Chris Tse has a winning way with words. Literally. He’s Canada’s slam poetry champion and next month, when he competes in an international competition in Paris, he could capture the world crown.
- Chris Tse, performing at last year’s Capital Slam competition
Not bad for a guy whose mom had to encourage him to enter poetry competitions in high school in Coquitlam, B.C. “She’d enter, I’d win,” he jokes.
“I could always flat-out write, and that’s how I could B.S. my way through everything,” he adds. “I wasn’t a strong student, but writing was how I got the grades to get into Carleton.” He’s wrapping up his fourth year in the Bachelor of Journalism program.
Soon after he arrived in Ottawa, he caught a performance by Shane Koyczan, a slam poet he’d learned about through MySpace. “I liked his work, but didn’t know what it was,” Chris recalls. “I didn’t know how to define it, but I thought it was cool.” Opening were members of the local group, Capital Slam, and Chris was hooked. He wrote a couple of poems, performed at the next Capital Slam competition, and took second place.
Last year was a banner year, when he became Ottawa champion and captained Capital Slam to the national championship.
Since then he has taught slam poetry at high schools in Ottawa and B.C. and talked to kids at TEDx events, and will perform next month at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Arts Centre.
But his fame has spread internationally – and he almost didn’t know why. At a Vancouver slam in December 2009, he performed a controversial work called “I’m Sorry I’m a Christian.” It went online a couple of weeks later, but nobody told him.
“All of a sudden I got random requests to be a Facebook friend or Twitter follower, and I finally asked somebody why. He said, ‘Dude, you don’t know? You’re all over YouTube.’” With more than 80,000 views to date, the poem has caused a stir among atheists and Christians alike, is blogged about by right- and left-wing religious leaders, received air time on two Australian radio shows, and led to speaking invitations from both church and hip-hop events throughout the U.S.
“I don’t even think it’s my best piece,” he says.
But it does reflect another side of Chris Tse: his faith. He serves on the leadership team of the campus chapter of Navigators, an international group that explores Christian beliefs from a social justice perspective. “When you make a decision to believe, you’re not set for life. It’s a constant struggle.”
He helps promote club events, volunteers at the Ottawa Mission and Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, and interned one summer as a youth director at a church.
He also spent four years with Journalists for Human Rights (JHR), a group that mobilizes the media to make people aware of their human rights, and this year was president of the local chapter – though he says, “That’s really just a title since the executive works together.” He’s off to Ghana this summer to work at a radio station on a government-funded JHR project.
But he’ll take a break from that for the world slam poetry championship in Paris. He says he’s pretty competitive – after all, he was a provincial-level athlete in track and field. But win or lose, he says, every performance is “an opportunity to get on stage and be fully uncensored for 3 minutes and 10 seconds. You can say the most radical things, and people give you respect.”