Vancouver Poetry House presents the Verses Festival of Words from April 22 to May 1

Vancouver Poetry House presents the 11th annual Verse of Words festival from April 22 to May 1.

Canada’s largest alternative literary festival, Verses features spoken word artists, poets, storytellers, singer-songwriters and improvisers on various stages online.

Highlights of the festival include:

Raffut (April 22-24). BC’s Youth Spoken Word Festival offers workshops, performances, and some of the province’s top school-aged poets all share work for their peers and for the public.

Talk the Talk: what is your ritual? (April 24). Artistic Director of the Vancouver Poetry House Joseph Dandurand shares what he does before dropping the first word of a new poem.

From step to page (April 24). Professionals from the poetry, publishing and theater industries form a star panel to create new poems by spoken word artists.

Poets forward (April 26). Workshop with Isabelle Wang encourages participants to consider the problems of the dynamic world and to discuss why poetry is political, imaginative and militant.

Mashed Sabbath 50 (April 27). Nine poets will create new works in a mix of spoken word and musical creation reimagining songs from the classic Black Sabbath album Paranoid.

El Jones (April 28). The Halifax poet, teacher and activist leads a free writing workshop to develop basic, beginner and intermediate writing skills for the page and the stage.

CIPS Finals (May 1). To celebrate the closing of the 2021 Verses Festival of Words and National Poetry Month, the final round of the Canadian Individual Poetry Slam will see the top 10 competing oral poets compete against each other, followed by the top five poets. Nisha Patel and André Préfontaine are invited judges to the event, which is organized by Johnny D Trinh.

For the complete verse schedule, watch here.