Reflections of an Australian Poetry Slam Champion
It’s honestly bizarre to reflect on the last two years, let alone this spoken word journey. Put them both together and I can’t help but shake my head at how wonderful and weird it’s been at the same time. Around this time in 2019, I was only starting out, having won my first slam at GriffinSpeak during the Melbourne Spoken Word Festival. I remember sitting in my car down a side street, 45 minutes early, ripping at my nails and totally ridden with anxiety.
No one knew I was there.
I couldn’t fathom what my family would think, what my friends would say and how much inner shame I felt doing something new. I remember feeling so overwhelmed and out of place, not knowing exactly why I was there but knowing it was finally time I showed up for myself.
I was in a place of thinking my poem had to be ‘perfect.’ I spent weeks memorising it before daring to go and perform. I had this naïve and conditioned perception of what it meant to
be an artist, of what it meant to perform and the way I spoke to myself was ripe with negativity and shame. My relationship with myself has come a long way since then and I’ve got poetry to thank.
It’s hard not to fall in love with spoken word. The diversity, the energy, encouragement, inclusivity and on top of that, the incredible way people use their words. There’s something about a poem that seems to transcend other ways of communicating.
The other day I was on the radio and the interviewer asked me about how I remember my poems. I told him that a poem is a morsel of humanity and once it is written, our voices bring it to life. The more we speak it, the more we begin to get to know who the poem really is and from there, we find the voice right for this living, breathing creation. It’s a cathartic process. He laughed and said that’s an interesting way to think about it but went to the next question before I had time to tell him I’ve spent a lot of time with my poems, it’s simply something I’ve come to know.
I’ve had to remind myself of this extensively throughout lockdown. Competing online versus performing onstage has its obvious differences. I miss the faces, feeding off the crowd’s energy and how electric it feels to hear those clicks. I know some don’t love them but honestly, I think they’re delicious. I love dishing them out for every poet, like kindling to an already burning flame, every poet needs fuel.
None of us write and share only for ourselves. We don’t do it only to be seen, we do it to be a part of something. We do it to show up for ourselves, to heal, to illuminate and to connect.
The journey from the pre-slam nail biting binge to now has been a quest. With its own trials and tribulations, mostly mental. Launching Wordcraft has been one of the biggest expansions to come from winning the championship. The opportunity to work with poets to overcome their blocks has been a full circle journey for myself as an educator and someone who suffered from paralysing anxiety. To know, deeply in my soul, that spoken word has been monumental in my healing and foundations for my career is a blessing that I will never forget. Wordcraft, which lives as a monthly spoken word event, workshops, as well as 1:1 mentoring, was born from a place of deep knowing of the power of poetry.
It’s a gift to be able to blend my teaching and writing together to help other artists on their journey in knowing what it means to be themselves in their art. To watch an artist develop their craft, their confidence and how they use their voice to reclaim their power is real life magic. I wouldn’t know this is what I was supposed to do with myself if it wasn’t for the open mic. In person or online, both mediums have impacted my reality, my communities and my identity. While right now, lockdown has fatigued all of us and Zoom turn outs are low, it doesn’t change the knowing that poetry heals. It’s some serious magic that I wish more people knew about. It’s in its renaissance, that much we know.
When I run a workshop, I’m usually asked, ‘How do you write a poem for a slam?’ Honestly, you don’t. You simply write.
I say this as the 2020 Australian Poetry Slam Champion - do not write for the slam.
Write for yourself.
When I started competing interstate and internationally, which is the biggest plus of being a poet in lockdown, I started to have one success after the other. I was honestly amazed at the response to my art. Collectives were inviting me to compete, international groups were interviewing me and then I started getting feature spots at gigs. It was the most affirming beginning to my career as a writer.
I had spent a decade denying myself these opportunities out of fear of being judged. But all this momentum came with a new wave of self-doubt. The newest question on my mind was, ‘How do I be more slammy?’ Literally, slammy. That’s the word I used. Not to be confused with my family’s homemade salami. Anyway, I genuinely began to wonder how to make my writing ‘better.’
I tried writing pieces that were more political, more this, more that. But after hours of frozen fingers at the keyboard and more deleted words than written, I realised they weren’t my narratives. I could write about queerness, but I don’t identify with my queerness much, so I will leave that poem for the poet who does. I was angry at the racism in lockdown, but again, the poem is for the poet who has lived it.
I realised my idea of what a slam piece was ‘supposed to be,’ was simply warped by an expectation I had somehow learned to believe. I thought I had to write a certain way to be successful in a slam. I had to write a certain way to win. But a poetry slam is not political. It simply attracts those kinds of poems because of the connotation of the word ‘slam.’ It is not a rap battle either, where you get given a topic and a time limit and are expected to spit rhymes for top spot. It is simply a fun way to share poetry and potentially win stuff. But the winner is always poetry. We slam for the poetry. Some people might disagree with me, there might be someone out there who will say ‘the more political, the better the poem.’ I don’t know. All I know is I didn’t win the championship writing an angry poem about something I haven’t lived.
In reframing the way I looked at the slam, I stopped writing for it. I kept writing for me, for my own healing and the processing of my experiences. I wrote about love, about unrequited love, about boys that treated me badly and parts of myself I never talk about with my family but bravely share in front of them on stage. I kept writing about my relationship with my body, my body hair, about my womanhood and what it feels like to fall in love with myself.
I wrote a poem about my heavy period. I performed a poem about my heavy period.
I won the championship.
If you haven’t picked what I’m saying, it’s this -
Write your truth. That is how you write for a slam and the way you will know you’re a poet.
