Word Poet Research Articles

“Poetry is on its way back up”: a spoken word performer’s contribution to young people’s engagement with poetry

ABSTRACT The presence of spoken word poets at school can prove to be engaging for young people, especially if used to complement the work conducted by enthusiastic teachers of poetry. By means of an evaluation of a spoken word residency at an Australian high school, this article discusses some of the opportunities and challenges associated with the attempt to engage young people with the genre. The case study’s research data was collected by means of observation of the residency and semi-structured interviews with the poet leading it and the teacher who organized it. In the article it is argued that while students are encouraged to develop their conceptions of poetry and perceive it as engaging, it is important to democratize participation in spoken word activities and enhance teachers’ own engagement.

Shelley’s Poet-Birds

IN ‘TO A SKYLARK’, Shelley wonders how to understand the bird he observes: ‘What thou art we know not; / What is most like thee?’1 The same question might be asked of poets, we realise, when Shelley swiftly makes the skylark ‘like a poet’ that is ‘Singing hymns unbidden’ (ll. 36, 37), a singer of such sincerity and feeling that it might seem a model for the poet. Shelley was fascinated by the identity and responsibility of the poet. Wordsworth asks, ‘what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him?’2 Shelley’s approach is more oblique, his prose and poetry strewn with similes rather than bound by definitions. Conjuring the ideal poet as a combination of legislator and prophet, A Defence of Poetry imagines one who ‘essentially comprises and unites both these characters’ (MW, p. 677). In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley complements this abstract though thoughtful description with brief portraits of figures such as Dante and Plato, who provide examples of the nature of the poet. But in his poetry Shelley returns to the more figurative idea of the poet as a bird, granting himself the freedom to conceive multiple ways of seeing or imagining the poet via an avian counterpart. Strengths and weaknesses are drawn out through the parallels: the poet-bird, sometimes standing in for a particular poet, at other times representing the poet as an unspecified figure, lets Shelley muse upon the reality and the ideal of the poet’s role.

Change Trains at Summit: Becoming a poet

Change Trains at SummitBecoming a poet Robert Pinsky (bio) i used to follow the self-imposed rule that you should not presume to call yourself a poet. "It's for the world to say," said Robert Frost. So for years, even after I began publishing my work, I would avoid "I am a poet" and say instead, "I write poems." But in the meantime the exalted word poet went its own way, becoming more and more a term for all kinds of things, including an academic job category. ("We need to hire a poet.") Following Frost's principle started to feel like an affectation. His cunning declaration that poet is something for other people [End Page 25] to say was like him: under what may look like a modest surface, a covert, underlying superiority. There's also a bit of superstition involved—bad luck to claim the word for yourself. That kind of backspin has its appeal. But a couple of books into my career I let myself say out loud, at times, that I was a poet. It wasn't modesty that made me shy to use the word about myself, but a matter of where I came from—a covert, stubborn, and provincial pride in what you are and shame at the very idea of pretending to be anything you might not be. In the watchful smalltown neighborhood of lower-middle-class Jews, Italians, and Black people where I grew up, the phrase "trying to be something you're not" was a heavy accusation. It might be fine to be a poet, though possibly less valuable than to be an optometrist. In certain limited ways, it might even be acceptable to be a criminal. What was not acceptable was vaunting bullshit about yourself. Poet was a great thing to me—none greater, really, so not to be desecrated. Given my background, a dear friend recently asked me, How is it that I became a poet rather than a criminal or an optometrist? I could quibble. My father, Milford Pinsky, was an optician, not an optometrist. (A common mistake.) And it's true that his father, Dave Pinsky, was a criminal. But as my aunt Thelma used to say, her pop was in the liquor business, and it happened to be during Prohibition. That was the era when Dave, my Zaydee Pop, as I called him, pursued the liquor business in our hometown, Long Branch, New Jersey. Trivial and significant, stupid and profound, like a family oppressive and nurturing, like the larger world seductive and treacherous: my feelings about the town are as confused as can be. My bedeviled patriotism, my need for the lofty outcast art of poetry, my C− student's distrust of worldly rewards and punishments, the inward voice that spurs me to bring together disparate times, places, and things, that attraction to a mishmosh. All began in Long Branch. If I have a story to tell, it's about how the failures and aspirations of a certain time and place led to poetry. [End Page 26] Click for larger view View full resolution Dave Pinsky, the author's grandfather. [End Page 27] ________ even saying "i write poems" is inaccurate. Write is not precise. I work to produce not marks on paper but something more like a song or a monologue, or both. I was never that precocious child or teenager who would sit down to produce work on a page with a pen or a typewriter. I know that there are people who think by writing. But I tend to think by speaking, often to myself. Even now, as throughout my life, my poems don't usually begin on paper or on a screen. It's a matter of humming and muttering, grunts and echoes in the vowels and consonants of speech, the melody of every sentence. I get a tune in my head. Like noodling at a piano, I like toying with bits of remembered conversation, maybe half-remembered lines by Keats or Dickinson mixed in with a joke or a bit of gossip. Sometimes you discover something new. Early on, this obsession with how words sound seemed like a bad habit...

A healing curve: The poetry of Taqralik Partridge in Inuktitut translation

Curved against the hull of a peterhead (PS Guelph 2020), a slender volume of 19 poems that “wrestle with colonialism and racial violence while also reflecting a rich sensory imagery” (Partridge 2020a) was released in January 2020. By May of that year, this first book by prize-winning short-story writer, artist and spoken word poet Taqralik Partridge already figured in a list of “six Inuit literature greats” deemed essential reading. Although Partridge composed all of these poems in English, three translated versions are provided alongside their originals in curved against. The present article focuses on the two poems accompanied by Inuktitut versions, translated by Ida Saunders and Looee Arreak respectively, with a view to engaging with Partridge’s work from the perspective of eco-translation. The language related to nature – how it is employed and especially how it is translated – proves relevant to the discussion, as does the act of translation, which highlights the inter-relatedness critical to survival, literally and metaphorically speaking, for Inuit and non-Inuit alike.

Decolonization through Spoken Word Poetry: A Postcolonial Analysis of Emi Mahmoud and Safia Elhillo’s poetry

Hip Hop has been a cultural wave creating and modifying the revolution started in the 1970s by Black people against systemic oppression, and while it manifests itself as a commodified narrativization against racism, sexism and other equally troublesome oppressive ideologies, it becomes a site for change through ethnographic performativity. Spoken Word poets have used this tool to bring marginal narratives to the center and challenge the heteropatriarchal lens, misogynoir and racist practices all around the world. Spoken word poetry has not been researched analytically or theoretically much previously, and even when it was, the research and statistics were limited to the technical aspects of performance. This paper deals with the idea of culture being a site for performance, and simultaneously performance being the action that precedes stereotypes and false representations of marginalized cultures throughout the global north. The spoken word poets use the stage as a liminal space for a multiplicity of cultures to thrive, and challenge the oppressive tools, including that of language, clothing, and voice used by mainstream cultures to oppress the said communities, and normalize their own traditions and morals. The paper reveals the performative tactics used by spoken word poets in order to deinstitutionalize systems of power, and establish a counter narrative of their own as a form of revolution.

Striking Bold Strokes: Albinism and Stigma in Malawian Spoken Word Poetry

In the past few years, persons with albinism have been attacked and killed in various African countries due to mythical beliefs associated with their bodies. Although various non-governmental organisations have been campaigning actively to stem the violence, there have been some efforts to represent their plight in literary forms, as a way of raising awareness about albinism. In this article, we focus on spoken word poetry emerging from Malawi, one of the countries that have registered high statistics of violence against persons with albinism. Drawing from a close reading of two Malawian spoken word poets, Phindu Banda and Yamikani Mayere, the current article illustrates how Malawian spoken word poetry on albinism exists as an optimal form to express the experiential plight of persons with albinism. The article showcases how the two poets articulate awareness of albinism by interrogating crosscutting issues such as nature and (in)humanity, commodification of the human body, religious faith, and motherhood.

High Time to Break Up the Boys’ Club: The Gendered Politics of Spoken Word and Open Mic Spaces in Trinidad and Tobago

The increased visibility of spoken word in media, public campaigns, and literary festivals demands critical attention to the social organisation of the art form, movement, and space. This paper explores the gendered politics of spoken word and open mic spaces in Trinidad and Tobago since 2000. Based on semi-structured interviews with spoken word poets and open mic organisers, this article discusses the unequal gender power relations between male and female spoken word poets in open mic events. I argue that unredressed gender stereotypes and male privilege contextually marginalise female spoken word poets and maintain the posture of “power” for male spoken word poets and organisers in the movement.

You start where you are: Literary spaces of Palestine solidarity

This essay discusses the contributions that three of the most prominent diasporic Palestinian Anglophone spoken word poets—Suheir Hammad (US), Remi Kanazi (US), and Rafeef Ziadah (Tunisia/Canada/UK)—have made to a contemporary literature of Palestine solidarity, in relation to the tension between liberationist and humanitarian articulations of solidarity that characterizes many contemporary appeals for solidarity with Palestine. I focus on their political and stylistic commitment to plain speaking, an approach that distances their work from the stylistic conventions of human rights advocacy and literary modernism, which both tend to discourage the explicit articulation of political belief. These poets demand that the listener/reader “start where you are,” as Hammad puts it, and conceive of the Palestine solidarity movement as part of a global liberation struggle in which we are all implicated. An examination of how each poet constructs the solidarity relation through their creative uses of analogy, address, voice, and performance helps us to see how this forthright invitation to the listener/reader works in practice.

Your Story Will Forever Float as Memory: Afrodiasporic Cultural Production and Activism in Black Canada

ABSTRACT The narratives presented in this article speak to the lived experiences of an Afrodiasporic activist: an educator and spoken word poet named Efe. Efe mobilized his talents to support racialized youths as they navigated the complex and often difficult social context of Toronto, Canada. Efe also used his cultural production to speak to his own personal frustrations with being a Black man within Canada. These narratives are important because they counter the hegemonic way Canada is depicted as a welcoming “multicultural” country, consequently denying the racist and problematic methods that have been historically used when dealing with indigenous and Black communities and individuals.

Prowling Foucault: A review of Lynne Huffer, Foucault’s Strange Eros

Prowling FoucaultA review of Lynne Huffer, Foucault’s Strange Eros Britton Edelen (bio) Huffer, Lynne. Foucault’s Strange Eros. Columbia UP, 2020. Lynne Huffer’s Foucault’s Strange Eros is a translation, but not in the usual sense. This original work translates not a text from one language to another, but a person: Michel Foucault. Huffer invites us to perceive Foucault differently, with slightly squinted eyes and perked ears, so that we may see the lacunae in and hear the “strange murmuring[s]” of the archive (1). Like all good translations, Huffer’s brings to light something that went unnoticed in the original—eros. Prowling for this, Huffer uncovers the ethopoietic movements in ourselves and in the world that pulse just beneath the surface and offer strange possibilities for inhabiting the present. The change in our perception of Foucault issues from a change in designation: Foucault is not a philosopher, but something else. Huffer briefly characterizes the kind of philosopher that Foucault is not by referring to Simon Critchley’s 2013 New York Times essay “When Socrates Met Phaedrus,” which deals specifically with the presence of eros in philosophy. Critchley shows that the philosophical discipline’s longstanding commitment “to keeping everything but the rational mind outside its gates” is a quixotic, impossible dream (Huffer 31). Philosophy is not immaculate; the stain of irrational eros is always already there. But something is rotten in the philosophical eros that Critchley identifies. His reading of Plato’s Phaedrus “links eros to rhetoric, the art of persuasion . . . ‘the art by which the philosopher persuades the nonphilosopher to assume philosophical eros, to incline their soul toward truth.’” Philosophy’s task is to “tell people what they should do,” and eros is deployed in the service of this goal, which Huffer sees as dangerous because it “is a moralizing art bound up with the history of a rationalist violence” (31). Foucault, and Huffer with him, unequivocally rejects this moralizing. Huffer cites a 1980 interview in which Foucault exclaims, “I’m not a prophet; I’m not an organizer; I don’t tell people what they should do. I’m not going to tell them, ‘This is good for you, this is bad for you!’” (31). And if he isn’t a philosopher, someone who “tells people what they should do,” then what is he? There are numerous possible answers, but Huffer settles on one that, like eros, comes to us from ancient Greek sources. Foucault is the other of the philosopher: a poet. The poet and the philosopher stand on opposite ledges of a deep—but not uncrossable—chasm, and Huffer carries Foucault across (translatio). But is this reparative gesture necessary? Are philosophy and poetry distinct enough to require metamorphic translation? Huffer does not wade into this millennia-old debate or change its terms; she instead chooses, for better or worse, to take for granted the possibility of finding firm footing on the dichotomy’s now-shaky foundation. By “translating him as a poet,” Huffer asks us to see Foucault’s works as poetry, a category she avoids explaining in concrete terms (1). She presents only two definitions: Poetry is “narrative’s circuit breaker, an erotic counterviolence that dedialectizes history” (89); and, citing Foucault, a form that “opens language to ‘the void in which the contentless slimness of ‘I speak’ [and] is manifested [as] an absolute opening through which language endlessly spreads forth, while the subject—the ‘I’ who speaks—fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space’” (74). Huffer thus highlights the concordance between poetry, a form literally and metaphorically formed by and conducive to rupture, and Foucault’s genealogical method, which carefully attends to “breaks, gaps, and discontinuities” (36). The strongest testimonial for Huffer’s redesignation comes from the “poet” himself. Foucault calls for this reading through his career-long assertion “that truth, history, and life itself—all fundamental elements of biopower— are made, fashioned, and invented” (10). Foucault’s word for this making is “fictioning”: “fictions can ‘induce’—or ‘fiction’—‘effects of truth’” (11). Huffer asks us to listen to the murmur of Greek in the word poet(ry): “poiein, to make” (10). In this sense, Foucault is unequivocally a poet. Just...

From minstrelsy to the spoken word poet: Oral tradition and postcolonial Nigeria

This paper attempts to trace the influences, interactions, conflations and developmental trajectories that link the ancient art of oral chants, poetry, minstrelsy, and the contemporary and modernist spoken word versifications in practice today in Nigeria. Audience, form, content, and intent have been pivotal factors in the different epochs that separate the ancient precursors and the present forms in this performance matrix. Through ethnographic and qualitative approaches, and textual analyses, select spoken word poets in contemporaneity have been studied and their verses analyzed for such influences from established traditional forms; validating credence that the ancient forms have built a formidable bulwark of elements and standards that give rise to spoken word poetry fitting for the malaise of the post colony. There has been a dearth of such research scope. Two contemporary spoken word poets with Yoruba (oriki and ijala elements) and Igbo (abu and mbem factors) nationalities are studied in this paper and a nexus has been established that oral tradition has through adequate metamorphoses, augmented a postcolonial tenor and relevance. This study has elicited the use of the spoken word poet as its theoretical anchor.

‘a night where june and moon rhyme’

Dr Raphael d’Abdon is a writer, scholar, spoken word poet, editor and translator. In 2007 he complied, translated and edited I nostri semi/Peo tsa rona, an anthology of contemporary South African poetry. In 2011 he translated into Italian (with Lorenzo Mari) Bless Me Father, the autobiography of South African poet Mario d’Offizi. In 2013, he compiled and edited the collection Marikana: A Moment in Time. He is the author of three collections of poems, sunnyside nightwalk (Johannesburg: Geko, 2013), salt water (Johannesburg: Poetree Publishing, 2016) and the bitter herb (East London: The Poets Printery, 2018), and he has read his poetry in South Africa, Nigeria, Somaliland, Italy, Sweden and the USA. His poems are published in journals, magazines and anthologies in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, Singapore, Palestine, India, Italy, Canada, USA and UK, he is South Africa’s representative of AHN (Africa Haiku Network), and he is a member of ZAPP (The South African Poetry Project) and IPP (International Poetry Project), two joint-projects of the University of Cambridge, UNISA and the University of the Witwatersrand, whose chief aims are to promote poetry in schools in South Africa, UK and beyond, and to instill knowledge, understanding and a love of poetry in young learners.This interview is conducted through e mails in the months of April-May 2020 when Corona virus ravished the world. We saw light through the wings of poesy. We reached out each other through questions and answers about poetry, life and the immediate.

“My Body Is a Temple/I Am the God It Was Built For”: An Examination of the Confrontation of Male Entitlement in the Spoken Word Poetry of Savannah Brown and Hollie McNish

Alternative forms of expression, like spoken word and slam poetry, manifest themselves when conventional representations silence certain groups. These alternative forms, however, also hold the capacity to exclude certain individuals as is illustrated by the objectification of women in many contemporary spoken word forms. While the rising popularity of this genre of poetry reinforces the male gaze, certain female spoken word artists refuse to allow this form to erase their own experiences. This essay therefore brings to the forefront the voices of those who have emerged to confront this silencing and assert a female identity not determined by male fantasies. A strategic focus on the poems ‘hi, i’m a slut’ by Savannah Brown and ‘A Poem on Flo Rida’s Blow My Whistle’ by Hollie McNish, explores the effectiveness of the techniques used by female spoken word poets to subvert and even ridicule this male-dominated form, which in turn creates a liberating space in which the voices of women are brought to centre stage.

Poetry, Identity, and Family: An Interview with Amal Kassir Conducted by Nina Zietlow

Amal Kassir is a 23-year-old Syrian-American spoken word poet and artist. Kassir has performed in 10 countries and over 45 cities and has conducted workshops, given lectures, and recited her poetry in venues ranging from youth prisons to orphanages, refugee camps to universities, and churches to community spaces. She hopes to take part in the global effort to support literacy in war-struck areas and refugee camps and runs a project called More than Metaphors that focuses on helping to educate displaced Syrian children. Recipient of multiple awards, including the Grand Slam at the Brave New Voices International Youth Competition, Kassir has performed on the TED stage and been featured on the PBS NewsHour.

“[T]he most underrated genre”: Malaysian Poetry in English in the 21st Century

The point of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, it will survey all the important volumes of poetry by Malaysian poets writing in English in the new millennium and try to infer the current trends of Malaysian poetic writing in English. Secondly, I will show how the online social media has been wholly responsible in keeping the poetic word alive, especially in terms of the number of young writers who have espoused the form of the Spoken Word sub-genre of poetry. In fact, the spoken word poets seem to have discovered a new poetic “nerve” of the nation that is both exciting and challenging to read.

The Poetic Generation of Place: Ethnography for a Better World

In this article, I employ the ethnographer poetic as a strategic provocation to rethink the foundation of contemporary ethnography. The root of the word poet or poem is the ancient Greek concept of poiesis. Poiesis is defined as making. While in the Greek tradition poiesis foregrounded an analysis of the arts or aesthetics, contemporary usages highlight the making of a social or political dimension. Drawing from the social and political dimensions of poiesis, I argue that the ethnographer does more than simply represent a social context, and, instead, calls the place into existence. The ethnographer poet transforms ethnography from a representational form of inquiry into a generative poetics of place. This allows for a new social mythos to emerge in which the field of ethnography is brought into the service of envisioning and working toward a society that is hopeful, abundant, vibrant, and just.

A rose by any other name? Developing a method of collaborative poetics

ABSTRACT This article describes a new method of participatory arts-based research in which poets and social scientists form a collaborative research collective. This collaborative poetics method harnesses participants’ skills and knowledge to produce innovative, creative pieces, which can deepen understandings of social scientific issues and communicate this knowledge in engaging, accessible ways. The method was developed in a pilot study in which seven young spoken word poets and one poet/social scientist explored their lived experiences of discrimination. These experiences were elucidated through poetic autoethnographies, which were disseminated in a chapbook and live spoken word performance. Audience feedback indicated that the autoethnographies were powerful and thought provoking. For the co-researchers, the project was a transformative experience, facilitating changes in their focus, exploration, and communication of issues around discrimination and encouraging them to respond differently to instances of discrimination, prejudice, or abuse. The pilot study thus provides strong, preliminary support for the value of the collaborative poetics method.

Weekend Monk

Weekend Monk Tom Montgomery Fate (bio) I regard monks and poets as the best degenerates in America. Both have a finely developed sense of the sacred potential in all things. -Kathleen Norris Peosta, Iowa I am a slow and bumbling pilgrim. So I couldn’t watch both the road and the pulsing blue GPS dot on my little iPhone map, and got lost somewhere near Dubuque. I’d accidentally spun the whole map upside down with my index finger, so nothing made sense. North was no longer north. I grew up just thirty miles away, but the dusty county road winding through the endless cornfields looked like a hundred others I’d traveled. And my internal compass is less reliable since I’ve grown reliant on digital ones. But finally, with a paper map, I found Monastery Road, and followed it to an asphalt lane, which led through a row of towering [End Page 169] white pines, and opened to the yellow stone entrance of the New Melleray Abbey. Like many small Iowa communities, it’s easy to miss, in the middle of nowhere, and quite beautiful––to those who can see where they are. A pamphlet for guests in a rack near the Abbey’s entrance serves as a guide for visitors. The monks describe themselves as “Christians professing the Rule of St. Benedict…” As you make your retreat at New Melleray, you will learn more about the monks, the Rule of Saint Benedict, and a life oriented to contemplative prayer. That’s partly why I had come—to remember how to pray. Not that I ever knew, but I used to practice more––in seminary, which is where I first read about the Rule of St. Benedict. In the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia, an ascetic monk, who lived in a cave in Italy for three years, wrote a book of rules for monastic communities. It prescribes a life of prayer that is separate from “the world,” obedient to Christian ideals, and under the authority of an abbot. The Rule later became the guidebook for monastic life, and for fifteen hundred years, monasteries around the globe have followed it, including New Melleray. When I arrived at the Guestmaster’s office to get my room assignment, a stocky, balding, seventy-something monk was leaning on his walker and thumbing through a folder. He clearly didn’t expect me, but quickly found my reservation. “You’re in 218,” he said. “There are no keys. Meals are downstairs in the refectory after prayers.” When he asked where I was from, I mentioned that I’d taken classes at Chicago Theological Union (CTU)––a respected Catholic seminary. “We call that the Cesspool of Theological Uncertainty,” he said, smiling. Given this barb, and my own eclectic theology, I didn’t respond. For me, the “study of God” (ology theo), and religion itself, is rooted in uncertainty, in questions. After my five-minute orientation was over, I had a “What am I doing here?” moment. Was I some ridiculous wannabe monk? I wasn’t Catholic, didn’t know how to pray or cross myself or bless myself with [End Page 170] holy water, or chant psalms melodically, or bow at the right times, or anything else. In spite of this ignorance, I still wondered if I might have a spiritual epiphany of some sort during my four-day stay—as if I could schedule, and recognize, such a revelation. I thanked the Guestmaster, went to my car, grabbed my bag and books, and climbed the stairs to my “cell.” Cell. I like this word. It turns a monastery into a prison, a pilgrim into a prisoner, highlighting the isolation and suffering of monks and artists and other willing captives. Monks and artists seek to be creatively freed in their confinement, in their simple, boiled-down lives. They are not “doing time” but making it. That’s what the word poet (poetes) means: “maker.” An artist too has faith––in their search for meaning amid the mystery of creation––in how they trust and listen to the stillness. And it was still––eerily quiet. The monks took no vows of silence, yet...

Dust, a spoken word poem by Guante

In "Dust," spoken word poet Kyle "Guante" Tran Myhre crafts a multi-vocal exploration of the connections between the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the current struggles against xenophobia in general and Islamophobia specifically. Weaving together personal narrative, quotes from multiple voices, and "verse journalism" (a term coined by Gwendolyn Brooks), the poem seeks to bridge past and present in order to inform a more just future.

From a Gangsta to a Spoken Word Poet: The Multiple Identities of Spiritual

One’s identity is always forming based on past social and cultural experiences. In this article, the author utilizes the notion of identity and figured worlds to capture and discuss the “multiple identities” of Spiritual, an African American male. By illustrating how Spiritual critically analyzed his figured world via spoken word, the author demonstrates the importance of empowering dispossessed youth to be able to critique and examine the material conditions of their lives through “unsanctioned literacies” or “ill-literacies”. Therefore, through this case study, the author explains how we can better engage oppressed students through the power of spoken word poetry—which enables them to critically examine their lived experiences, to challenge and question the harsh realities of everyday life, and helps them find their voice.