Shane Koyczan draws a crowd in Vancouver

    1 of 1 2 of 1

      At the Vogue Theatre on Saturday, March 28. No remaining performances

      Shane Koyczan is nobody’s fool, as shown by the way he’s armoured himself in Teflon with the release of his new album, Silence Is a Song I Know All the Words To. On the record’s penultimate track, “Troll”, he trickles scorn onto “you, who crept into our lives, with tongues like knives stabbing your words into our skin.…[Who] turned your hate into stones and hurled them at beauty, as if you couldn’t bear to see anything other than ugly/anything different,” effectively nullifying any kind of critical response.

      So what do you do if you want to say that Koyczan’s fart jokes aren’t nearly as funny as he thinks they are, or that he’s a mediocre poet, or that the predictable cadence of his delivery sometimes makes your skin crawl? Speak up and you’re a troll—or worse, a bully, the kind that Koyczan gave a gentle beat-down to in his verse-novel-turned-opera Stickboy.

      What do you do if those are your truths, however much they’re at odds with his?

      If you are a bully, you’ll just bull ahead anyway. If you’re not, you’ll pour sugar on your plaint. And, boy, Koyczan is a likable character. Not surprising, really, in that he came up through the culture of slam poetry, where excellence is a popularity contest. For someone who claims to have had no friends in grade school he sure has them now, packing the Vogue on a night when, as he noted, both the Whitecaps and the Canucks were competing for Vancouver’s entertainment dollar. Packing it with everyone from preteens to pensioners, not to mention enough pregnant women to stock a couple of ob-gyn clinics. (What’s up with that?)

      And all for poetry, with a little music for spice courtesy of violinist Hannah Epperson and her low-key looped soundscapes.

      You’ve got to give the man a hand—for his ability to draw a crowd, for his performing skills, and also for his honesty. One of Koyczan’s best lines of the night came when he explained the zigzag scar that now decorates his left forehead: “I look like the love child of Harry Potter and Hagrid.” It’s true, and it’s funny, and it’s horrific, too, because he got the scar while cycling—he was hit by a truck—and it’s left him permanently dazed, as if he were an old-school library card catalogue that’s been tossed by vandals and left all out of order. That’s his description, and it’s a good one.

      The accident has left a significant impact on his on-stage style. The old Koyczan recited from memory and was almost annoyingly intent on being impressive, but the new one—reliant on notes and a tablet teleprompter—is less organized and more human, more likely to veer off onto unexpected pathways. On Saturday, some of those were poignant, like his musings on his beloved grandmother and her impending surgery. Some were hilarious, like his improvised banter with a Mr. Burns sound-alike in the crowd. And most of these tangents were more interesting, theatrically, than the set pieces, which included an asshole-cat poem made up mostly of declawed Garfield gags, and a love lyric, “Favourite”, that was so far beyond sweet that it was pure treacle.

      This troll is still not convinced that Koyczan is a good poet, but he seems to give people something that they need. And, you know, I kind of liked watching him do it—or maybe that’s just the Teflon talking.

      Comments

      2 Comments

      Natty

      Mar 30, 2015 at 10:33pm

      Somewhere on the interwebs, someone has taken the photo accompanying this article and turned it into a "Milady" meme.

      Dennis E. Bolen

      Apr 7, 2015 at 5:03pm

      Finely balanced, brave and to my mind accurate assessment of this popular but by no means particularly skilled or talented spoken word performer. I think Alex has stated here what so many in the poetry community quietly think but are chilled into silence over for fear of being branded abusive. Bravo, Mr Varty.