Global Poetics Tour

Urban Food Store + Café
Saturday September 17

Slotted in amongst the shiny new apartments and ambiguous sculptures of New Acton, the Urban Food Store + Café beckoned. Rather than their usual organic foodstuffs, tonight they were hosting a cornucopia of poetry. This was the final leg of the Global Poetics Tour, courtesy of the Molonglo Group and the Centre for Poetics and Justice, an organisation aiming to explore the intersection of spoken word and social justice. On offer was a veritable smorgasbord of some of the finest local, interstate and international poetry slam champions and spoken word performers.

Luka Lesson, our MC for the night, began by reading a poetic response to an Aboriginal artwork, rendering repetitions of forms, colours and abstractions. The crowd was politely hushed, attentive and too quiet for Luka’s liking. He didn’t want us to wait until the poems were over to respond. He encouraged everyone to get snapping, clapping and vocally engaged for the approaching succession of poets.

Doubting Thomas began by slinking through the crowd, embodying a feel-good bearded charity mugger, but soon he began slamming, guilt tripping, dripping righteous anger, laying down a compelling damn-the-man diatribe. Next, Alia Gabrez presented a forthright antithesis to a ‘roses are red’ love poem. Darkwing Dubs wrote names in raindrops and made us both laugh and believe that if Jesus was born again, he’d be Buddhist. Joel McKerrow smacked out percussive protests within rhythms of shifting time signatures. Tariro Movando descended stairs, danced, twirled and spun words across the swelling café crowd. By now, I could safely say it wasn’t just booze lifting everyone’s spirits and voices.

Two familiar faces added some heightened local pride to the mood of the night. Omar Musa gave us both a love/hate tribute to his hometown of Queanbeyan, and the powerful My Generation, which has become something of a signature piece for him. After him, along came Hadley, regaling us with his Irish-lass-slash-bog-hag’s tale of woe, and then, like some kind of unhinged preacher, he shouted forth his own love/hate tribute to Canberra: “this town, this town, will hold you down…but those are your hands around your neck!”

By now, everyone was bloated with words, but still salivating, so after a brief breather of an interval, the two high-pedigree headliners from New York took to the stage. Ken Arkind took us through the present injustices of American history, gave a hilarious takedown of somebody’s request to sleep with his ex, and dictated a love letter to San Francisco. Finally, Jive Poetic slammed the lie of US manifest destiny afresh, questioned genetic tampering via the seedless grape, and threw himself into the crowd, protesting slavery, and seeking to demolish any injustice he could name, with nothing more or less than words. As with many times throughout the night, the poets made it seem possible.

The feast was finishing up. We cleared chairs for a dancefloor as an impressive assortment of beatboxing, rap and tunes were offered up by Kodak the Moment, Omar Musa and D’Opus respectively. Some stayed on to continue the party, many began heading home, but all surely were satiated with the poetry we’d been served up and I know I’d heartily recommend checking out any of the aforementioned poets.

One friend thought that perhaps the strong political bent of the event felt a bit too much like saving the world by preaching to the converted. It’s hard to avoid accusations of posturing, hypocrisy or plain old disagreement when you explicitly inject politics into things, but I’m confident the crowd left entertained, inspired and challenged by the diversity of poetry offered up. For me at least, the words resonated long after the banquet of Urban Soul Food ended.