A wrap-up of the 2007 Canadian Festival of Spoken Word
By the time you read this, I’ll be on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic (yay for post scheduling) flying to Europe for work, but don’t hold that against me: I’ve been doing a lot of flying recently.
A few weeks ago, I flew out to Halifax, Nova Scotia in order to attend the 2007 Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Most of you are aware of the love I have for the performance poetry scene here in Toronto, so it was my distinct pleasure to accompany the two Toronto teams to Halifax in order to watch them compete in the National Slam Poetry Championship as part of the festival.
I wrote extensively on blogTO about and during the festival, so if you’re looking for some insight as to what happened out in Halifax, here are a few posts to check out:
- Poet Profile: LEVIATHAN
- Poet Profile: Truth Is…
- Poet Profile: Dwayne Morgan
- Poet Profile: Tomy Bewick
- Poet Profile: White Noise Machine
- Poet Profile: Boonaa
- CFSW07: It All Starts Tomorrow
- CFSW07: Round One
- CFSW07: Round Two
- CFSW07: The Finals
To be honest, I’m not much of a photographer and I wasn’t carrying a video camera with me, so the photos and video you see on blogTO are not of the best quality. Luckily, there were professionals at the festival who managed to grab some fantastic videos at the festival, as well as tons of poets and spectators who have uploaded a ton of photos from the festival onto Facebook. A quick FB or Google search should help you find some good stuff.
My favorite poem of the entire festival was a second-round piece by Radar from Victoria, and unTV.ca managed to grab video of the performance. Just search for Radar and CFSW when you’re at their site.
Not surprisingly, her performance garnered the largest and most enthusiastic standing ovation of the entire festival; you don’t have to agree with what she said in order to appreciate her lyrical mastery.
In case I didn’t say it already: Halifax won the National Slam Championship. And if this post piqued your interest in spoken word even just a little, drop me a line and I’ll get you connected with the people that run the slam scene in your city — and hopefully I’ll see you at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Calgary next year.