Slamapalooza III brings poetry to the GrassRoots Cafe

Jillian Christmas

Halfway through poet Jillian Christmas’s opening performance at performance, Kwantlen Creative Writing Guild’s Slam-a-palooza III poetry slam event, which took place Nov. 28,  the projection screen behind her snapped on, blaring out a test signal.

Something seemingly inconsequentially random gained poignance in the context of her words being spoken over them, sharp words about about race relations in the feminist movement.

One could say the same thing about the entire event itself. In that moment, there was no need to compare anything to anything else, Christmas remarking afterwards: “Apparently, I made the projector angry.”

As the name Slam-a-palooza III suggests, the event is third instalment of the popular Slam-a-palooza poetry slams that have been organized by the Kwantlen Creative Writing Guild since last fall, filling Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Grassroots Cafe with staunch supporters and intrigued passers-by.

Though this fall semester’s turnout wasn’t quite the room-packer that the second Slam-a-palooza was this spring, said organizer Simon Massey on Facebook, it was still “well received.”

Much like the two previous Slam-a-palooza events, it opened with a pair of featured poets, drawn from the ranks of the Vancouver Poetry Slam. Christmas, a Southern Ontario transplant from Markham, is not only a Vancouver Poetry Slam champion, but also the co-director of the Verses Fes­ti­val of Words. Themes of family, mental illness, memory, identity and impermanence are filtered through the prism of her experience, often in the calm, gentle tone of bedtime stories, but they are rousing all the same, leavened with morsels of hearty lightness in between.

Al Mader, performing at Slamapalooza III, Nov. 28, 2013. (photo by Chris Yee)

In contrast, Al Mader, the second featured poet of the night, exuded middle-aged angst, but he was no less wry. Wielding an ensemble of improvised instruments – a washtub bass, a saxophone-shaped piece of driftwood, making up what he calls his “minimalist jug band” – he tells his tales of woe, topping his last piece by smashing his instruments in a farcical, fed-up rage, taking leave of the stage soon afterward.

As much of a spectacle the featured poets were, this review is about a poetry slam, a competition between poets drawn from the audience. A handful of competitors were brave enough to duke it out with each other, judged against the night’s “sacrifice of blood,” Connor Doyle, the Creative Writing Guild’s president, even as the audience was admonished to “applaud the poet, not the scores” after every reveal from the judges.

Out of the six contestants, Eric Wirsching took home the grand prize with a call to arms against environmental destruction and capitalism (both intertwined, he stressed) while Jessica Ross came in second with an expression of collegiate self-doubt, and Elizabeth Hann third, with seething yet vague rage.