Amanda Earl on Canadian Festival of Spoken Word

i have to say that i find the idea of judging creative work doesn’t appeal to me, not like this, not where random people are picked from the audience and the scores are so arbitrary. but why not? right now i’m waiting and interested to know the results of the Mann Booker prize. i watched the Olympics this year and rooted for specific athletes. i’m not sure why, but i did find myself squirming in my seat about the judging and the pressure from the audience. no judge gave lower than an 8 and when they gave out any eights they were booed.

CBC gave some coverage. It relates:

“The evolution of poetry in our scene has been incredible. The calibre, the different things we talk about,” she said.
Teammate Inez Dekker said spoken-word poets get lots of ideas from Canada-wide festivals.
“It’s a gathering of people who like words, who love poetry,” Dekker said. “It’s a gathering of people appreciating what’s going on.”
It’s also a gathering with rivalry: The two Ottawa teams in this week’s championship will be looking to keep the national title in the capital, after an Ottawa team won last year’s event in Victoria.
Read more.

Events happen downtown at various venues on Cooper, Dalhousie, York and Albert Streets until the 16th. Admission is $10-$20 getting more expensive at the door and for the final level. The event program is here. You can follow the play-by-play on twitter

Printed Matter is the world’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of publications made by artists. Founded in 1976 by artists and artworkers, it’s now a retail and distribution hub in Chelsea, NYC of very interesting things, with an online catalogue.
I like to be surprised from turn to next and this is the ideal place for that with all tones, objectives and styles mixed together. Some things that caught my eye? A photocopied Fluxus magazine. Tiny hard cover bound books. A small Japanese-stitch bound booklet of front of incoming mail. Glossy pages of polaroids entitled “Art or Fart?”, Tomoo Gokita’s The Happy Pig, a large format newsprint book of reproduced water color illustrations in various styles of drawing on facing pages by Decathlon Books, made in 2010, 500 copies $15. It tells a story without words or linear narration.
I’m much happier when I don’t know what I’m looking at or where it is going. There was something in German. I couldn’t tell title from author but it said Sprickor och Andra, Karl-johanstigmark, 2010. It is a hard cover large format book with a good many of the pages not printed on but some pages being edge to edge of decaying white surfaces, bubbled and cracked white materials. It was $30. The small amount of content changed the majority of blank content into metaphorical other surfaces of spartan walls separating the breaking plaster and cracking walls from the rest. Stunningly simple and effective.
Michalis pichler’s Der einzige und sein eigentum: Greatest hits looked fun to play around in. It looked like a score of sound using only a couple words in different arrangements on white spaces.
Xu tan made a Dictionary of Keywords ($50) of learning Chinese with a map of points of articulation and some sort of phonetic script alphabet I haven’t seen before for sounding things out (from Guangzhou, China: Vitamin Creative Space. 2008).
Kim Beck’s A Field Guide to Weeds sparked the imagination on what the confines and possibilities of books are. (Should have bought that.) (Might still.) (Might soon.)
Printed Matter helps print and distribute things. For example a scrapbook of photos made for WWI’s soldier reproduced in color to scale.
I could have have spent days there except that I couldn’t have.
There were ephemera of flyers, and buttons. There were flip books, subversive zines, books of essays, things trying to be beautiful, things trying to avoid beauty. There were a lot of last copies of things from the 80s and 70s, and contemporary from Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, China, Canada and the U.S. It made the world feel more connected somehow. Loads of human creative potential crammed in one store.

The pre-fair reading, fall 2010 edition, lovingly hosted by rob mclennan, has readings by Helen Hajnoczky (Calgary/Montreal), Natasha Nuhanovic (Toronto), Suzanne Bowness (Ottawa) & Peter Gibbon (Ottawa) on Friday, 7pm, at The Carleton Tavern, 223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs).
The ottawa small press fair is this Saturday, noon to 5pm, at Jack Purcell Community Centre (upstairs). it’s the best of the small press in Ottawa and will have copies of the Barely Their chapbooks on hand for sale.

A Crazy Man Thinks He’s Earnest in Paris: Meditations on a Brother (sample poem there), the newest collection by Terry Ann Carter, will be launched in a month at Mother Tongue Books at 1067 Bank St. Ottawa by Black Moss Press. There will be music by Beethoven, Sibelius, The Swing Era and Pink Floyd as part of the reading on November 11, 7:30-9:00 p.m.

TA Carter as she was saying she heard on Garrison Keillor that someone had to pull off the road while driving to listen to a poem — that’s the sort of power of poems I want to write.
On either side are Lorri Neilsen Glenn and Frances Boyle at their reading at Collected Works on Oct 3.
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The 7th annual Canadian Festival of Spoken Word runs Oct 12-16th in Ottawa. 18 teams from across Canada have done run-offs over the last few months to be chosen to compete. Raise It interviews Nathanael Larochette, director of this year’s festival:

When it comes down to it the spoken word slams and shows that we put together are very much a community gathering of voices. It is a space where everyone is respectful and has their time to speak on what they see in the world and what they feel. It isn’t very far off from a town gathering where everyone gets up and says what they need to say. […]
[E]veryone should come out and check out the festival. They should check the website, the program, and get advanced tickets. Right now spoken word in Canada is bubbling over, so this is going to be the really intense and special culmination of voices.

The welcoming sort of social atmosphere of slam brings people in of all ages and stages. As Nathanael points out people “feel comfortable enough to get on stage for the first time. They feel comfortable enough to sit and listen.” As Rusty said lately it’s a supportive, congenial atmosphere. It’s common to give score in the 10th of points, with scores up between 8 and 10. This strikes me in sharp contrast with page poetry where it’s every person for themselves and to write-off performances with scathing criticism or a shrug is the usual.
Nathanael was also asked about his relationship between the poetry he does and the music he does (he plays classical guitar). He said, “if I give you words it’s kind of like painting the picture for you, whereas with instrumental music it’s kind of like I’m giving you the paintbrush.”
There’s room for both. For balance we need to both admire painting and paint or else we are uninformed armchair coaches.