Poetry feels like home.
That one oversized sweater I can never throw out. Too warm draped around my shoulders to let go of. It has seen so many versions of me. Held me through deaths and breakups. Helped me find myself. Toughed me up enough to play with the big boys but always reminds me to stay soft. To cry when I need to.
Poetry makes my pain tolerable through beauty. Turns broken glass bottles into vases.
Poetry speaks for me when I don’t have the words. Opens my heart up
Poetry gave me an avenue to connect. With myself. With the people I love. With community. Gave me the space to speak over my anxious brain.
As a form of writing poetry is something I will always return to. It gives me a place to work through my own thoughts and feelings as well as a way to express myself. I find poetry both energizing and healing.
Unfortunately, as a community I have had to step away from poetry. For a number of years, I was part of the poetry community in Vancouver that was mostly centered around poetry slam. For those who are unaware a poetry slam is like a sport. It’s a poetry competition where random audience members judge a set of poets and determine a winner based on a scoring system that allows the poets to accumulate points and compete in various national and international competitions. There are so many amazing things that come along with poetry slam and the opportunity that competition provides but there are also some downsides.
I was lucky enough to compete locally in a handful of competitions as well as at two national competitions at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word (CFSW). I wouldn’t change that experience for the world. It allowed me to grow as a person and become more confident as well as build some of the most amazing and long-lasting relationships with poets across the country.
Being encouraged to write and learning from all of these amazing poets influences my 20s tremendously. I was able to explore poems surrounding the death of my mother when I was a teenager as well as my sexuality and gender and that was a huge influence on who I have become.
Of course, there are some negative aspects associated with the competition. It can be hard to have your art be judged even though a big part of the poetry slam community is reinforcing that the judges are random and the ‘point is not the points, the point is the poetry’. And it can be hard to feel like you’re not good enough when your poems don’t do as well as you think they deserve. I had several times where I scored fairly low on poems I poured my heart into and then scored higher on poems I felt like I threw together. Although I do acknowledge that some of this, at least for me, came down to my performance. I am an anxious person and performance like this is challenging for me and I never really didn’t invest a ton of time into my performance for a number of reasons.
In most cases, I found that poets were fairly supportive and encouraging of one another regardless of the scores which was nice but this absolutely was not always the case. I personally experience some issues with particular members of my local community that I at this point aren’t important to discuss but as a whole, there were times community members were not supportive. For example, only clapping for the people they like and very visibility not paying attention while other poets were performing.
No community is perfect but in the end, it felt like it had become the oppression olympics and that didn’t feel okay to me. By this I mean it felt a lot less about the art and more about the pain, trauma, or oppression a person had experienced. Now, part of me wonders if my experience in the community changed as I started to transition and began presenting more masculine.
Poetry is less a part of my life these days and I find it unlikely that I will return to the poetry slam community but I am still thankful for the people that I met and the connections I’ve made. I will also continue to have poetry in my life because it is something that I love and it is one of the best tools I have for connecting and healing.