Ottawa Poetry Faceoff 2006
Topic: slam
Last night was the Ottawa CBC Poetry Faceoff.

I love this stuff - something about a room full of a wide range of people who are all there to have fun and hear poetry. It just gets me wired. It's a pretty big event, too, so you get to see some people who might not have heard the poets before, and that's always fun. I got to bring a friend who had never been to a poetry slam and who was clearly blown away by the evening's winner, DJ Morales. It was fun to see her reaction.

I knew three of the poets competing - I had never heard Doretta Charles or Colin Vincent, but I met Jacqueline Lawrence at the workshop with Kwame Dawes a while back, and Steve Sauve and DJ Morales are really familiar from Capital Slam (they've also both read at Dusty Owl).

I think experience with doing slams has got to be a major advantage - it gives you some practice at recovering if you slip or drop out a section. It's a theatrical skill, and one I'm pretty envious of. And I think one of the more amazing moments of the evening was the entire audience pulling for Jacqueline Lawrence when she started to stumble, had to restart the poem a few times, and still managed to fight through, stumbling but recovering, and keeping her cool, which really impressed me - I'd have been off the stage and shaking somewhere. She stayed up there and finished the poem, with a couple of shouts of "You can do it!" and "Go for it, Jackie!" from the audience. The whole room was just pulling for her to make it through. And the poem was gorgeous.

DJ, who took home the Poetry Crown and the Cup of Minutiae, is a hell of a lot of fun to watch. She might have stumbled once. Maybe. She's just tiny, and her delivery is rapid-fire and really dramatic. And she's 19. . . I also knew, as soon as Alan Neal pointed out that he couldn't use the word "fuck" on the radio, that they were going to have to bleep DJ. When she had to pull her number for the performance order, she said, "I don't want to go second," pulled her number, looked at it, and just burst out, "Fuck!" . . . and Alan and the audience all yelled back, "Eff! You have to say eff!"

Oh, and I love the fact that the CBC, the national broadcasting corporation, the Official Canadian Media, has such a weird-ass sense of humor. The Cup of Minutiae? Alan Neal's Velvet Suit Fund? CBC golf balls?