SA Poetry Slam Launch goes off with a bang!

Submitted by State Admin on Mon, 09/12/2011 - 03:07

The launch of the SA Poetry Slam Season was held at Higher Ground on Friday 9th of September.

With over 20 poets registering and more than 100 audience members, the scene was set for a great night!

Miles Merrill co-creator of Slams in Australia was special guest and co-host with Daniel Watson, SA's regular MC.

Competition was tough but after a great battle, Indigo was the worthy winner along with Royce our runner up.

We look forward to seeing them perform again at the SA State Final on Friday 11th November.


MC Daniel Watson, runner up Royce, winner Indigo and special guest Miles Merrill


We interviewed our SA Launch winners to find out more about them

Indigo - winner

Age: 29

Location: Adelaide, South Australia

Level of education: Advanced Diploma in Professional Writing

Experience with writing and performing: I have been writing and performing my own poetry for about 5 years now.

Give us a small testimonial outling your experience of the slam, why you entered and your relationship with poetry: having been involved in the slam since its first appearance in SA, I have been lucky enough to twice represent the State on the National stage. The National Slam is the largest format in Australia enabling performance poets to gain some national and even international exposure, and I'm keen to support that, who wouldn't be! It has been fantastic to have had the opportunity to see and connect with performance poets from around Australia, and I have been lucky enough to work with some of them since. I wasn't sure if I was going to slam this year, but in thinking over how exciting the SA wildcard launch heat was going to be, I just couldn't not be part of it.

Have you performed in front of an audience before? Yes, I've performed many times, both in slams and outside of them. Inspiring to me was that a notable portion of the audience at our SA launch heat hadn't been to a slam before. And equally, or perhaps more inspiring, some slammers hadn't either. I love that slam brings new audiences and performers to poetry. And I'm super excited about the new slammers coming into the SA scene, and really proud of the standard the State can consistently deliver.

How do you feel performing your own writing? I love it. I have felt somewhat contemplative of this in the past, because often it can be quite personal, or assumed to be, but I've thought my way through that and find it really empowering, shit scary at times, but empowering. And it's a fantastic thing to be able to, as a performer, be malleable with the text. Often changes occur in the preparation of the piece or even on stage, and in that way it is great to be both writer and performer; you can constantly evolve a piece without having to run it past anyone else.

Do you have a favourite style of writing or a favourite writer? I love performance, poetry, storytelling and song so I think I like to hear writing, but I also love getting sucked in by good fiction. As far as favourite writers are concerned they include a mixed bag of local, national, international, contemporary and not so contemporary. Stacyann Chin, a phenomenal woman and spoken word activist has been high on my favourites list for awhile, as have Anis Mojgani, Rives, Wildred Owen, Sylvia Plath, and one of my lifetime idols who seems to write straight out his mouth, Billy Connolly. So many of the Australian poets kicking around on the scene are absolutely phenomenal - I'm not going to risk leaving anyone out so I won't mention names, but they're from all over the country.

Do you think it's important for Australians to write and perform their own work and why? I think it's important to follow your inner urges, and I think if you experience an urge to write, wherever you are or have come from, then follow that urge. This works the same with performing. Australia is a vast, rich and diverse place so I think it's important and exciting to hear the voices that come out of that. I think slam provides the perfect format for getting across a message; it's the modern soapbox, so why not have a turn? You never know what might happen in a slam.


Royce - runner up

Age: 20 something

Location: Northern suburbs of Adelaide

Level of eduction: Currently a University student

Experience with writing and performing: I am a performance poet and mercenary journalist. Co-Chief Mischief maker with the nameless project. Sort of a band for performance poets aimed at promoting performance poetry as an artform, having fun and building audiences.

Have you performed in front of an audience before? Indeed I have. I have been doing this for about two years now, at local slams and in feature spots at various events. It still makes me nervous. Every single time.

How do you feel performing your own writing? It is important to stand up and share your work. Show and tell is what turns scribbles in a notebook into a poem. But that isn't really answering the question. It feels good. Like striking a match. It feels good to stand up and be applauded for something you've created and shared with the world.

Do you have a favourite style of writing or a favourite writer? Too many. As far as poets go, many contemporary American poets. Anis Mojgani for his gentleness, Saul Williams for his honesty, Stacyann Chin for her ferocity, B Yung for his fire, Sarah Kay for her softness, Shane Korcyzan for his beauty, The Suicide Kings spoken word trip (Geoff Trenchard, Jamie DeWolf and Rupert Estanislao) for incorporating poetry and punk and their sense of justice. There's also Indigo, another local performance poet, for the way she is.

I'm also a huge fan of Hunter S Thompson for his pace and expressions, Joseph Heller for Catch 22 and Richard Wright for his brutally honest realism in Native Son.

As far as styles go, I like anything edgy and interesting. It's got to hold your attention. If you're checking your text messages midway through a gig or putting down a book to go wash your hands or clip your toenails, that's a pretty good indicator that something's not right.

Do you think it's important for Australians to write and perform their own work and why? It is essential. the act of writing, of writing something down, allows you to process and catalogue your environment. It helps you to know yourself. Someone's art, their creation, reflects their personality. You can come to understand them and what it is like to be them. It builds empathy.

In the bigger picture, poetry gets a particularly bad rap because there's all these preconceived ideas about what poetry ought to be. Usually it's Shakespearean neckfrills or beatnik turtle necks. and there are other stereotypes that get reinforced at an institutional level with the academic study of poetry, which in turn influences how creative writing competitions get judged and which works get published.

Performing your work, in mediums such as Slam which democratises poetry, then becomes almost a revolutionary act. On the other hand you are keeping your work personal by keeping it within your control and using your voice to communicate it to an audience the way you want it to be heard. In doing so you help to create and support a culture that values difference and experimentation in an artform. But most importantly, you are taking time and space to make an audience listen to what you have to say. And they will never see that moment again.