A Quote by Sarah Kay
My first spoken word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that that's what was expected of me.
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I think you can perform any poem. But what I believe is that the best examples of spoken word poetry I've ever seen, are spoken word poems that, when you see them, you're aware of the fact they need to be performed. That there's something about that poem that you would not be able to understand if you were just reading it on a piece of paper.
The first spoken word poem I ever wrote was when I was 14 and I wrote it because I was accidentally signed up for a teen poetry slam. Because I loved poetry I said that I'd try it out.
The first time I ever performed spoken word poetry in front of a big crowd, it totally failed. It ended, people barely clapped...in retrospect the poem was terrible. And for a while I thought this was something I would never do again. And then I realized that, in my 17-year-old head, that was the worst it could have been. And it wasn't that bad - [because] from there, it could only get better. And I think that failure kind of freed me up to explore and not be afraid of failing again.
No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.
I first got caught up in this marvelous feeling of being spoken to in that very direct, private, magical way by a poem when I was really young. I was in grade school and had found an Emily Dickinson poem in a textbook.
High school was the first time I ever saw spoken word poetry. The first place I ever performed a poem was at my school, so in some ways it was the nucleus of how it all started. For me I think high school was a period of trying to figure myself out, and poetry was one of the ways I did that, and was a very helpful avenue to try to do that.
When I first knew that I wanted to rap I was seven years old and I lost the talent show. It was like spoken word or something. My mom made me do it. It was a Langston Hughes poem. The girl that came on after me, she wound up winning. She was a singer.
The difference between 'lighght' and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn't have a reading process. Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn't. You can see it all at once. It's instant.
Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem, it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry.
I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.
Our spoken word first hammers a thing desired into shape. Our continued spoken word brings this shaped substance forth and clothes it with a visible body.
For me, the power of the poetry in 'Milk and Honey' is the feeling you get after finished reading the poem. It's the emotion you feel once you've read the last word, and that is only possible when the diction is easy, and you don't get stuck on every other word, you don't know what the word means.
Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do.
The spoken word is never really effective unless it is backed up by a life, but it is also true that the living deed is never adequate without the support the spoken word can provide.
[The publication of his first poem] was wonderful ... but it taught me early on that the only thing that really matters is writing the next poem. Publication is best seen as a happy accident.
I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.
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