Anti- bullying poet offers ‘ safe place’ at PAC
For poet Shane Koyczan, rhythm and flow don’t require a band. It just takes a microphone and an audience willing to go where he takes them.
Sometimes the journey is funny, other times painful. But few are left unaffected by the time he’s done.
This isn’t your dreaded high school poetry. Koyczan’s spoken word performances dive deep into the scars left by childhood bullies and the stigma of being an outcast. His highly- charged poems have been seen in documentaries, at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and on YouTube where an animated version of his devastating monologue To This Day has more than 20 million views.
Asked what people can expect from his live show, Koyczan offers a hearty laugh. It’s something he’s asked a lot, and is still not sure how to respond.
“It’s such a weird question because I’m never really able to answer it,” says the Yellowknife writer. “Because I don’t know how people are going to take certain things.
“I talk about mental health, the importance of relationships — not just romantic relationships. Friendship is something that’s severely underrated in our society, but so important to our mental well- being.
“But it’s hard, because when they think of friends, they think of people that are always there for them. It’s like, no, you’ve got to recognize the sacrifice as well. It’s a trade — you have to do the same for them. It can’t be one way. Otherwise, that’s not really a friend, that’s just somebody you’re using.”
Speaking at FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre in St. Catharines Tuesday, Koyczan says he tries giving the crowd a “good mix” live. That means blending some humour with the heavy stuff.
“There’s always pieces that people want to hear, versus stuff I want to say. I try to mix that up. Emotionally, the show is quite varied as well. I take people through a lot of the highs and lows. I think people are always surprised that there’s a lot of humour in the show. But humour’s really what I use to keep myself sane. It’s become a big part of my life.”
Koyczan started keeping journals in school but kept them to himself, after being told no one would care what he thought.
“You start to believe that and keep a lot of your thoughts to yourself. But at the same time, I didn’t have anyone to talk to, so all I had was a blank page. And that blank page would never tell me to shut up. It just let me keep going and going.
“It wasn’t until I got to university that I started sharing work. And that’s when people’s tunes started to change. You spend so much of your life internalizing everything that you come to grips with it in a different way. If you exist on the periphery long
enough — if you live on the fringes — your thought process is different than a lot of people trying to fall in line.
“That’s the thing about school. Everybody was trying to be cool, but nobody knew what cool was.”
In 2013, Koyczan’s heartbreaking poem To This Day was released on YouTube. Featuring 12 animators and 80 artists, it details his early years being abandoned by his parents, then bullied by classmates. It was featured on CBC and became a central part of the Pink Shirt Day anti- bullying campaign.
“As human beings, even as different as we are, there are some things that connect us,” he says. “That’s really all I’m looking for, trying to show people they have these parts of themselves as well.
“We live in this world now where everybody’s told to shut off that emotional part of themselves, because it’s not productive. It doesn’t help with productivity. I’m really just trying to give people a safe space for you to return to this place, because you are emotional creatures.
One of the reasons we’re seeing such a rise in mental health problems is because people don’t have an outlet any more. They don’t have a space to let that part of themselves go.
“I can’t tell you how important it is. It feels like a pressure cooker for a lot of people over the course of time, and if they don’t deal with it, bad things can happen.”