People sitting in Pressed Café, a little bistro tucked away off Bronson and Gladstone, witnessed the remarkable power of spoken word poetry Jan. 10.
That night, In/Words Magazine held their first literary showcase of the year, which provides musical artists and writers the opportunity to display their talent to others in the community.
In/Words is a poetry and literary magazine, created in 2001 by Professor Collett Tracey, who is a member of Carleton University’s English department. Chris Johnson, organizer and co-editor of In/Words, described the publication as a “student-run, small press and literary magazine.”
“We’ve developed a monthly reading series, we have a weekly writer’s circle, and this year we’ve started doing these showcases, which, the first one was awesome, so we decided to throw another one together,” Johnson said.
Performing first was Carleton music student Kaleigh Watts. Watts uses a tool called a looper, which allows her to record elements of a song on the spot, and use them as a part of her performance.
In addition to musical talent, there were several poets who performed spoken wordpieces.
Ali Alikhani, or Ali Bomaye—the moniker he’s known by in the slam poetry community, treated the audience to a particularly moving reading. He spoke about his life in his home country, Iran, and encouraged others to overcome their fear of performing poetry.
“For me it’s like writing is always something I did on my own, to just make sense of myself and the world around me,” Alikhani said after his performance, which caused some audience members to break down in tears.
“Once I came to Carleton, and I heard about the different activities going on, I went out to a slam poetry event and I did an open mic, and people were super supportive,” Alikani said.
Maria Demare, the co-editor and organizer of the event, commented on her impression of the show.
“To me, no matter what’s going on, or how you feel before the show, once it starts, and people start to enjoy the arts, everything just kinda happens. If you look around, there are people crying after the last performance. I was kind of shocked to see it,” she said.
“To be honest, you never know how the event’s going to go until you get here, we just let the art happen.”
