The first day of the festival saw dozens of poets pouring into Victoria. We started our morning with some coffees and tea in the amazing local cafe Habitat, where we took over a large table that one local was sitting at, causing him to be highly entertained but to fail to get any significant work done.

We then moved on to the Victoria Event Centre, the venue for most of the festival, where we helped a couple members of the Victoria team do an interview and a mock slam for the local A channel. Still haven’t seen the spot on TV, but we’ll let you know if we do!

After an afternoon full of rehearsal, we registered and sat down at the VEC for the Last Chance Slam (for those of you who don’t know, this is where any poet in the country can slam off to be a member of the Wild Card Team that competes against all the city teams in the National Slam). It was a mind-blowing evening of amazing poetry, including notables Mary Pinkoski (www.reverbnation.com/marypinkoski) and Jeremy Loveday (www.jeremyloveday.blogspot.com). In the end, the Wild Card team came down to tfour poets, almost all of whom have all been on the national stage before: Toronto’s Truth Is… (http://www.myspace.com/truthisellipsis) and Made Wade (http://www.myspace.com/madewade), and Vancouver’s Magpie Ulysses (http://www.myspace.com/magpieulysses) and Zaccheus Jackson Nyce (http://www.myspace.com/perfectlyincomplete). Highlights also included the group of local Victorians sitting at the table in front of us, none of whom had ever been to a slam before. Needless to say, they were absolutely blown away by the talent and the power of the spoken word they saw, and are full converts to the amazingness of spoken word poetry!

A couple of us rounded out the evening with a round of poetry tag in one of the Halifax team’s rooms (for those who don’t know, poetry tag is exactly what it sounds like–one performer starts, then when they’re done, they tag someone else they want to hear a poem from, and so on). Many phenomenal poems were heard, but our favourite was definitely from Ottawa team member Ian (whose info we’ll get to you as soon as we can find it!).

Gotta go get ready for our first bout tonight…we’re showing the love all over the place and thinking of you all.

Peace,
Elyse