On Saturday the 14th, the best youth poets in the city gathered to SLAM in the Sustainable Poetry Youth SLAM at the Public Library. The competition was the first of many poetry-related events hosted by the 2012 Spoken Word Festival in Calgary as part of Youth Week Calgary 2012.
As the MC for the event, Tyler first introduced the host festival and the variety of the events that will be taking place later this month. The official festival runs from April 17 – 22, so be sure to check out the youth focussed workshops they offer later on.
The event started off with five open mic-ers that presented various works of their own poetry in a non-competitive setting. After they got their creative juices flowing, three judges were randomly selected from the crowd (one of which I unfortunately was not). They were to judge the poems out of 10, based on the quality of content, performance, and audience reaction the respective poems received. The rules of the SLAM were as follows:
1. Poems were to be read in less than three minutes.
2. No musical instruments / props / costumes were to be used by the participants.
This year, six SLAM participants competed for the top three prizes: A $70 gift card to Shelf Life Books, and two $50 and $30 gift cards to Pages Books. In order to give the judges a chance to gauge their marking criteria, a “sacrificial poet,” the Public Library representative, presented her own poem before the contestants.
The rest of the event was divided into two rounds of competition: the first of which determined the top three contestants, and the final round for the top three contestants. The theme for this year’s SLAM was sustainability.
In the first round, the top three finishing contestants were Sarena (YAA represent!) with 22.0 points, Francois with 24.4 points, and Alexa with 25.7 points. In the final, the 2012 SLAM eventually determined Alexa the winner with 26.2 points. Alexa will now have the opportunity to compete at the SLAM final for a chance to join the SLAM Poetry Team.
This year’s Youth SLAM was sponsored by This Is My City and Tales.