Andrea Thompson was a page poet, getting published, getting rejected such as that. When she moved from Ottawa to Vancouver, she started a radio show, began to feel the flow of audience interaction, then discovered slam. She went to the US Nationals in Portland. She worked on the Edgewise Electronic Center. A whole group swoon occurred as people spoke about the days of predigital technology, of Telepoetics started by Merilene M. Murphy and Kurt Heintz. Andrea Thompson commits random acts of poetry, and her dream is to make it so that you don’t have to explain what we do.
Hilary Peach, who was hosting the event the night before, came to spoken word from language poetry and theater. She felt that it was democratic, of the people. She lives and runs a series on Gabriel Island off Vancouver and wants to run the Imagination Health Spa where seven poets would live together, each teaching one morning a week. In the afternoon, everybody would be collaborators. Island-hopping poetry readings, Poems Only Dogs Can Hear, her most unusual spoken word CD, blends its whispered narrative and the strange. Reminds me a bit of Laurie Anderson, but it’s all Peach. In real life she’s a welder.
Ken Mitchell from Regina has been a storyteller all his life, or maybe, as he would self-effacingly have it, he’s just a good bullshit artist. Anyway, it led him to radio drama, stage and screenplays, musicals, opera, acting: the magic live voicing. It is writing that calls for occasions, not for publicity, only to be heard. And then eventually Robert Burns and cowboy poetry, ahhhhhhhhhh.
Jill Battson came to spoken word as a poet, and has become a one-woman work gang, pushing spoken word into the unsuspecting ear of the populace. She organized the Poets Refuge in Toronto. Working with all different kinds of poets, she learned how to torture an audience by bringing on a poet who was not only unfamiliar to them but maybe from a different aesthetic. She rented a school bus and put 10 poets and an audience head to head, and commanded “Nobody leaves!” No one could leave anyway. She did the Word Up! series for Much Music. She too worked with Merilene M. Murphy, working in the oral traditions in the same way that you work with texts. Now she runs the Red Schoolhouse Poetry Festival where farmers get lost in the poetry. “As far as right-now dreams go,” she says, “I don’t dream, I do.”
What was Rha Goddess doing up in the Canadian Rockies? She’d been to a conference in Winnipeg, and this was the closest place that was farthest away. Rha spoke from a different place from the rest of us: from the center of the hip-hop community in the United States. She’d seen how hip-hop can turn lives around, and how they could spin out of control over again. She interviewed over a thousand people in the last two years to create the one-woman show the she will soon be touring. The scale of her work left all of us with new appreciation of where spoken word can go.
We really wanted to hear Lillian -- she who asked the questions would surely know the answers. She came to spoken word when she was six years old. She walked into its breath. She walked on stage. She was in a church. She saw how people reacted: you got a voice, her church was the place where she first got high, high from the reaction of her audience. And her advice is to buy real estate. Buy real estate! By a real estate. She speaks of her work with the Canadian Council for the Department of Heritage. She calls her orality “literary,” because it’s got a value and literary seems to be what marks value. She wants to put excellence back on the table, and that can transform space and time.
This ends the intro, the telling of the Report. Next time it’s the good old Where Do We Go from Here? Hmmm.
~Bob Holman
