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All sceptics reading this article should suspend disbelief for five minutes. Just five. And let me explain to you why a poetry slam should be your next adventure.

Bloody Lips is a performance poetry and music event happening in the Hotel Hotel Lounge in the Nishi Building at New Acton Precinct this Sunday at 4pm. Headlined by US performance poet Derrick Brown and hosted by 2013 Australian Poetry Slam Champion CJ Bowerbird, Bloody Lips is here to convince you that performance poetry is cool.

The title ‘Bloody Lips’ refers to Nietzche’s encouragement that one should ‘write with blood: you will discover that blood is spirit’. According to the event coordinator David Caffery, ‘these international and local performers have blood on their lips’. With free entry, Bloody Lips aims to bring a whole new audience to performance poetry, uniting the grittiness of blues – provided by Chris Harland’s blues band trio – with the sometimes visceral, sometime high brow nature of performance poetry.

So what is performance poetry? And what makes it so different to the written word? I caught up with the event’s host, CJ Bowerbird, to discuss his involvement in Bloody Lips, how to find your own poem, and what it’s like performing to a Chinese audience who don’t speak much English.

Poetry Slam events are not new to Canberra. The Phoenix holds a poetry slam on the third Wednesday of every month from 7:30 – 11pm called Band!Slam!No!Biscuit! Open to all things from manifestos and shopping lists to haiku and rants, CJ tells me that these events are ‘regularly full and packed out with people’.

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CJ Bowerbird describes himself as a man of many capes – father, son, friend, husband. However, in his Ted^x Talk, “I am the Poem”, he tells his audience, ‘I wear some of these capes more comfortably than others. But it is being a poet which is the most essential, the closet to the essence of being human. It is the thing that whispers in the ear of all of my other labels… my highest expression of humanness, of my frailty and boundlessness.’

CJ tells me that the purpose of Bloody Lips is to introduce people who might not otherwise have come to a spoken word event to the idea of performance poetry ‘through a very high class world … [with] some quality music and a beautiful venue’. He wants it to present poetry that has ‘a strong, personal, emotional aspect to it’.

But CJ Bowerbird is not ‘just’ a host for Bloody Lips. He is also a successful, widely travelled and universally appreciated performance poet. Among other accolades, he was the 2013 Australian Poetry Slam Champion. He tells me that he has written poetry all his life, and was involved in amateur theatre in the early days. His first experience of performance poetry was at The Front, which holds regular poetry slams. The first time he went along to check it out, and the next time, he performed. In his words, ‘I just kept going from there’. He tells me that the step from words on paper to performance was almost natural – ‘I never really thought twice about it’.

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Spoken word is distinguished from poetry on the page by its performance aspect. Watching any video of a performance poet on YouTube, you can see immediately the significance of the sound of the words, their rhythm, and the way everything fits together. For CJ, however, the buzz comes from the immediate emotional feedback that you get from the audience – ‘people looking, laughing crying … that’s the greatest thrill for me.’

However, this personal interaction with the audience comes with pitfalls as well – the difficulties of performing to blank faces and serious looks, for example. However, for CJ Bowerbird, even where you don’t have that interaction with the audience, you still need to perform for that one person who is really engaged. According to CJ, ‘There is a balance – when it really works, and you get a lot of interaction and you bounce off the audience … but it doesn’t always happen like that…’

One show that sticks out in his mind is a 45-minute show he performed in China. While the first performance was delivered to an audience of expats and diplomats with good English skills, one of his shows was delivered at a university to an audience of Business students with a working knowledge of ‘business’ English, but not what CJ calls ‘creative’ English. During the performance, where the poem describes a moment of emotional anguish, CJ tells me how someone right in the front row said loud enough for him to hear, “Is he alright?” Although, as he describes, it was rather distracting, what he did learn was that although the humour can get lost in translation, the emotion could still get across. And for CJ, ‘That’s really rewarding … that’s part of the performance – the emotional aspect.’

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So what should you, dear reader, take out of this? For an event that has been in the works for six months, and is headlined by such a well-respected performance poetry artist, you should be thinking that this is something that you want to go to. The event is looking to be run every two months into the future, giving Australian as well as international artists the opportunity to perform and to communicate in their own way with a diverse audience.

Asking CJ for any closing words on Bloody Lips and on performance poetry, he had the following to say:  ‘There’s a lot of depth to it. If people think this is a poetry event, and they think Banjo Patterson, or that Yeats poem they had to study in Year 12 … it’s going to be a lot more that what some people think as “just poetry”.’

In short, don’t be scared. Take a risk and come and listen to what these intelligent, humorous, interesting people have to say. And in the meantime, do as CJ Bowerbird recommends: ‘Be creative, uncage your intuition, allow yourself to make unconscious decisions, learn more about yourself, share this with others … know better what it is to be human’. And go around bare foot more often, because it’s never too late to do dumb things and make mistakes.

the essentials

What: Bloody Lips
When: 4pm Sunday 1 June
Where: Hotel Hotel Lounge, Nishi Building, New Acton Precinct
Cost: Free
Web: www.newacton.com.au/bloodylips