Hammer & Tongue Slam featuring Ross Sutherland and support Lizzy Dening

Order discounted tickets online via Eventbrite: http://htcoctober13-efbevent.eventbrite.co.uk
Time for the first open round of the Cambridge Hammer & Tongue 2013-14 season… Spoken word artistry and competitive mayhem. What more could you want?

This is your chance to become part of the spoken word slam brilliance that has graced this here fair city since 2009, in the warm and wonderful surroundings of fabulous venue The Fountain. Sign up as one of the eight to compete for a place in the Regional Final next September, or just dive in and soak up the atmosphere and talent on display. And some great beer.

Tickets are a silly £5 full price/ £3.50 concessions/ £2 for slammers in advance and a frankly ludicrous £6.50/ £5/ £3 on the door. Doors are at 7:30pm; kick-off at 8pm. There’s also a bar upstairs… 😀

Ross Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1979. He was included in The Times’s list of Top Ten Literary Stars of 2008. He has three collections of poetry: Things To Do Before You Leave Town (2009), Twelve Nudes (2010), and Hyakuretsu Kyaku (2011), all published by Penned In The Margins. Ross is also a member of the poetry collective Aisle16 with whom he runs Homework, an evening of literary miscellany in East London.

A veteran of Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival, this year he performed his critically-acclaimed show combining prose poetry and found footage – “Stand By for Tape Back-Up” – at the Forest Fringe. Last year he was a finalist in the prestigious BBC Slam, while staging his interactive auto-theatre piece “Comedian Dies in the Middle of Joke”, which recently enjoyed a sell-out London residency.

To find out more, visit http://www.rosssutherland.co.uk

And he’ll be supported by Lizzy Dening – a feature writer from Cambridge. She has been writing poetry for over eight years and has been published widely, including The Times, The Rialto, Rising, Pomegranate and Orbis; her most recent collection comes from Nasty Little Press. Find out more at: http://lizzydening.wordpress.com

Hosted by Fay Roberts.

Fancy Slamming?

The rules for H&T slams are as follows:

Slammers are chosen at random from the sign-up list to perform – spoken word only, no music, no props. Each competitor has 3 minutes from the time they start talking on the mic. After 30 seconds’ grace period, they start losing points (1 point for every 10 seconds!). At the end, they’re given points out of 10 by 5 judges chosen from the audience, while the top and bottom scores are removed to ensure fairness. The slammer gets a score out of 30, and the competition moves on.

The winner of that evening’s competition goes through to the Regional Final (the Cambridge one tends to be held in September), and the winner (and runner-up) of the Regional Final goes through to the National Final. The winner of the National Final gets crowned H&T National Slam Champion and can then go on to compete in things like the Radio 4 slam championships, the international slam championships, etc.

Aspirant competitors can sign up either by rocking up as doors open on the night (typically 7:30pm for an 8pm start) or by booking slam tickets in advance online (£2 from Eventbrite – the relevant link is above). You can “express an interest” by emailing your name in advance, but that only gets you on the reserve list until you pay on the door (£3).

There are no limitations on style of poetry – a typical slam will see sonnets, blank verse, hip-hop, rhyming iambic pentametric couplets and more all cross the stage – and we’ve seen winners who’ve read their poems out from the written version (paper, kindle, phone, beermat) so, while there are advantages to learning your pieces off by heart, it’s not a requirement!

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