by VINCENT TINGUELY

 

Toronto’s poet-priestess Andrea Thompson is on top of her game these days, with a CV groaning with festival gigs, television and radio appearances ranging from CBC to TVO, a Canadian Urban Music Award-nominated CD, One, and a current stint hosting season two of the Bravo TV series Heart of a Poet.

 

It’s been quite an evolution from the neophyte student, who, not so long ago, couldn’t quite get a handle on the whole poetry game. “I took workshops in poetry in university,” Thompson says, “but I didn’t really get passionate about it until I moved to Vancouver.” There, she took a volunteer job as co-host of the CITR radio poetry show Hearsay, and in hearing herself speak on mic, literally found her poetic voice. “That took me out of the realm of the page and onto the stage,” Thompson explains. “With radio, it was all about how the poem sounded—how you could use your voice, borrowing elements of acting, monologue and stand-up comedy.”

 

Thompson was stage-struck, and has remained so since. She’s particularly keen on her relationship to the audience, be it through the airwaves or more directly in performance. This connection has taken her out into the community at large, whether it’s working as promotion and communications manager at the League of Canadian Poets, or reaching out to kids through poetry workshops. “Part of my involvement in the community is as a sort of channel or guide, getting a chance to take something I really love that isn’t really understood and bring it forth into the audience,” says Thompson. “I like preaching to the unconverted, it’s really exciting to me. With the workshops, they might expect to be bored, and when you can reach past that and touch them, that’s really exciting. The kids have a lot of angst—it’s good for them at that age to have an outlet.”

 

Thompson’s coming to town this weekend as one of the featured performers in the Voix d’Amériques spoken word festival. She’ll be hosting Voices From Planet Toronto, showcasing a broad spectrum of T-dot talent. The legendary lunarian sound poet Bill Bissett will be on hand, along with poet, playwright and spoken word curatorial catalyst Jill Battson, hyperprolific poet Robert Priest, spoken word recording icon Dwayne Morgan, outspoken interdisciplinary artist Naila Keleta Mae and politically engaged dub poet Spin.

 

Audiences can expect Thompson to delve below the surface and into the spiritual with her own performance poetry. “I’m really interested in mythology and finding cross-culturally where we’re the same,” Thompson says. “My poetry really takes things down to the personal. I’ve written about race, environment, our relation to it and abuse of it, injustices. Also from a feminist perspective, about relationships, the experience of being human—but it’s always through personal experience. ”