Our slam season ends in April with our big Finals event, and the next season doesn’t start until June, so what do we do in May? We throw the rules out the window and have an anything goes slam! This means:

Cover pieces, musical instruments, costumes, and props ARE ALL ALLOWED this month!

This is your chance to show us your talents beyond regular slam poetry, and have some fun!

**Rules still in effect: No hate speech, 3 min time limit

After some changes for Finals, the slam is back at our regular time (8 pm, doors at 7), regular place (London Music Club, 470 Colborne St), regular price (ONLY $5).

Our amazing feature poet for May is Ontario International Poetry Slam Champion Alvin Lau. Trust us, you do NOT want to miss his set!

Alvin Lau is a Kundiman fellow, the first and third champion of the Chicago youth poetry slam Louder than a Bomb, a back-to-back champion of the national youth slam Brave New Voices, and a record-setting eight-time individual finalist in national level poetry slams, ranking as high as 2nd in the United States and 1st in North America. His work has appeared on two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, NPR, viral campaigns for Nintendo and NARAL: Pro-Choice America, numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry Foundation Online and RATTLE, and in 2007, Amnesty International named him their official “Poet of Conscience.” As of 2012, Alvin is also the Moth storytelling grandSLAM champion of Chicago, and regularly performs at storytelling showcases across the country.

Bring your friends, your fam, your snapping fingers, and of course, your poems!
Check out our Facebook Group ‘London Poetry Slam’ for the event and don’t say maybe, say yes!
You can also follow us on Twitter at @LDNPoetrySlam

Grand Slam Champion Holly Painter, Emilee Nimetz, Ted Olczak, Rachel Rensby, & alternate Alisha Tax

The team will travel to the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Montreal in November.

Thank you to everyone involved in making our 2013 Finals night a success!

10 top poets will hit the mic and compete to be named to the 2013 London Poetry Slam team that will rep London at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Montreal in November!

Please note the changes from our regular monthly slams:

Location: Palace Theatre, 710 Dundas St. London ON
Date: Sunday, April 21st
Time: Slam will start PROMPTLY at 7 pm, doors at 6
Price: $10 PWYC min.

Our host for the evening will be the beautiful, talented, and amazing Elyse Maltin, founder of the London Poetry Slam!

A total of 46 poets hit the stage this year. We are pleased to announce the 10 poets who will be battling to be named Grand Slam Champ, and to be named one of the five who will make the 2013 London Poetry Slam team:

Ted Olczak
Holly Painter
Emilee Nimetz
Rachel Rensby
Inali Barger
Ben McCabe
Bryton McKinnon
Erica Howes
Alisha Tax
Matthew Goddard

NOTE* This month we will not have an open mic portion of the show (usually reserved for up to 3 performers who wish to share their work but not be part of the slam competition) Instead, we will welcome our Canadian Individual Poetry Slam rep Emilee Nimetz to drop a mini set to start the show! Emilee will be travelling to Vancouver in April, representing the London Poetry Slam, and needs all our support and love to get there!

This month we welcome Magpie Ulysses from Nelson, B.C as our feature performer.

Magpie Ulysses is a dynamic performance poet and storyteller known for charming and slaying her audiences with intense stage presence and thoughtful insight about humanity. Her “confessional poems hit hard and take the reader through intense visceral terrain, but never wallow” (Robert Priest, NOW magazine). Magpie began performing poems at the age of 17 in Calgary, Alberta. She has performed across North America at hundreds of events, sold close to 1000 chapbooks from her own hands, is a veteran of the Vancouver poetry slam, where she was a member of two national champion Vancouver poetry slam teams and was the winner of Vancouver’s 2008 CBC poetry Face off. Magpie was recently named a Poet of Honour at the Canadian festival of Spoken word (2012).

So much of her work surrounds the things we don’t say. She speaks on the topics of history, science, love, exploration, abuse, addictions, environmentalism, human triumph, sacrifice and struggle. She has been called “an anthropologist of the heart who doesn’t apologize for her vastness when she sets fire to the shade you took for shelter from this thing we call living.”

Slam is at our regular time (doors at 7:30, slam starts at 8), same place (London Music Club, 470 Colborne St), same price (ONLY $5), and same rules (sign up at the door, team pieces welcome, no props, no costumes, no nudity, no hate speech, original work only).

Bring your friends, your fam, your snapping fingers, and of course, your poems!
Check out our Facebook Group ‘London Poetry Slam’ for the event and don’t say maybe, say yes!
You can also follow us on Twitter at @LDNPoetrySlam

And don’t forget to join us for our monthly FREE Saturday workshop at King’s College from 12-2 PM . No experience necessary. Featuring our wonderful feature poet, Magpie. Magpie will be conducting a workshop focused on the power of the collective spirit. Together, attendees will choose one writer’s personal story and create a ‘group piece’ which can include either one voice or multiple. Through numeruous exercises – including personal writing times, small and large group activities – the two-hours will create the conditions for a connected cohesion of artistry.

‘Emilee Nimetz likes to think of herself as both a performance and creative artist. She sings in both showers and stages alike. Emilee spends most of her time drinking tea, acting in plays and musicals, doing crafts, teaching dance and working on getting better, and getting a stronger back. She is big but she is also little.’
Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @emileenim

Emilee has been performing spoken word poetry for just over a year and has had great success at the London Poetry Slam this season! We are proud to have her represent LPS at Indies in April!

Don’t know what ‘Indies’ is? Read on…

The Verses Festival of Words incorporates the third annual Canadian Individual Poetry Slam, a competition between 40 of the best poets from across the country held in April in Vancouver. Poets will compete in normal slam fashion, though they will be asked to perform 1, 2, 3, and 4 minute poems in a series of bouts. The festival is a unique opportunity for poets to connect with other successful slammers from across Canada and to pit their work against the very best the country has to offer.

For more information on the Verses festival, and to find out who else will be joining the London Poetry Slam rep in Vancouver, check out their website or find them on Facebook.

This month we welcome Natasha ‘T.’ Miller, from Detroit, MI. Natasha is a writer, performance poet, author, publisher dedicated activist, producer, actress and an aspiring motivational speaker. Since her debut, just over four years ago, Natasha has proven to be a poetical powerhouse. After one year on the performance circuit, in 2007, she was crowned Detroit Poetry Slam team’s Grand Slam Champion, and has been a member of four National Poetry Slam teams. She has also been a Women of The World Poetry Slam top five finalist three out of the last four years once ranking as high as the third female slam poet in the World. Natasha continued her impressive record by leading and coaching her own slam team to a championship at the 2010 Midwest Rustbelt Poetry Slam, where she also came out ranking #2 overall in the individual competition.

Slam is at our regular time (doors at 7:30, slam starts at 8), same place (London Music Club, 470 Colborne St), same price (ONLY $5), and same rules (sign up at the door, team pieces welcome, no props, no costumes, no nudity, no hate speech, original work only).

Bring your friends, your fam, your snapping fingers, and of course, your poems!
Check out our Facebook Group ‘London Poetry Slam’ for the event and don’t say maybe, say yes!
You can also follow us on Twitter at @LDNPoetrySlam

And don’t forget to join us for our monthly FREE Saturday workshop at King’s College from 12-2 PM. No experience necessary. Featuring our wonderful feature poet, T. Miller. Workshop details to come.

Check out video from an episode of London Under 30 featuring the London Poetry Slam, and our Director, Holly. The clip perfectly captures the amazing energy of our slam community!

Keep “showing the love” London!

Whether your New Year’s Resolution was to get up on our slam stage, write your first poem for your eyes only, or just to finally make it out to one of our events, there is no better time to get started than the first month of slamming in 2013.

We are excited to welcome Lisa Slater as our feature poet this month!

Lisa Slater is a queer spoken word artist living in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Feminist, survivor, and community builder, Slater’s poems explore what it means to reclaim our bodies and identities from what broke us open and how we relearn love, sex, friendship and family in the process. A finalist at the 2012 Individual World Poetry Slam and a 2011 Vancouver Poetry Slam team member, Slater’s work has been published in The Moose & Pussy and Poetry is Dead.

Slam is back to our regular time (doors at 7:30, slam starts at 8), same place (London Music Club, 470 Colborne St), same price (ONLY $5), and same rules (sign up at the door, team pieces welcome, no props, no costumes, no nudity, no hate speech, original work only).

Bring your friends, your fam, your snapping fingers, and of course, your poems!
Check out our Facebook Group ‘London Poetry Slam’ for the event and don’t say maybe, say yes!
You can also follow us on Twitter at @LDNPoetrySlam

And don’t forget to join us for our monthly FREE Saturday workshop at King’s College from 12-2 PM. No experience necessary. Featuring our wonderful feature poet, Lisa Slater. Workshop details to come.

Our December London Poetry Slam feature performer is Chris Gilpin, from Vancouver, BC.
‘Chris has been practicing Artistic Yelling since 2005. In the daytime, he works as the Onsite Program Facilitator for Animating History at the Museum of Vancouver, and as the Program Coordinator for Vancouver Poetry House’s Word Play, Poetry in Schools program. He has won a bunch of slams and lost a bunch of slams. He performs with Brendan McLeod and RC Weslowski as part of the interactive multimedia clown rock supergroup Awesome Face.’

Chris Gilpin, Vancouver BC

***PLEASE NOTE THE TIME CHANGE FOR THE DECEMBER SLAM!!!***

When: Friday Dec. 21st, slam starts promptly at 7:30 PM, sign up/doors open at 7 PM
Where: London Music Club, 470 Colborne St
Cost: Only $5, free for volunteers (email/tweet/msg us!)
Rules: Sign up at the door, team pieces welcome, no props, no costumes, no nudity, no hate speech, original work only

Please note: Due to our limited time frame for the slam (we must be out by 10 PM or risk being drowned out by a band playing in the room below), we may not have an open mic portion of the evening before the slam depending on how many slammers sign up.

Bring your friends, your fam, your snapping fingers, and of course, your poems!
Check out our Facebook Group ‘London Poetry Slam’ for the event and don’t say maybe, say yes!
You can also follow us on Twitter at @LDNPoetrySlam

And don’t forget to join us for our monthly FREE Saturday workshop at King’s College from 12-2 PM. No experience necessary. Featuring our wonderful feature poet, Chris Gilpin. See workshop event for details.

Finding the poetic in the personal and the metaphor in the mundane, Missie Peters is our feature poet of the month all the way from Victoria, B.C. She is a two-time Victoria Slam Champion, a former Slam Master and the current Artistic Director of the Victoria Spoken Word Festival. In 2012 she toured her second solo show, ‘Where’s My Flying Car?!’ to Fringe festivals across Canada.

Slam is same time (doors at 7:30, slam starts at 8), same place (London Music Club, 470 Colborne St), same price (ONLY $5), same rules (sign up at the door, team pieces welcome, no props, no costumes, no nudity, no hate speech, original work only).

Bring your friends, your fam, your snapping fingers, and of course, your poems!
Check out our Facebook Group ‘London Poetry Slam’ for the event and don’t say maybe, say yes!
You can also follow us on Twitter at @LDNPoetrySlam

And don’t forget to join us for our monthly FREE Saturday workshop at King’s College from 12-2 PM. No experience necessary. Featuring our wonderful feature poet, Missie Peters.