Word Travels: Get Your Poet On

Once the hangover of the long weekend's intense schedule of goings-on has passed, maybe it's time for a change of pace. This coming weekend sees the launch of the Word Travels Festival, which promises to be three days of live literary mayhem with events at The Rocks, the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Theatre.

The Festival is the new home of the Australian Poetry Slam (APS). Poetry slams add an element of performance and competition to your more traditional poetry reading, in a way that brings an affinity with hip hop, with or without the backing track, and are becoming increasingly popular around the world.

According to Creative Director Miles Merrill, turning the APS into a three day festival of spoken word allows for greater diversity, provides the opportunity to reach a broader audience and sees the involvement of more poets from various backgrounds.

Traditionally the realm of high intellectuals, hippies or sixteen year old school girls (depending on what you feel constitutes poetry), slams give the written form a new life as performance. Originating at The Green Mill, a Chicago bar in 1986, slams rose in popularity after the concept was picked up by HBO via Def Poetry Jam produced by hip hop legend Russell Simmons. Def Poetry found spoken word performance a natural home within hip hop, and featured work from Jamie Foxx, Erykah Badu, and Kanye West amongst a myriad of others.

In Australia, slams were introduced by Merrill, who is himself a Chicago-born spoken word artist. In 2004 Australia’s first inter-city slam was held, before going national in 2007. Now in its ninth season, the has APS seen thousands of poets exhibit each year and it continues to grow.

But slams are not all about sharing, they are competitive, with judges taken from the audience on the night. The national poetry slam final will be held on 13 October, with the prize the opportunity to perform at the Bookworm Literary Festival, the Ubud International Writers’ and Readers’ Festival and the Byron Bay Writers Festival in 2014 – a tour worth over $12,000.

Also featuring in the Festival’s highlights is international guest, key-note performer and queen of spoken-word Ursula Rucker, who is touted as one of the strongest female poets performing today; and a Poetry and Story Bordello will see sophisticated wordsmiths louring patrons through the backstreets of The Rocks to private shows by the world’s best poets and story tellers. Sounds tempting.

The Word Travels Festival runs from 11-13 October at various locations in Sydney. For more information head on over to http://wordtravels.info/.

-Stevie O'C