Hip hop and the sounds of poets practicing filled Rooster’s Coffeehouse Feb. 11 as people filed in to see a poetry slam competition put on by Carleton’s slam group, Urban Legends.
The host of the night was Ottawa slam poet Prufrock, well known to both the Ottawa slam poetry scene and to Urban Legends.
“Urban Legends is run bi-weekly,” Prufrock said. “It’s a spoken word poetry series. So basically whatever anyone has to share that they feel is important to them, they come up, they get three minutes, then they share it.”
The night’s poets used rhyme to explore everything from racism, to revolution, to abusive ex-lovers.
“You never know what to expect,” Prufrock said. “Messages are always diverse depending on the crowd and depending on the people.”
“The poet has one night when they could say something about the government and then the next time you see them they could be talking about . . . microphones or something,” he said.
Sarah Musa, the event’s organizer and a first-year human rights major, agreed.
“The poetry can vary but it’s always very intense,” she said. “You’ll leave with poetry headaches.”
Though the event only drew a small crowd compared to previous Urban Legends slams, the energy was high and the poetry intense, according to Musa.
Co-organizer and slam poet Sean O’Gorman added that the crowd is usually diverse.
“The reason most people come to check us out is because we’re talking about things that they’re also going through or things they think that they might agree or disagree with,” O’Gorman said.
With these diverse crowds, O’Gorman said reactions to the poetry can be very polarized.
“You’ll have people coming up to you afterwards saying ‘Wow, that was awesome’ or ‘Fuck you,’ you know what I mean?” he said. “In the end it’s so theatrical, it’s so engaging, that by the end of the night, people are really into it.”
After three rounds of intense poetry, one round more than what most audience members were used to, the winner, fourth-year journalism student Christopher Tse, was announced.
“That’s the thing about poetry, no one boxes themselves into one subject because if you do that people are going to hear the same shit over and over,” Tse said.
“People are going to say ‘You were dope, but now you’re just boring,’ so no, I try to expand my horizons and talk about whatever I feel needs to be talked about.”