Sean McGarragle, poet and artistic director of the West Coast Poetry Festival, stands chatting with his colleague, RC Weslowski. Weslowski is directing the migratory Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in Vancouver this fall, so the meeting is not at all unusual-except that they are standing ankle-deep in sedge grass in the middle of the Trans-Canada Highway, 60 kilometres west of Calgary. On the hillside above, travellers have formed words by rearranging boulders. McGarragle is brushing the dirt from his hands, having just climbed down from altering someone else's text. Now some of the rocks form the words poetry slam. Nine other top performance poets, festival directors, and poetry activists from across Canada are gathered haphazardly on the median. There is a light prairie wind. It's Canada Day, and traffic moves steadily past in both directions. The group is surrounded by the blinking lights of RCMP cruisers and emergency vehicles.

Of the 10,000 or so cars headed toward Banff on this long weekend, two vanloads of poets have managed to careen into each other and drive off the road. Someone ahead stopped suddenly and both van drivers swerved to the left to avoid a more serious accident. The two vans collided, inadvertently leaving a significant representation of the Canadian spoken-word community stranded here. "We're lucky," McGarragle says wryly. "It could have been the Buddy Holly story all over again." In response, Weslowski opens his arms to the summer sky and answers, "They said life was a highway."

Although shaken, no one is hurt in the incident. There is more than one hangover in the group, however, because the poets were up until the early hours celebrating the final event of the highly successful Calgary International Spoken Word Festival. Prophetically, the closing event was called Big Bang Poetry. Eventually a tow-truck arrives, the poets are sorted into new vehicles, and the convoy heads off to the festival's inaugural spoken-word Banff summit meeting.

Organized by CISWF artistic director Sheri-D Wilson, with inspiration from veteran Toronto dub poet and poetry activist Lillian Allen, the summit is a gathering of spoken-word organizers from across Canada. The purpose of the meeting is to unite as a group to discuss collective organization and advocacy and the place of spoken word as a genre in Canadian culture. Wilson, Allen, McGarragle, and Weslowski are joined at the table by Festival Voix d'Amériques artistic director D. Kimm and Wired on Words audio producer Ian Ferrier from Montreal, media-savvy poetry activist Jill Battson and the urban music-influenced poet Dwayne Morgan from Toronto, New York City spoken-word guru Bob Holman, and eight other poet-organizers.

It soon becomes apparent that there are as many subgenres of spoken word-from cowboy poetry to hip-hop-as there are seats at the table, and the gathering begins to resemble an interplanetary bar scene from a science-fiction movie. But if the aesthetic differences among the group are vast, the sense of enthusiasm and urgency for action is unanimous. By the end of the weekend, a Web site, a database, and a series of advocacy strategies have been determined. A national day to "Liberate the Voice" is in the works, and this loose collective has morphed into SWAN, the Spoken Word Arts Network. "Not bad," one wag quips, "for a bunch of ugly ducklings."

Spoken word is becoming an increasingly inclusive term and has come to refer to all artists working in the oral tradition, writing and performing their own texts. Subgenres include dub, hip-hop, sound poetry, slam poetry, storytelling, poetry theatre, spoken jazz improv, and folk poetry. Although it seems like a relatively new phenomenon, practitioners argue that it is the oldest form of poetry, with oral traditions predating written language by centuries.

In Canada, spoken word finds some of its roots in Toronto in the sound poets of the 1960s and '70s such as bp Nichol, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffrey, and bill bissett, as well as in the dub poetry of political practitioners like Lillian Allen and Clifton Joseph in the '80s and '90s. The West Coast also boasted a thriving spoken-word scene in the 1980s and '90s with performance poets like Judy Radul, Sheri-D Wilson, and Kedrick James making a huge impact. Many of these artists still perform but increasingly are becoming involved in other projects. However, it's obvious that there is a new wave of spoken word in Vancouver.

In less than four months, three major spoken-word festival events will have taken place in Vancouver: the West Coast Poetry Festival presented 46 poets from July 7 to 11; this weekend, the Vancouver Folk Music Festival is giving its spoken-word stage more prominence than ever; and in October, the second annual Canadian Festival of Spoken Word is being held in Vancouver (last year it was in Ottawa).

"I don't want to call it a revolution," McGarragle states, "but it's definitely an evolution. These guys live within a 10-block radius of each other: Shane [Koyczan], C?R [Avery], Brenda McLeod, Barbara Adler, who at 22 has toured Europe three times and the States doing her poetry.”¦There are probably 20 artists in Vancouver right now who can go anywhere in the world and hold their own. They're not competing so much as bouncing ideas and new material off each other. It's almost a cult. Barbara Adler must have a hard time going to school, because she's constantly being bombarded by people."

The poets McGarragle cites come largely out of the slam-poetry tradition, one that has been widely criticized for being overly presentational, competitive, and concerned with popularity as its sole measure of success. But McGarragle points out that a slam-poetry event often has four times as many audience members as an "average" poetry reading. Whether you are a fan of this particular subgenre or not, it seems to have found a niche.

As its stylistic diversity indicates, spoken word attracts people who don't fit into the mainstream. Its practitioners are the anarchists and orphans of the literary arts. These same artists are continually carving out space in which to practise their form. Instead of appealing to commercial media with massive infrastructures to market their work, they start home-based publishing houses and record labels to distribute their books and CDs, and they invent festivals to show their performance work. As Bob Holman pointed out at the Banff gathering, the appeal of the form is that it has "certain elements of democracy that you don't see elsewhere. It's the single voice of the individual cutting through the consumer-marketing tool of language."

The next time you're travelling to Banff, maybe on a long weekend, maybe on Canada Day, feel free to borrow from the oral tradition: don't drive with a hangover; keep well back from the cars ahead of you; be wary of the hazards of the road; and keep your eyes peeled for messages written on the hillside. These days, poetry is everywhere.