Poetry Slam at Your Place - Event #33

After a new year and a concussion, New Zealand's only regular online slam, and your favourite online community event is finally back - and you don't have to go anywhere cos it's live at your place!

Event viewing link and password will be posted on the Facebook Event Page on the day of the event.

For those that don’t know: poetry slams are live poetry competitions! And they are super engaging and awesome!

Now before you go, “ooooh but you can’t judge art!" I agree – it is very difficult to give objective rules with which to hierarchically place one “art” above another “art” but subjectively we do it all the time (not that, that makes us right, mind) through submissions, grant applications, whether you buy something or not, and of course, just actual competitions we are constantly judging art – again, not that, that makes our opinions right – all we do here is make it a bit more exciting, interactive and fun! PLUS we get to hear a whole load of Fabulous Poetry at the same time!

Normally, at slams in physical venues, five judges are selected randomly from the audience and they give scores out of ten for each poet’s performance. But as this is online - we are going to do it a bit differently – everyone will be a judge!

Now don’t panic, it’ll be completely anonymous and you don’t have to! But this is the part where you should remember: it is, first and foremost, for the pure joy of sharing poetry and, as we already mentioned: everyone involved understands that this isn’t a scientific process – sometimes the poetry gods will disagree with our decisions but we are just mere, feeble humans trying to have a good time. So relax and join in.

Talking of which, here’s how things will go down:
- 8 poets will compete.
- In each round, a poet will face off against one other (randomly selected) poet – each performing one piece (order also randomly selected).
- The first round will consist of four of these one vs one bouts, with four poets going through to the second round; the second round will consist of two bouts with two poets going through to the final round; the final round will consist of one bout with one winner decided.
- After each bout, everyone at the event (audience AND poets) will have 30 seconds to fill out the anonymous voting poll for which poet they think should go through to the next round (again you do not have to vote if you don’t want to – it’s just fun).
- All poems have a 3-minute time limit and a 10-second grace period.
- For every second a poet goes over the grace period, they will lose 1% of the total number of voters from their poll. (So if 50 people vote and a poet goes 6 seconds overtime then they lose 3 votes from their total)
- The timer starts from the first time the poet engages with the audience (mic checks and content warnings are encouraged and will not start the timer).

As with all Your Place Events – entry is "pay-what-you-can-afford" because finances should not be a barrier to accessing art however if folks don't honour that system then artists such as myself cannot afford to create and provide these fabulous gatherings! So please do pay-what-you-can-afford via the links supplied during the event.

If you really can’t afford anything, then there are plenty of non-financial ways to support - sharing the event, telling a friend, liking and writing a recommendation on the Your Place Events page. If you can afford to donate then please do; you will be covering someone who can’t afford to and enabling Your Place Events to keep putting on shows like this.

Love!