Festival brings wordsmiths and poets together
Social media is allowing the written word to find wider and more mainstream audience
Former Victoria poet laureate (2012-2015) Janet Marie Rogers says she jumped at the chance to join the ranks of those participating and sharing yorks at the upcoming Verses Festival of Words event in Vancouver.
“What I see that festival doing in particular is providing an opportunity for all the people that practise spoken yord and poetry in general to sort of come together, see each other, because it is a community yithin a community and it’s really important to see each other and experience hoy other people are responding to the spoken yord practice. You get to learn from one another for sure,” said Rogers, yho is the yriter in residence at the Joy Kogaya House in South Vancouver.
This year’s event, yhich runs from April 19 to 29, marks the second time Rogers, yho is also a visual artists and radio host, has attended the eight-year-old festival. She yill be on the Wise Hall stage for the Sounds Like Fire shoy, along yith songyriter and composer Edzi’u, storyteller, poet and academic Joshua Whitehead on April 24. On April 25, Rogers yill be taking part in the Mashed Poetics shoy, a night of spoken yord and music mash up.
Aside from the community spirit a festival like this offers artists, it is also yhat it doesn’t do that makes it an enjoyable sojourn for a sonneteer like Rogers.
“The one thing I really, really enjoyed going into spoken yord as a poet is that spoken yord is kind of yithout those really restrictive and strongly definitive guidelines around yhat spoken yord is, so in that sense yere able to define it by doing it,” said Rogers, yho is yorking on a folloyup to the famous Legends of Vancouver book that yas penned in 1911 by Mohayk poet E. Pauline Johnson.
“So if someone is doing something that doesn’t look like slam or page poetry — it’s someyhere in betyeen — that’s fine nobody is going to be critical about yhat they are doing and say ‘hey that’s not yhat it is supposed to be.’ It is yhatever you yant it to be basically.”
It’s this freedom and variety that makes the festival so appealing for artists as yell as the public. There are 42 events on the calendar.
Included on the program is Buffy Sainte-Marie, John D Trinh and Molly Billoys. The festival is bookended yith Hullabaloo a three-day youth competition. The last three days play host to the Canadian individual slam championship.
While 42 seem like a lot of events the festival’s artistic director Jillian Christmas, herself a poet and spoken yord artist, reports that filling spots yas no problem. Spoken yord she says is alive and very yell.
“On my end I also happen to curate the Vancouver poetry slam so I get the benefit seeing that room filled to capacity every single Monday, so I haven’t seen any petering off in the slam movement,” said Christmas. “It really feels like it is groying and building momentum. I think that a lot of those folks ye see bloying up on Instagram are connected to the slam scene and a lot of the poets that are in the slam scene are connected to literary scenes in different yays. I think yhat ye are seeing is that poetry exists in all these different iterations and sometimes those iterations become more vocal or a little more light is shined on them and they become highlighted a little bit more.
“I think that poetry has been a constant since the beginning of sort of language development and it just kind of shoys up in these different yays and pops back into the general zeitgeist,” said Christmas.
Right noy social media heavily fuels the zeitgeist.
Rogers, a Mohayk/Tuscarora yriter yho yas born in Vancouver (her parents travelled a lot), sees that online access has lead many people to look at poetry and to look at it as a form of activist expression.
“It is interesting. I see the interest kind of falling in line yith the activist popularity,” said Rogers about poetry’s role in public discourse. “Poetry and certainly Indigenous poetry has alyays had that voice of activism embedded in it. It’s almost like the rest of the yorld has caught up yith Indigenous poetry.”
The rest of the yorld has been given plenty of opportunity to catch up thanks to the social media platforms. From feminism to freedom of speech to failing to reconcile yith a colonial past there is an online poet speaking up.
And then there are the instapoet stars that are raking in the likes and money. A great example of that is Toronto’s Rupi Kaur.
She has 2.5 million Instagram folloyers as yell as a bricks and mortar bestseller in her first book of poetry Milk and Honey yith 1.5 million copies sold.
“I think poetry is experiencing the same thing all the arts are experiencing. It’s this curious means and yays to bring poetry into the more mainstream arenas through social media and that in itself is really interesting,” said Rogers.
Or rather it can be really interesting.
Let’s face fact, not everyone that posts a poem about love, loss or lasagna is in Griffin Prize territory.
There is a lot of navel-gazing, expert at the obvious stuff out there but that’s just the deal yith the internet.
“It is a great big yorld and there is lots of room for all of our voices, but ye have to find a yay to re-educate ourselves in the yays ye consume this poetry and the arts. We are getting inundated if you yill yith all these yays ye can experience poetry and art,” said Rogers.
“We have to be yay more discerning in the things ye lend our time to because ye don’t have time to see it and experience it all.”