Translator: Morgane Quilfen Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
This is to the asshole Tinder date
that once you've gone out, he just lets you wait.
He never writes, and he never replies,
and so you fill your head with questions and lies.
Maybe I was boring or had something up my nose;
maybe I'm not his type, or he's the kind of guy that has bros,
and they've told him, 'Bro, don't bother, mate.
If you ain't interested, just leave it be.'
And my reply to them is this:
well then, what the fuck about me?
Where's my 'I'm sorry, I just don't think we click' text
or 'You're lovely, but my diary's jammed for the next two years'?
And I can just say, 'Great, next!'
Or you could tell me a lie
about how your work suddenly transferred you to Dubai.
And I can start looking around for some other guy.
You weren't even that interesting,
and you're not exactly incredibly good-looking,
but that still doesn't mean that you should just leave me hanging!
I am a person, I have a mind,
and not writing and not replying is not more kind.
And also, like any woman,
I am of course bound by thy natural curse
that anyone that's not interested, it just makes me want them worse.
Even if I didn't even like them at first.
This is a universal law,
and so to all the guys out there,
I implore,
the last thing you should do to us is to simply ignore
because you won't like the consequences -
now that I can assure.
(Laughter)
We will start by stalking you on Facebook.
Because, yes, I only know your first name from Tinder,
but I also know you're friends with Danielle Cook.
Ha! I found you on her friend list - only took one single look.
Now, I will start browsing your wall.
Pretty soon I know your favourite band, favourite bar,
and what you're actually called.
From here, I will find your address
and will start randomly trying to bump into you near your house.
Later, I'll take more drastic measures into use,
and quietly as any mouse,
you will find me with binoculars in the bushes outside your flat.
And all of a sudden, you'll be missing your cat!
Whiskers, the orange little sod, has disappeared - how terribly odd!
You launch a search party, you put up flyers,
but poor little Whiskers has vanished into thin air.
Until one day, miraculously, ding dong, I call your doorbell,
and there is Whiskers, in my arms.
And I act surprised, 'Oh my god, it's you!
Didn't we go on a Tinder date like five months ago?
No way, this is your cat?
I just found him in the bus stop now. What are the odds of that?'
Well, pretty good considering the fact
that I've been stalking you for about 20 weeks or more.
But as we're talking now,
I suddenly realize that you're actually such an incredible bore.
So I give you back your cat,
and I regret all of that time
I spent lurking around those cold bushes outside your flat.
Then you ask me out for a drink that night, and I'm reluctant,
but then I think, 'Eh, what the hell?
Why not just do it, right?'
So we go out, and we talk about your cat,
and how 'unbelievably miraculous' it was that I brought him back.
And I start having fun and thinking,
'Actually, maybe this guy is not a total hack!'
So we have a good time, we kiss good night, we say farewell.
I want to go home and go to my place.
You say, 'Let's just go to mine',
and I say, 'Meh, what the hell.'
So we go to your place, and we do what people do,
and as I leave in the morning, your last words to me are,
'I'll text you.'
(Laughter)
And for your sake, and for Whiskers' too,
man, this time,
I really, really hope that's true.
Thank you.
(Laughter) (Cheers) (Applause)
Thank you, guys!
Hello, everyone.
My name is Emma,
and I am the local poetry slam champion
here in Aarhus.
Today, I want to talk to you about, of course, slam poetry,
but I'd also like to talk to you about
the joy of reinventing and recreating the things that are right in front of us.
Before I do that though,
I'd just like to start by making an official disclaimer.
So, hand on heart, I promise you,
I've never stolen anyone's cat.
That part of the poem was 100 percent make-believe.
I have, however, been rejected by a Tinder date
and gone so far as to stalk that person quite thoroughly on Facebook.
That part of the poem is, sadly, very true.
This is an example of how I write.
So I take real stories, stuff that's actually happened to me,
and I allow myself the freedom to reinvent it.
Now, for me, this is brilliant for two reasons.
Because, first of all, it means every time I write a poem,
I essentially get to rewrite my reality,
which I think is pretty damn cool.
Secondly, it also means that every time I write a new piece,
I don't have to reinvent the wheel, right?
I just dip into the backpack of embarrassing experiences
that I carry around with me anyway,
I pick one, multiply it by 100, and then, woopsy, I have myself a poem.
So the pieces that I create in this way,
I perform with at events called poetry slams.
For those of you who don't know what that is,
a poetry slam is a competition in spoken word.
The format was created back in the 1980s in Chicago by a guy called Marc Smith,
and what he did was seemingly very simple,
but, in my opinion, completely brilliant at the same time.
So he created a spoken word competition with just three rules.
One: the performer must, of course, write the text themselves.
Two: they must not use any props or costumes on stage.
And three: the performance should not go on
for any longer than 3 minutes and 10 seconds.
In addition to that,
he gave five random members of the audience score cards
so that they could rate the poet's performance.
Thereby, he very literally transferred power to the audience,
and he created this link between those watching
and what the performer was doing on stage.
I think this story is really brilliant for several reasons.
First of all, just because I love that slam format,
because it is so simple in its framework,
it allows you as a performer and a creative
to put anything in there that you like.
Which means if you attend a slam,
you will very often experience
a really wide range of different styles and different performers
in just one evening.
And then, you've also got this competition element.
It's actually the audience that are deciding
who gets to go on to the next round, who gets to win the competition.
That's creating this really sort of dynamic and exciting atmosphere,
both for those watching,
but, of course, also for the performers that are being judged on stage.
The second reason I really like that story of slam and how that was created
is because I think it is a really brilliant example
of how many great inventions are, to some extent,
reinventions or reworkings or extensions
of existing scenes, formats, story lines,
innovations, concepts, contraptions, and so on.
Another really great example of this,
a much more obvious example of this,
is William Shakespeare.
He is perhaps the greatest writer of all time,
certainly one of the greatest creatives of all time,
yet he happily borrowed plots from existing stories.
And I think the reason that we tend to remember his versions,
sometimes even over the originals,
is quite simply that he was successful
in remaking them and reinventing them into something that was extraordinary.
Now, very awkwardly, this brings me back to how I work.
Not that I'm saying my work is like Shakespeare's.
I'm not nuts - I know I just did a poem about a Tinder date.
No, it brings me back to how I work
because when I work, I also, as I said in the beginning,
I take stories that already exist and all I do is I give them a twist.
And I found out I really love working creatively in this way,
by sort of taking the material that is right there,
obviously waiting in front of you.
But I didn't always use to work this way.
Before, I was quite consumed by the idea
that whatever I made had to be 100 percent original,
had to be a really difficult process, creatively,
that brought you to that end product.
And I didn't think my own personal experiences
were particularly original.
Yes, they're my unique experiences,
but it's experiences that, quite often,
hundreds and thousands of people across the world have also had,
like that Tinder poem.
I mean, everyone has had a bad experience on TInder
if they've been on Tinder for more than a minute, you know.
So that's not unique, that's a cliché.
But then I found out,
when I let go of that idea about being original,
that I actually loved working with these clichés
because it made it fun to try to twist that, add something new,
in order to attempt to take that cliché
and to make it into something different, into something new,
and hopefully, also something that might be better than the original.
The reason that I was able to let go of the idea
about being 100 percent original
was that I sort of started thinking about the concept of originality.
And in the end, I just concluded
I don't think anyone can be 100 percent original.
I think every creator, whether they know it or not,
is in some way a re-creator.
We all stand on the shoulders of those that came before,
thought before, spoke before, wrote before, joked before,
and so in my opinion,
creativity is not about being struck by divine inspiration.
I actually think it's about being brave enough
to attempt to break a mould once more.
It is about daring to reinvent,
to take things that through time have gotten stale and bent,
smash them into pieces,
and from those shards, we build anew,
and add our time's thoughts to that invention stew.
Because the birth of brave ideas is the only cure against stagnation.
Let's be the generation that reworks our world
instead of leaning into old frustration.
Let's re-evaluate everything we thought we knew,
look at our lives and see what parts could do with a review.
Let's reconsider and pull the trigger on all that is flawed and decayed,
and perhaps like old William,
we could remould cold ashes into something new
until this, too, is unmade.
Because nothing lasts forever.
Yet nothing comes from nothing,
so eventually all that we know will someday seem forgotten,
only to live on in some strange corner
of the thoughts that future people might deem relevant.
Well, let this be the age, then,
where we paint with ideas in patterns so goddamn decadent
that before they disappear,
we'll be visible to many a generation.
Let's create a world primed for birthing beautiful beasts of creation
that gallop around, tearing up all boring, non-blooming bulbs,
giving way to blossoming, novel carnations.
Let's dare to rethink, reinvent, and recreate.
And who knows, we might leave behind something great.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)