Canadian Festival of Spoken Word

The tradition & historical record

The Canadian Festival of Spoken Word is an annual festival produced by Spoken Word Canada and planned by a local Festival Organizing Committee in each host city. The inaugural festival took place in Ottawa, Ontario, in 2004 and was then known as the Canadian Spoken Wordlympics. CFSW has since become the flagship event for poetry slam in Canada, and is evolving to better represent the full spectrum of spoken word nationally. ¹

The Canadian Spoken Wordlympics as an organization was created in 2003 by Darek Dawda, Anthony Bansfield, RC Weslowski, and Dwayne Morgan, who received support from the Canada Council for the Arts to organize a national showcase of spoken word talent in Canada. They saw the success of the National Poetry Slam in the United States and envisioned a similar poetry slam event for Canada drawing national and international attention. The founders of the festival decided the first event should be held in Ottawa in fall 2004. An organizing team was pulled together and another large successful application was made to the Canada Council for the Arts for financial support for the four-day event. ¹

The inaugural festival, led by Darek Dawda and Oni Joseph, was held at the National Library and Archives in October 2004, and featured several poetry slams held in the evenings, with showcase events and open mics in the afternoons. Several poets from international locations such as France, the U.S., Germany, and the United Kingdom also participated in various facets of the festival. Showcases for women, Aboriginal peoples, urban poets, queer poets and youth were held, and there was a guerrilla reading on the front lawn of the Parliament buildings.At this occasion the French speaking spoken Wordlympics was won by the French Poet Pilote le Hot who is organisating a world cup of poetry every year in Paris since then. The festival also honoured the poetic contributions of acclaimed African-Canadian poet and playwright George Elliott Clarke. Slam teams representing Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Halifax and Winnipeg participated in the first team championship competition, with the Vancouver 1 team of Shane Koyczan, C.R. Avery, Barbara Adler and Brendan McLeod emerging victorious. Brendan McLeod and Drek Daa tied for the title of the individual slam competition champion, thereby becoming to date the only persons ever crowned Canadian Individual Slam Champions. At a meeting of city representatives held during the Wordlympics, Vancouver was selected as the site for the 2005 festival. However, the event was renamed the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in its second year because of concerns about copyright conflict with the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. ¹

The 2005 festival organizing committee, led by Randy Jacobs / RC Weslowski, took the opportunity to broaden the focus of the event. Open mic events for the evening shows started with a live band jamming with poets reciting improv-style on stage, and feature performers were brought into the evening events. Showcases were held in the afternoons for queer poets, African-Canadian poets, youth and others, while Aboriginal poets, sound poets, storytellers and others performed in the evening slots. The 2005 festival also continued the tradition set the year before of featuring international poets with a contingent from the U.K. doing performances as well. Rob Gee, Steve Larkin, Kat Francois, TUGGStarr and AF Harrold all participated. The cities of Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg and two Vancouver teams competed in the slam competition. Vancouver 2 featuring Patrick Swan, Magpie Ulysses, T.L. Groves, and Kim Shaughnessy, took the finals win, retaining the championship for the home city for the second year in a row. The "poet of honour" award was also introduced in Vancouver. Dwayne Morgan, Canadian Urban Music Award-winning poet, and Sheri-D Wilson, director of the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival, were the first Poets of Honour. They were invited to perform feature sets during the festival. ¹

The third annual festival took place in Toronto. The festival organizing committee, led by Dwayne Morgan and David Silverberg, took the event one step further by introducing a conference component to the festival. Workshops on recording spoken word CDs, touring, applying for grants and creating team pieces were woven into the afternoon events, along with showcases featuring dub poetry, African-Canadian poetry, queer poets, nerd poets and youth. The Poets of Honour were Lillian Allen, Juno award-winning dub poet, and Shane Koyczan, the first non-American to win the U.S. National Poetry Slam. Eight cities entered teams into the slam competition – Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Halifax, Calgary, Montreal and Windsor – though Windsor and Montreal ended up withdrawing from the competition. The slam went ahead with seven teams when a second Toronto team was added at the last minute. The hastily assembled Toronto 2 team performed extremely well, narrowly losing in the team finals to team Vancouver featuring RC Weslowski, Patrick Swan, Nora Smithhisler and Magpie Ulysses. This enabled the defending champions to win the title for the third consecutive year. The 2006 Spoken Word Canada annual board meeting in Toronto set CFSW on new course by bestowing the right to host the 2007 festival on Halifax and inviting Calgary to be the host city in 2008. For future years, Spoken Word Canada decided to award the festival to host cities two years in advance. ¹

The 2007 festival was hosted by the Word Iz Bond Spoken Word Artists' Collective in Halifax. The festival organizing committee, led by Shauntay Grant, incorporated other artistic forms into the festival. Beginning with a showcase called "Halifax in Poetry", the festival showcased poets working with musicians during their performances. There was also a showcase involving youth workshopping their poetry with the assistance of professional jazz artists, and an innovative Poetry Challenge combining spoken word artists, musicians and visual art on display at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. The festival also included open mic sessions, panel discussions and guerrilla poetry readings on the streets of Halifax. On finals night the festival honoured Darek Dawda, one of the festival's founders, and the late Rita Joe, a noted Nova Scotia based Mi'kmaq-Canadian poet and songwriter. Seven cities were represented in the team slam competition—Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Halifax and Toronto (with two teams). After a highly competitive preliminary round and an energized final competition, the home team from Halifax broke Vancouver's winning streak to become the second city to capture the Canadian team championship in the history of CFSW. The Spoken Word Canada Board of Directors selected Victoria as the 2009 host city at its annual meeting. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Canadian Festival of Spoken Word”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Canadian Festival of Spoken Word is recorded in open cultural data. The structured record cited below does not describe the practice, and this entry has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. ²