This is an attempt to give performance poetry a bit of a push, to bring some new voices out into the open, to put a little more audience participation into poetry, and, not least, to have a little fun.

The slam made its debut last year (the first in India, actually) to much enjoyment from the audience and the participants. You can see the scoresheets from the live contest here.

Themes

There are four themes:
Name
Place
Animal
Thing
You must also have one more poem—your choice of theme—which we’ll call the ‘Free Poem.’

Date and Venue

7:00 p.m., 10th February, 2008, at the David Sassoon Library Garden

How to enter

Go to the entry form. (But puhleeze make sure you read the entire page here first.)

Submit one poem on any one of the themes (but not your Free Poem), at the link.

Please do not put any personally identifying information in the body of your entry.
By this we mean no byline, signature, credit line, copyright notice or symbol. If you have filled out the fields for name, email address and phone number, never fear, your entry is linked to that data by the system. The body of your entry is all our jury will see, and all that they want to see. Entries that ignore this will be seen to be trying to influence the jury, and will be disqualified.

Deadlines

For initial submission via the web link: Midnight (Indian Standard Time), 3rd February, 2008. Deadline extended to 22:00 hours, 7th February, 2008.

To respond to the invitation to the Slam: noon, 8th February, 2008. midnight, 8th February 2008.

On the day of the Slam, 10th February 2008: report to the Open Desk at the David Sasson Library, Kala Ghoda, by 6 p.m.

How our Poetry Slam works

Even if you know how a conventional Slam works, please read this section. There are more than a few tweaks.

Before the Slam:

Each poet must write one poem on each theme (see Themes, above), and one on a theme of their choosing, the “free poem.”

To be invited to compete in the Slam, you must submit one poem on any one of the themes.

The organisers/judges will short-list a maximum of 20 poets from the entries. Selection criteria will be the quality of the writing and how well, in the judges’ opinion, those poems lend themselves to performance.

The selected poets will be informed of their selection only via email, by the 6th 8th February 2007. Their participation will be confirmed only once they reply to that email and confirm that that will be able to perform at the Slam on the 10th February and that they will come prepared to perform five of their poems, one for each of the prescribed themes, and one of their choice.

At the event:

Poems on each of the themes will be performed in separate rounds, in random order. Participants in each round will also perform in random order.

After each round, the judges will vote, and the competitors with the lowest points in that round will be eliminated, until we have a winner. The exact number that will be eliminated in each round will be decided depending on the number of participants selected to compete in the Slam, and will be announced before the performances start.

Scoring will be cumulative. Those who survive each round will carry their points with them. Elimination in each round will be based on the scores in that round; in case of a tie, the totals from previous rounds will come into play. Actual points scored will not be revealed until the end.

Rules and Conditions

The contest is open to anyone, anywhere, with the exception of the jury or their family members. No, to make it absolutely clear, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been published or not, whether you’ve performed before or not.

Since the main event is live on stage, selected participants must be prepared to travel to the venue (at their own expense) from wherever they are to perform their work.

Each entry must take no longer than two minutes to read aloud. Time on stage will be kept strictly, and you will be cut off if you exceed the limit.

Entries must be in English.

Entries must be your own, original work, and previously unpublished anywhere, in print or online.
We interpret “published” to mean that there was some form of editorial or jury selection and/or payment involved. So work that appeared on a personal blog or unmoderated forum is okay, but something that won you a prize somewhere is not. Something that may have been selected to be printed in a newspaper is published, whether you got paid for it or not.

Participants selected for the Slam can, on stage, read, recite, declaim, shout, or sing their words. They can stand still, gesture, pace, even jump and up and down. They will be judged on both the quality of the words they perform and the performance itself.

Do not send in duplicate entries of the same work or make multiple submissions of different works. We will delete all your entries from the system if you flood it.

There is no entry fee.

Submissions remain the intellectual property of the entrants, but by submitting an entry, you give the the Kala Ghoda Association, the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival and its Sponsors, and Caferati permission to use your entry, with acknowledgement, but with no payment to you, in their websites, as part of Press Releases (where they may be reproduced by media organisations), and in a possible special booklet or CD featuring the best of the Festival.

The decisions of the jury are final and binding, and no correspondence will be entertained regarding the jury’s decisions.

Judges

Caferati’s editors will evaluate initial submissions, filtering them down to not more than twenty.

On the event day, there will be a panel of 6 judges.

The expert panel:

Jane Bhandari, painter and poet, has lived in India for four decades . She is the author of two collections of poetry: Single Bed and Aquarius. She has also written two children’s books, The Round Square Chapatti and The Long Thin Jungle. Her poetry has appeared in Fulcrum, Atlas, and TLM, and on on-line sites. It has also been selected by Sahitya Akademi for their forthcoming anthology of women’s poetry. A third collection of poems and a novel are in progress. Jane also won last year’s Poetry Slam.

Advertising, corporate communications, education, PR, corporate training… Vivin Mathew Easo has worn some interesting hats as a communications professional. But Theatre continues to be his abiding passion! He’s been associated with theatre over the last 20 years as an actor, director, producer, publisher and more recently as a script writer. By default he’s also dabbled in some radio & TV. He’s the founder of Theatre Watch, a company focused on promoting experimental and creative productions like A DiA-logue with Poetry & Prose, multi-disciplinary live performance events that aimed at building bridges across disciplines of art and creating a true dialogue amongst art, artist and the audience. His latest venture, Theatre for Change, aims at creating awareness thru performance & debate, in the hope of impacting some change amongst college students, about issues like casual sex & HIV, violence & abuse in the family, communalism, deforestation and public & private space.

Anju Makhija is a poet, playwright, scriptwriter and translator. She has done work in the fields of education, training and television for several organisations, written culture-based columns, editorials and reviews for several publications, and been a guest lecturer at Indian and foreign universities, and participated in literary seminars abroad. She is the recipient of several awards in India and abroad. All Together, a multi-media production, won the second prize at the National Education Film Festival, California, USA (’85) She won the first prize in The All India Poetry Competition sponsored by the British Council and The Poetry Society of India (’95) and the Commendation prize (’94). She also won the BBC World Poetry Prize (’02). As a playwright, Makhija has written for national and international directors incl. Alyque Padamsee and Michael Laub. Her play, The Last Train, was short-listed for the BBC World Playwrighting Award (’99). Her creative endeavours have spread across several media and her work has been translated into Marathi, Sindhi and Gujarati. Currently, she is on The English Advisory Board of the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi.

The Audience Panel:
Three randomly chosen members of the audience will join the experts to help judge each round.

Prizes

Prizes worth approximately Rs 3000, Rs 2000, and Rs 1000 to be won.

Winners will be announced at the end of the contest, on the evening of 10th February, 2007, at the David Sassoon Library Garden.

Updates

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