I’m not trying to sound sappy or sentimental at all, and I’m certainly not trying to play grab-ass with an artistic community I haven’t been involved with in years, but believe me when I say the performances I saw were outstanding.  …I was genuinely shocked by the quality of the works and their readings.  This is an extremely talented group of people who consistently defied my expectations by writing moving, funny, engaging pieces and presenting them in a very honest way – I know I keep calling this “performance poetry” but the sense I got was there was very little in the way of “performance” going on.  These people made me believe in what they were saying, and for people dealing with a guy who went in categorically hating poetry, that’s a pretty impressive feat.

Alexander James, a blogger who visited the London Poetry slam from Toronto, writes here about how this October’s slam changed his world: