Biographie
RC Weslowski is a long-time Canadian spoken word artist living on the Unceded Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Wautuh Nations. RC is a Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Champion and a two-time World Cup of Poetry Slam Finalist. He has led performance workshops at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Tucson Poetry Festival, the Victoria Spoken Word Festival and the Speak North Festival. RC incorporates nonsense and surrealistic language to get at the depths of himself. He has trained as a clown and believes play is a key component of his artistic practice. RC's first collection of poetry, "My Soft Response to the Wars" is available through Write Bloody North Publishing at www.writebloodynorth.ca
Entrevue
I read the poems that were assigned to us in high school. A lot of that included Shakespeare and Doctor Seuss. I remember being quite taken by a poem I read in the horror magazine, Creepy. It was written in the style of Edgar Allan Poe and detailed the story of a corpse decomposing in a grave from the body's point of view. I don't remember the poem's title though.
I experimented with poetry in high school and in my early to mid 20s. I wanted to do something with writing but I wasn't sure what. I wrote a lot of angsty rhyming poetry. I probably didn't start thinking of myself as a poet until recently actually and sometimes, I have difficulty doing that now.
I think a poet's job is to play and through that play expand the universe of perception.
The poem I have in the anthology is called "Let's Not Get It Together" and I was inspired to write it while being a part of a conference at the Banff Centre for the Arts. I was in conversation with a fellow clown and that phrase "Let's Not Get It Together" popped into our mouths and I thought it was great. I feel like we humans can get too rigid in our ways of thinking...fundamentalisms, literalism and so on rather than using play and curiosity to expand our perceptions of ourselves and the universe we inhabit.