Vancouver Poetry Slam - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

In the early '80s, Marc Smith (at which point the crowd traditionally replies: who cares?) invented the poetry slam as a way of silencing hecklers during readings at bars -- if your opinion is so important to share, hold up the numbered score cards rather than rudely interrupting. Not long after, his event moved to the Green Mill in Chicago, where it continues to this day. After early representation from [AWOL Love Vibe], Vancouver embraced the poetry slam movement in the late '90s (one of its first teams documented in Max Devlin's 1998 documentary Slam Nation) and the opportunity to win cash prizes before big crowds and be sent on a blood sport tour circuit resulted in the format replacing other, more traditional poetry reading contexts, competing with other period experimental format changes such as [the Edgewise Cafe]'s involvement with [videopoem]s and the [telepoetics] movement. (Slam had a way of covering its own expenses, while telepoetics only flourished locally where grant support endowed it financially, which is why we still have slam poetry today, managed locally by the Vancouver Poetry House, but haven't had telepoetics in a dog's age.)

If you were a young lit writer looking for something to do with your poetry locally around the turn of the century, probably you would have started at the Edgewise Cafe and then (after spinning your wheels at plenty of poetry open mic nights) pivoted to the slam, as [Cthulu] did.