetry and spoken word in 1998, from the theater, from clowning. Happened on the poetry slam and said “I could do that.” And now he organizes that. Graham Holmes is slam mastering Winnipeg; Weslowski works with them. He spent a year and a half for at the Vancouver Poetry House. Now there is one in Winnipeg. Hard to keep it going, Randy would like to not have any government funding but when it is there, please take the money.
Jem Rolls came to the authoritative conclusion that his writing was oral. Now imagine the thought process necessary to come to this conclusion. He became obsessed, and led a poetry cabaret known as Big World, where he engaged audiences weekly for five years. The scene died off, and Jem moved on to the Edinburgh Fringe with spoken word. Shows got better, the press got better. Jem takes it on the road. Now is on the Canadian Fringe circuit and howdy do!
T.L. Cowan was the lone academic in the crowd. She came to spoken word six or seven years ago -- she had been writing bad short stories, when (Eureka!) she heard Sister Spit. She began curating, promoting, producing Choke Words Cabaret in 2000 for the Rock for Choice Movement. She created the Under the Volcano Series in Calgary in 2002. She went to Edmonton working on her dissertation on spoken word and has been teaching spoken word in high schools and colleges. Coastal Town is a CD that she’s put together, subtitled “Women in Vancouver.” She wants to emphasize the history and genres of spoken word in her thesis.
How did Kateri come to spoken word? Her grandmother. Her grandmother is a storyteller, public speaker -– it’s in the family line. Hers is a culture of spoken word, a web of things including publishing and writing. She’s not comfortable with spoken word as a concept -- it is just what you do. In the 80s she joined in the spoken word indigenous people’s movement –- cassettes. Recently she created the Seagate, Standing Ground. She dreams of younger people engaging with spoken word dreams, and how poetry can help the self-esteem for those in need.
Sean McGarragle, Vancouver. Five years ago, on his birthday, Andrew Paparow told him to go to a reading at Bukowski’s, a joint in Vancouver. That’s where Shane Koyczan was reading –- if you haven’t heard this most unlikely Slam Champ, you *&%*$^! And all of a sudden, Sean as the story goes was turned on to a new art form. The rhythm, the humor, the brilliance... Now he runs the West Coast Poetry Festival, a huge event, he helps out with the Van Slam and oversees a touring circuit in Canada. Attendance is up.
