Unfortunately, I don't have time to go into too much detail here, but I have a lot that needs to be said about a certain poetry event which happened last night.

A group of 5 of us travelled into London to take part in a slam, as well as to watch a number of "featured" performers. Many of the performers were excellent, and there were certainly a lot of good things about the evening.

However: terrible compering (getting names wrong; bad time-keeping and general organisation; failure to raise ANY energy from a good-sized crowd; putting the audience down on several occasions; and AWFUL waffling intros), and the most disgustingly sexist (does this even EXIST anymore??) scoring from one judge (ie. low-scoring the female performers, raising the points for the below-par boys, and high-scoring the most disgusting, offensive "act" I've ever seen on a poetry stage).

After the aforementioned performer received no applause, the audience were goaded by the frankly rubbish compere, because "didn't we realise it was supposed to be ironic". Some people then joined in, but the response was suitably restrained.

The score was a draw and performers were called back to the stage to merely be rejudged, and both looked rather puzzled as though they were expecting another chance to perform.

The tie was, of course, between two of the men, who were both excellent, but this didn't help the general atmosphere, and when everyone was gathered for a group photo there was a noticeable feeling of "who cares"

When I whispered to the low-scoring judge "I'm a bit new to this game, what was there about my performance that you didn't like? How do you think I can improve?" he told me that I didn't have enough stage presence and that... wait: I shouldn't let it get to me. I guess to him I was a hysterical woman... he had no idea how truly angry the night had already made me.

Many acts overran, although there was no penalty for this. And it has made me think that for all our pre-planning what to perform in our 3 minutes, we may as well not have bothered. It doesn't matter if your work is poetry or not, well-thought out, well-performed, well-timed or not. Some crowds, some judges and some comperes have no place amongst people who actually care about what should be a great creative, competative and fun branch of poetry.

I feel pretty disappointed and quite sad that such a prestigeous event seems to be so badly run. My only comforts come from our little group, who, while we're happy to argue about which performers we preferred, agree about all that went so badly wrong.

The other comfort comes from knowing that we can run a FAR better slam. Poetry Kapow is Go!