Urban Legends.
Urban Legends team members Brad Morden, left, Jamaal Rogers (Just J’Maal), Prufrock, Sergio Guerra (Hyf) and Cannon 2x meet a week before competing in the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Toronto.
Emma Jackson
A team of Ottawa poets is in Toronto this week speaking and slamming their unique form of poetry in an increasingly popular genre.
The five slam poets, led by South Keys resident Sergio “Hyf” Guerra, will perform eight group poems and eight individual poems at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Toronto between October 11 and October 15 as part of the fledgling Urban Legends team.
Slam poetry, or spoken word, has grown out of the oral traditions of beat poetry, hip hop and other performance-based art, and is as much about the words as it is the on-stage performance.
Guerra, who performed on the Urban Legends team last year at its first-ever national competition, has been practicing every day at Carleton University with his teammates Prufrock, Just J’maal, Cannon 2x and Brad Morden.
He said Urban Legends poetry is a mix of group poems and individual poems that have been “translated” into group performances. He said they are a very serious group, with “urgent and political” ideas always underlying their words.
“Literally we perform in a circle, there are no mics and very little light. It’s very political, very spiritual, very poetic. It’s got a lot of urgency, things about evolution and politics,” he said. One poem, for example, features a man who leaves Earth in disgust but through his journey to other planets and life forms realizes that Earth was distinct because it possessed the power of art. “It’s a very unique piece that can only come about by writing as a group,” Guerra said, noting that the group is trying to veer away from straight-forward cause-and-effect poems to make them more lyrical and equivocal.
Guerra was always interested in intellectual pursuits, and dreamed as a young boy of becoming an archaeologist or a novelist. The El Salvador native came to Canada when he was seven, and spent his childhood devouring books of all kinds. He first discovered the oral side of literature and poetry as a teen growing up in Elmvale Acres.
“People were always doing something in the bus stops, rapping, battling, and that was my first exposure to the oral side of it,” he said. “I’m kind of a small guy, I’m not really too loud, but there was something about the first experience of doing that and I realized it was a spiritual practice for me. I entered another state of being, another state of mind when I was performing, and you get hooked to that.”
He began to explore the world of hip hop, and about two years ago his performance arts morphed into slam.
“It’s like playing classical guitar and then going to play the blues guitar. This is one and the same art form, it’s the oral tradition, but just in different forms adapted to our society today,” he said.
Guerra was a member of the inaugural Urban Legends team that performed last year, which came in second only to Ottawa’s more established team, Capital Slam. The team is run like a league. It was set up by Ottawa slam poets Ian Keteku and Marcus Jameel, and different slam poets from the area make the team each year.
This week they will face 22 teams from across the country, performing eight pieces as a group and another eight as individuals.
Guerra said the team stands a good chance at the national championship, even though it’s only faced national opponents once before.
“Last year was our first year in the nationals, and the team came second. This year is our second year, and we’ve grown. (The team is) really expanding and it’s getting its own flavour and identity,” he said.