On their journey as co-founders of Airplane Poetry Movement, Nandini said,
“We just wanted to have these small gatherings where poets come together and just speak from their hearts, read out their poems and just share their work – because that was not something we were also introduced to formally. We were going to places sharing what we do; that was really the initial idea of APM. We did a few workshops and realised it was something we wanted to do more of, and it was an interesting way to introduce more people to these events. We started doing small exercises in the space of spoken word and eventually built up the educational part of APM, which is doing workshops with people who are beginners as writers, and making them fall in love with poetry.”
On the highlights of activities taken up by APM over the years, Shantanu said,
“We started with one small slam – first official APM slam poetry, a poster and everything was put up in Atta Gallata, a book store in Bangalore in January 2014. Then we started doing monthly slams. The next big thing for us was when we had ambassadors from 15 colleges across multiple cities. This for us was when it actually started living up to its name of a movement. We did not want it to be just about a couple of people performing, it was meant to be for people to get an entry into the world of spoken word poetry which we still believe is very magical.
All of this culminated into the National Youth Poetry Slam (NYPS) which was an inter-collegiate slam where over 400 people applied from more than 100 colleges, and the best 25 teams came down to Bangalore in 2016. We had featured performances by Sarah Kay, Kalki Koechlin and some more very fine poets from India. It was a 2-day festival and we sold out all our tickets on day 2. We had 1,200 people in the audience watching the finale being performed – which we thought was mind-blowing at that time. The only reason that happened is because the community came together. Every poet was shouting about it for a month after the event.”
Source: Barandbench
