LEON DE KOCK

SLiP’s InZync Poetry Sessions reached new heights of audience participation on Friday 7 October when a large crowd helped to judge three knockout rounds of solo competitors belting out poetry on the mike at AmaZink in Kayamandi, Stellenbosch.

The iPhone app downloaded to measure the audience’s applause proved too weak for the occasion. It was a good thing there were three judges also scoring the performances, and that SLiP Project Manager Pieter Odendaal had a back-up noise-meter on his PC.

Not only have the InZync Poetry Sessions been coming off beyond our imaginings, but they have been evolving in shape and form, responding to grassroots push-factors. The sessions have been adapting in form to evolving styles of performance, and the ways in which audiences have responded. (Every first Friday of the month, we cart minivan-loads of students to and from Kayamandi for the InZync sessions.)

There was a moment, in the middle of the year, when the exuberance of public response was such that we were worried the sessions might degenerate into talent contests, konserte.

So we sat down and crafted a Poetry Slam event. This brought together the ‘event-ness’ of the happening – its excitement and edge – as well as the bottom line of it all: Poetry. That's it. A peculiar art ticking, always, in the fearful, hopeful, contingent human soul.

Judge for yourself. Have a look at the videos of the event (to be uploaded ASAP). Watch the final round, and the winning performance, at least. Note of the crowd’s excitement.

Listen to the winner, JC van Schalkwyk (not JC Blyk, aka Christo van Staden, by the way) – a shamanic poet with an uncannily powerful and prophetic poetic voice. Listen to second-placed Mambesi Goje – a small and very young woman with a massive presence. Listen to the others, too – we believe that these events are uncovering raw, bursting poetic talent.

In this, and in our website reporting, we feel we have made a worthwhile achievement in 2011, the first year of SLiP’s life as a public literary project operated from the Department of English at Stellenbosch University. We, the SLiP team – Pieter Odendaal, Hale Tsehlana, Annel Pieterse, Riaan Oppelt, Adrian Different, and myself – feel good about this. Well done, team, and thank you, audiences. The common people. The people of Kayamandi, Cape Town and Stellenbosch. Poetry is for all of us. That much is clear, at least.