Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.
Interpretation
Spoken word poetry is an engaging art form that emphasizes performance and audience interaction.
This quote by Sarah Kay highlights the dynamic nature of spoken word poetry, distinguishing it from traditional poetry by emphasizing the need for its auditory experience. It suggests that this form of poetry is meant to be performed and felt rather than merely read, engaging an audience beyond the written word and inviting them into a shared emotional experience.
In practice
Using this quote during a poetry slam to emphasize the importance of performance.
When I hear other people's stories, I like to believe that they contribute to my 'Encyclopedia of Human Experience.' The stories I hear help me expand my definition of what love is, what pain feels like, what sacrifice means, what laughter can do.
Life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.
But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed.
If I should have a daughter, instead of "Mom," she's going to call me "Point B," because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me.
Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.
To me, having the courage to tell your own story goes hand in hand with having the curiosity and humility to listen to others' stories.
All the same it is being said everywhere that I played too softly, or rather, too delicately for people used to the piano-pounding of the artists here.
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.
People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.
It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling.
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