Brave New Word is Born in Bankstown
The Brave New Word poets, with feature poet Rudy Francisco (far right). Image: Bankstown Poetry Slam (@bankstownpoetryslam)
It took me a long time to discover that slam poetry is a thing in Western Sydney. I’m ashamed to admit it, mainly because one of Australia’s largest monthly poetry slam is right in our backyard. The Bankstown Arts Centre is where founders Sara Mansour and Ahmad Al Rady, as Western Sydney University students in 2013, founded Bankstown Poetry Slam (@bankstownpoetryslam) with their small team of volunteers. It’s where both seasoned and novice poets share the stage to serve bars and spit fire in an art form that lives somewhere between rap and poetry.
Don’t be fooled - you’ll rarely find sweet rhyming doublets there. BPS is a place of hard truths, where poets aren’t afraid to explore contemporary issues we all have on our minds - racism, gender politics, mental health, war, and climate change to name a few.
The Bankstown Poetry ‘Slamily’ gets clicky with appreciation. Image: Bankstown Poetry Slam (@bankstownpoetryslam)
Recently, BPS took things further with their first ever state-wide youth poetry slam and festival on Saturday, 30 November and Sunday, 1 December. The Brave New Word competition was open to residents aged between 12 and 24, but all ages were welcome to watch and participate in the rest of the festival. Before the final round of the competition, there were a number of panellist talks, covering themes like masculinity, diaspora, politics, and the environment. Each talk took place between panels of poets, writers, or publishers - some emerging and others well-seasoned in their creative careers, but all of them local to Western Sydney.
It was a relief to hear these talks along with a near-full house of an absorbed audience. To realise we have a community of creatives who dissect political and social structures and serve their findings in a language I could understand. It validates our own concerns and opens a dialogue in which every voice is relevant. That’s not to say everything was agreed-upon. In the talk on masculinity, the panel of poets - including Elliot York Cameron, Ali Al Hajj, Pola Fanous, Andrew Cox and Mohammad Awad - met with friction when the discussion turned to the notion of toxic masculinity and its origins. But a simple discussion is the beginning of change, and indicative of a community willing to enact change. We have influential people already enacting change through organisations like Sweatshop Western Sydney (@sweatshop.ws) - a literary movement providing opportunity and recognition for our culturally diverse writers and arts practitioners.
BPS is the community platform that is small enough to feel welcoming to a newcomer, and large enough to feature world-renowned poets like Rupi Kaur, Luka Lesson, and Omar Musa. Taking place on the last Tuesday night of every month, it’s steadily grown a reputation that reaches the shores of other continents. That weekend even saw renowned American poet Rudy Francisco take the stage to perform. This kind of performance poetry has a direct way of engaging strangers in your personal perspective that can’t really be achieved with any other medium. You can see it for yourself and meet the ‘slamily’ at the next event, coinciding with Sydney Festival on Tuesday, 21 January 2020.
Visit https://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/events/grandslam for more info!