When you look back on the past years of Czech slam poetry, do you notice a development?
First of all, our audience keeps growing. It has become an integral part of the competition expressively evaluating the particular performances alongside the jury. This is also apparent from the recording of the finalists’ performance on www.slampoetry.cz. Young people are becoming more interested which is probably because we now organize the competition in clubs. The first three years were held during the literary festival Poezie bez hranic (Poetry Without Borders) in Olomouc and were organized by the Brno-based publishing house Petrov. After it closed down, the competition was taken over by our civic association Fléda; the last four years of the event took place at the club that bears the same name – Fléda.
Apart from the national slam poetry competition, we’ve also started to regularly organize various shows during cultural festivals and we also cooperate with foreign organizers and “slammers”. We’ve managed to create a team of slamming poets some of whose members became hugely popular and are often invited to various events such as Bohdan Bláhovec (2005 competition winner) or Masha, the only famous woman in Czech slam poetry. Her perfromances in Berlin and Madrid were very well-received. Jan Jílek (2008 winner) has been succesful in Austria, while Jakub Foll has initiated a number of slam poetry events primarily in Prague. Competitions thus help discover remarkable personalities, although it remains to be seen whether they are also veritable artists.
Miroslav Balaštík
Taken from an interview published in the monthly literary magazine Host 2/2010.