The world order, rather disorder, is frightening enough to make amnesia appear like a good thing to have. Hitting new lows every day, cruelty and sadism rule much of the world. One can hardly blame us youngsters for plugging on our iPods and drowning into our ephemeral utopia.
Akin to being thrown a stick to stay afloat, I salvaged hope as I discovered the power and joy of spoken word poetry. As I watched 27-year-old New Yorker, Sarah Kay, perform her poem “If I Had a Daughter”, I made an instant connect with the poem and the poet.
Beyond its literary merits, one aspect of her poem and performance struck deep – unpretentiousness. From thence, the seeking and savouring of spoken word poetry has easily been the high point of the year just passed by.
How Spoken Word Poetry has a Beatles Connection
Spoken word poetry is poetry that is written to be performed. It serenades the stage with its rap-like rhythm, much like a conduit between metaphors, alliterations and music. The poem is performed in a context – presence of the poet, her/his appearance, interactions with the audience both individually and collectively – carrying the audience on a magical literary carpet privileged to sentient beings.
Traditional poetry demands understanding, interpretation and memorisation. Spoken word? It integrates the self in moments of insight forcing us to think and reflect critically.
With origins in Beat Poetry – a counter-culture of New York inspired by jazz and bebop – spoken word formed an integral part of the African American struggle for resistance to oppression and exploitation in the 60’s. It was Beat poet Allen Ginsburg, with a bohemian performance of his poem “Howl”, who took this oral tradition across the Atlantic.
Ginsburg inspired many, including the Beatles, and John Lennon famously remarked that if he wasn’t a Beatle, he would have been a Beat poet. Unashamed and unreserved, Beat and spoken word poetry reverberated with the English masses who struggled with incomprehensible academic poetry. (Elliot’s The Waste Land anyone?)
Why Poetry is, Still, Food for the Soul
The appeal of spoken word poetry with the youth is due to its simple, honest and rhythmic expression of serious issues. It is free format, but not nonsense literature. Today’s youth are socially aware and politically charged, and spoken word adds relevance to their opinions. Rather than passive print on paper, it sets alight stages, streets and salons with an outpouring of angst about the trauma of war, political and cultural repression, transforming poets into ‘poeticians’ and the audience into active participants in the thought process.
Radical poems on LGBT rights, depression, identity and sense of self gives voice to the young want-to-be-heard. My personal favourite is Kate Tempest, who raps her radical poetry with brilliant originality. Holly McNish’s sensitive poems on humanity are endearing.
Spoken word poet Sarah Kay has since taken her craft across the world through Project VOICE (Vocal Outreach Into Creative Expression), motivating the youth to use spoken word to engage with their culture, society and themselves. Post the devastating 2015 earthquake in Nepal, Sarah rallied the youth of Nepal to form “Word Warriors”.
In India, students of Delhi University founded “Mildly Offensive Content”, a spoken word and poetry slam club to voice their resistance to misogyny, political oppression of the youth, classism and other such.
Spoken word is the fastest growing performing art in the world, and is now a regular feature at the Fringe and several other Lit Fests.
Beyond the literal and rhetoric value, spoken word poetry exposes the human ability to rise above the mundane. By forcing conscious reflection and understanding, it helps us make sense of the incomprehensible. I believe politics and religion have failed us – twisted and torn us apart, slashed and slit every human value.
Literature and the arts still hold a chance to bring people together. Spoken word poetry will undoubtedly help evolve our species, which we are long due for.
(Veeksha Madhu is a 15-year-old writer with an intense and newfound love for spoken word poetry and the magic it weaves.)
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