Friday, September 4, 2009

Unraveling the yarns of Spoetry

With the latest performance by a spoken word artist this past Wednesday at AASU, one Mr. Carlos Robson, I was struck with the idea to center my blog around the art of performance poetry.

How can one sustain such a blog, people may wonder?

Easy. I plan to dispel many rumors and myths about those who write poetry, especially those about men. Like many other avenues of expression poetry has evolved over the years.

I plan on enlightening those who may be otherwise unawares about the differences between spoken word poetry and poetry written specifically for poetry slams. Technically there is no such thing as “slam poetry”, rather there are poetry “slams” for which certain poems are written to meet parameters of time, subject, and competition.

I intend to further discuss these details as well as highlight different spoken word artists who influenced my own poetry and that of others.

Hopefully, those of you following this blog will discover the complexity and the talent of performance poets from the likes of Rives, Taylor Mali, E-baby, Carlos Robson, Annie DeFranco, and many, many others. (I will provide links to some of their stuff next time around, for this is merely a mission statement at this point).

Performance, or spoken word, poetry will be referred to on this blog hereto hither as SPOETRY, a term I have coined for the blog, though somebody else may have already laid claim to it.

Spoetry can be comedy, drama, storytelling, poetry, rhyme, rhythm, song, music or any combination of these things. It is expression in spoken form that goes beyond merely talking or freestyling (though freestyling can be an aspect of it).

There will be more to spit shortly (spit is a term spoets use when talking about performing)…

2 comments:

  1. The AASU Writer's Club had a reading last semester at Barnes and Noble in which we all read something we wrote and then had an open mic. There was only one guy that went up for open mic. My question for you, Schwartz: was that you?

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  2. This is Schwartz and that would be a yes!

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