Sarah Jane Justice
I’ve been part of South Australia’s spoken word scene for a while now, and I still get a huge buzz from watching new talent as it develops. I’ve seen a lot of poets at their first events, nervous and uncertain behind a microphone, and I get downright maternal seeing how their journeys progress from there.
This year’s APS heats introduced me to a lot of voices that I hadn’t heard before. In watching the competition, it wasn’t just the quality of performance that caught my attention, but the diversity of styles and subject matter. We saw more traditional poetry, hip-hop influences, social commentary,
character pieces, and everything in between. This has always been what I love about slam as a genre – you can never quite predict what you’re going to see on any given night.
I was far from being the only one who walked away impressed. I talked to audience members who had never watched a poetry slam before, and they were taken aback by how much they enjoyed it. Even better, I saw poets in the audience who walked away scribbling ideas onto scraps of paper and notes in their phones. There is no higher compliment for a writer than to inspire others to write, and I saw a lot of that at our heats.
In advising and mentoring this year’s competitors, I was pleased to see a real willingness to learn. I’ve often said that every artist, no matter how experienced, should always want to improve their work. The best poets and performers I’ve met will still listen to suggestions and feedback, whatever the source of that feedback might be. Over five heats, I saw competitors who returned several times with the same piece, having obviously taken the time to work on improving it. Even though not all of those poets made it to the State Final, they created work that should make them proud. At the end of the day, there are only ten spots in the final, and I saw far more than ten poets that were good enough to make it there.
Looking at the spread of finalists that we’ll see compete this coming Thursday, I have no idea who will come out as the winner. It could be any one of them, and all of them have the potential to do SA proud on a national stage. While I’m looking forward to seeing how this competition wraps up, my current focus reaches much further than that. Having seen so many talented new writers for the first time, I can’t wait to see where they go from here. I want to encourage all of them to come back, to visit our open mics, and more than anything, to keep writing and performing.
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