October 2009:

Alexander James, a blogger who visited the slam from Toronto, writes here about how this October’s slam changed his world:

I’m not trying to sound sappy or sentimental at all, and I’m certainly not trying to play grab-ass with an artistic community I haven’t been involved with in years, but believe me when I say the performances I saw were outstanding.  If I had known what I was getting into I would have prepared more adequately to write this post by interviewing performers and getting all sorts of links together, but I was genuinely shocked by the quality of the works and their readings.  This is an extremely talented group of people who consistently defied my expectations by writing moving, funny, engaging pieces and presenting them in a very honest way – I know I keep calling this “performance poetry” but the sense I got was there was very little in the way of “performance” going on.  These people made me believe in what they were saying, and for people dealing with a guy who went in categorically hating poetry, that’s a pretty impressive feat.

June 2009:

thank you so much to everyone involved in making the london poetry slam finals the incredible event it was: to the volunteers who helped out every step of the way; the judges who took pleasure in their often difficult task; our host white noise machine who kept us all laughing with his witty repartee; shihan, our absolutely phenomenal feature; all of the poets (including our sacrifice) who poured their hearts out on stage; and most of all, to all of you who came out for a standing-room-only, sweaty-hot poetry event on a friday night!!!

for those of you who may have missed it, london’s team heading to victoria for the canadian national slam in november is: steph sly, elyse maltin, kyra harris, jeff drennan, and alternate char. video of the finals will be posted on youtube shortly, so join the facebook group and stay tuned for details!

Scores: