“If a novel is a big cup of coffee, then a poem is a shot of espresso.”
The words of Gomeroi poet and educator Rob Waters struck me as so profound I wrote them down immediately.
And it’s a good thing I did.
Because at the time of the Australian Poetry Slam regional heats at the Shepparton Library on Sunday, September 8, I knew very little about the craft.
In fact, it’s fair to say I knew as much about slam poetry at the time as I did about unilateral adrenal Castleman’s disease.
As it turns out, the latter is not something you want. Unless inflamed lymph nodes and enlarged organs are your cup of tea.
As Waters outlined at a workshop earlier that day, slam poetry is a form of spoken word in which the poet performs their work before a live audience.
Judges are selected from the audience; each performer thus appeals to their audience rather than to a panel of scholarly judges or other such members of the literati.
On the night, there were poems featuring themes of loneliness, of motherhood, of love and onions and the curious — some might even say layered — habit of both to induce weeping fits in unsuspecting victims.
And then I heard my name called.
Before I knew what was happening, I was behind the lectern, the microphone one inch from my face.
At some point I must have begun my poem, because soon enough I had arrived at the final line.
There was applause. I returned to my seat, various appendages shaking thanks to my adrenal glands working overtime.
I then had the pleasure of listening to the other performers speak.
Mayank Adlakha evoked themes of isolation and loneliness with his rich imagery.
Roxanne Bodsworth cajoled the tears from our eyes with her dissection of the murder of a Palestinian child.
For 15 marvellous minutes, in an intermission between speakers, last year’s Australian Poetry Slam Youth Champion K.J. Hayward held her audience spellbound.
As Hayward and, later, Waters spoke, I found my eyes following the joinery of the eucalypt leaves scattered in print on the library carpet, lost in the rhythm and cadence and passion behind their verse.
It was a full-circle moment for Hayward, who won her regional heat at the Shepparton Library last year.
To our assembled delight, Hayward performed her piece, Ode to my Teachers, with which she was crowned youth champion in Sydney last year.
Even now, with a place booked at the state competition in Melbourne next month, I admit to knowing next to nothing about slam poetry.
But listening to Waters and Hayward, I realised there was something quintessential in the way their words flowed from their bodies.
Theirs were words that embraced you, that tickled the hair on the spine of your neck before stabbing you in the chest with the barbed point of their poignancy.
And how could you not let them?