There are a few sim­ple rules to slam poems, in case you were won­der­ing: no props, no cos­tumes, no musi­cal instru­ments, and noth­ing over three min­utes. Beyond that, any­thing goes. “Some­one could do a haiku, or a hip-hop piece, a rant, a lyri­cal love poem, or a mix of com­edy and poetry,” says RC Wes­lowski, founder of the Van­cou­ver Youth Slam and c0-creator of Hul­la­baloo. “By def­i­n­i­tion, there isn’t really a type of poem called a slam poem.”

So what dis­tin­guishes a slam poem from the gar­den vari­ety? Appar­ently, it’s not about the poet so much as the audi­ence. Wes­lowski is wary of lay­ing down any def­i­n­i­tions (“there’s a bit of an argu­ment between the poetry slam cir­cles”), but tells me, “What the poetry slam does is encour­age poets to engage with the audi­ence. At the Youth Slam we have poets get­ting up and talk­ing about the teach­ers’ strike– they are talk­ing about stuff that’s rel­e­vant to an audi­ence, and rel­e­vant to their audi­ence, the youth of today.  You’re not just dong it for your­self, you’re try­ing to avoid being self-indulgent and appeal­ing to your own tastes, you’re attempt­ing to make a con­nec­tion with the audience.”

A lit­tle his­tory of the slam poem.

The ori­gin of slam poetry dates back to the 1980s, when Amer­i­can poet Marc Smith realised how bad poetry read­ings could be. “He was going to read­ings and poets were just get­ting up and read­ing into their papers, and not pay­ing atten­tion to the audi­ence,” says Wes­lowski, “And they were bor­ing the peo­ple who were there.” He devised a dif­fer­ent method that would keep the audi­ence inter­ested and pro­vide a new chal­lenge for the poets.

A poetry slam rev­o­lu­tion­izes not only the poetry read­ing, but the uni­ver­sal com­pe­ti­tion met­ric of a scor­ing sys­tem. Instead of experts or trained indi­vid­u­als, the judges are five audi­ence mem­bers, picked at ran­dom. They get cards with scores from 0 to 10 (10 remains the high­est score) and vote for their favourites based on what­ever cri­te­ria they decide mat­ters, be it style or content.

“Every­body acknowl­edges that it is a gim­mick, and it’s entirely arbi­trary, because the next night there’s five dif­fer­ent judges and the poem that won the night before won’t win. That’s why we encour­age peo­ple to expe­ri­ence in style, in writ­ing and per­for­mance, and not to talk it too seri­ously. Only take seri­ously work­ing on your skills as a writer and per­former,” explains Weslowski.

Hul­la­baloo and the Van­cou­ver Youth Slam

Wes­lowski has been men­tor­ing young poets for years, includ­ing as the founder of the Youth Poetry Slam (A Van­cou­ver Poetry House project), now in its fifth year. The Poetry Slam con­venes every fourth Mon­day at Cafe Deux Soleil for a slam. He also works with Word­play, another Van­cou­ver Poetry House pro­gram, that sends poets into schools to do poetry work­shops with stu­dents and intro­duce them to slam poetry.

A few years ago, he and fel­low Van­cou­ver Poetry House mem­ber Chris Gilpin were watch­ing Chicago high school poetry-slam com­pe­ti­tion doc­u­men­tary Louder Than a Bomb and decided to emu­late it in Van­cou­ver. The result was Hul­la­baloo, a com­pe­ti­tion invit­ing teams from around BC to com­pete in Van­cou­ver and as a by-product build­ing a provin­cial com­mu­nity of young poets. Impres­sive for any new arts ven­ture, the first year was a suc­cess, which Wes­lowski attrib­utes partly to the “crit­i­cal mass of inter­est” gen­er­ated by the Van­cou­ver Youth Slam and Wordplay.

What does Wes­lowski hope the com­peti­tors, from Grades 9–12 around the province, will get out of the expe­ri­ence? “They’ll be encour­aged to con­tinue their writ­ing. To know they have lots of peers within the province who are into the same thing that they are. If you’re into poetry and writ­ing and books, you can often feel alone and iso­lated, like a big geek. And maybe you are a big geek, but then you come to this event and find out that there are other geeks just like you out there, and they’re totally into poetry as well.

“I hope they’ll keep on writ­ing and be inspired by the other poets, the fea­tured per­form­ers. And they’ll know that if they chose to, this is some­thing they could keep on doing. This is some­thing they could do with their lives.”

And what of the slam poetry neo­phyte who attends Hul­la­baloo– what can they hope to get out of it? “They’ll get to see that the kids of today are able to speak for them­selves. They’re smart and artic­u­late and they know what’s on their minds. They don’t need inter­preters to speak for them. The audi­ence can get inspired and feel a sense of pride about kids. It’s great. That’s kind of what we’re in it for—all the mushy reasons.”

Sounds pretty good to us!

Check back at the end of March for full details about Hul­la­baloo 2012, or for info and advance tick­ets to the semi-finals and finals now, visit their website!