Katherine MacAlister meets the woman hosting night which celebrates risible rhymes

Selling out every year, Oxford’s most anarchic evening – the Anti-Slam – returns to the OFS this month to showcase the worst poetry on offer.

Contrary to a conventional slam, where the poet with the best poem and most authentic performance is judged the winner, the Anti-Slam crowns the worst poet with the lowest score as its champion.

Challenging nine of Oxford’s finest performance poets to be brilliantly terrible in this ultimate celebration of failure and disaster, expect clanking metaphors, rhymes straining at the seams, vomit-inducing imagery and poetry so bad it transcends quality and becomes genius.

Also featuring blatantly biased judging, irrational score-keeping and mob rule, the blood-thirsty audience then picks a winner.

It sounds nuts, and according to host Tina Sederholm, it’s worse than that. The idea came to Oxford via the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, having started in Berlin, and now features all over the UK. This is Oxford’s third Anti-Slam annual event and the winner goes through to the national finals.

Tina, twice Hammer and Tongue Oxford Slam champion, and a member of the winning Oxford team at the 2013 National Slam Championships is hosting the event, and says the performed poems are far worse than the corniest greeting cards: “It’s way beyond that. If it’s bad but clever it might get 5/10 but to be truly dire takes genius.”

In the first round the poets perform a prepared poem and in the second they are given just 15 minutes and a theme to write a second.

But why turn slam poetry on its head in the first place? Isn’t it disrespectful to poetry and performance poets?

“Not at all,” said Tina, who lives in Waterperry. “It’s enormously liberating. Performance poets try to be the best they can be, which is a huge pressure. This is a fun way of turning that on its head.

“It’s a celebration of failure and vulnerability, about being honest and exposing our weaknesses. The audience absolutely loves it.”

SEE IT
The Anti-Slam returns to Arts at the Old Fire Station, Oxford, on Saturday, 
January 30. See oldfirestation.org.uk