Via Vancouver's WestEnder comes the following:

Patrick Swan credits his nerve, his writing skills, and a teacher who kicked him out of her class as the catalysts for change in his life. At 25, he has evolved from a teenaged slacker to a globe-trotting performance poet.

When a high-school teacher told Swan to get out of her drama class and into creative writing, he shrugged. “I thought, ‘I don’t care, I just want a credit,’” he recalls. “I did it and I loved it, and here I am.” Swan is Vancouver’s representative at the Individual World Poetry Slam, taking place at three Commercial Drive venues — Café Deux Soleils, Zesty’s Restaurant and Rime Café — from Jan. 31 to Feb. 4.

It’s the mother of all performance-poetry competitions, featuring 70 competitors from across Canada and the U.S. The champion wins a cash prize and a book and CD publishing deal. “In the sense of the whole spoken-word world, this is a really big deal,” says RC Weslowski, a performance poet who heads Vancouver Poetry House, a co-producer of the competition with the U.S.-based Poetry Slam, Inc., which has organized the annual IWPS since its inception in 2003.

Performance poetry, as presented in an audience-judged competition or “slam,” could best be described as a mix of stand-up, monologue, live verse and performance art, influenced by rock and hip-hop music, says Weslowski. “You can explain it as much as you want, but once someone comes and sees it and hears it, they say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know it was going to be like that.’”

Source: The WestEnder

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