Australian Poetry Slam '09 - Queensland heats
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The search is on for Queensland's best spoken word poet!
Speak, scream, howl, whisper or sing your original at the Australian Poetry Slam - Queensland heats - an electric live event where the audience is the judge.
Heat winners will compete in the State finals at the State Library of Queensland on Saturday 17 October. Queensland’s top two slam poets will then slug it out for the coveted title of Australian Slam Poet 2009 and $10,000 in cash and prizes at the National finals in Sydney.
Want to sharpen your words before they take flight? Come along to one of the free workshops before the slam.
How can you take part?
Slam heats and workshops will take place in eight locations across Queensland.
| Sun 16 Aug | Yeppoon |
| Wed 19 Aug | Brisbane #1 |
| Tue 25 Aug | Townsville |
| Tue 1 Sep | Cairns |
| Fri 11 Sep | Brisbane #2 |
| Sat 19 Sep | Logan |
| Tue 22 Sep | Pinerivers |
| Wed 30 Sep | Longreach & Barcaldine |
More details:
What is Poetry Slam?
Slam is an electric live event and poetry competition where anyone can perform their words. Members of the audience judge the performances.
In 1985 construction worker and poet Marc 'So What' Smith (pictured live at the QLD Poetry Festival 2006) crammed poets into Chicago jazz bar, The Get Me High, for his new creation the Poetry Slam.
Experimenters in this new style of poetry presentation gyrated, rotated, spewed, and stepped their words along the bar top, dancing between the bottles, bellowing out the backdoor, standing on the street or on their stools, turning the west side of Chicago into a rainforest of dripping whispers or a blast furnace of fiery elongated syllables, phrases, snatches of scripts, and verse that electrified the night.
Slam is open to all people and all forms of poetry including verse, comic, hip hop, spoken word monologues, beat and any other style you can imagine! Each poet gets two minutes to read one of their own poems - the poet may not use props or musical instruments - just them, slamming their words to a live audience.
Slam in Queensland
The slam scene in Queensland is now recognised as one of the most vibrant in the world.
The first big slam was held by the Queensland Poetry Festival in 2006 which built on the monthly slams that had been happening in Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast since 2005, hosted by Queensland’s premier performance poetry collective, ouTsideRs. The other signature slam which runs in south east Queensland each year is the Woodford Folk Festival’s WordFood Slam.
Marc 'So What' Smith, the Slam founder, had this to say about the Queensland slam scene when he visited in 2006:
"The professionalism, audience participation, and quality of performance displayed at those events were on a par with (and in some cases exceeded) major poetry slam events around the world. Furthermore the spirit of the events were akin to the community building sentiments and intents of the original slam; they brought together people from all walks of life, all ages, and all point-of-views".
More information
- Phone: +61 7 3840 7307
- publicprograms@slq.qld.gov.au
Last updated: 22nd June 2009
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