Spoken Word (Cam B.)

I realize that our assignment was to only post a written poem to our websites, but after reading Mrs. Roush's blog post about how poetry is very easily overlooked, I noticed the same concept is applied to spoken word, or slam poetry. I've talked with a couple of friends about spoken poetry, but none seem to be aware of its impact. One of my peers who has been published in many magazines does not consider spoken word to even be poetry and fails to see how moving it, too, can be.

I just wanted to introduce you guys to the concept, and to mention that York has a poetry slam team. Last year we went to Louder Than a Bomb, a very big poetry slam competition, and heard many different poets perform their work. To me, poetry doesn't have to be written on paper. It doesn't have to be written by someone who's dead, someone famous, some adult, or some male (Dickinson was pretty good at what she did, especially considering how few females were in the poetry field in the 1800s). One poet, Kush Thompson, stood out to me at Louder Than a Bomb, and I wanted to share a few of her performances.

Here's SPEAK (There's a lot of screaming. It starts around :30)

And here's one of the later poems we heard her perform in the semi-finals, KILLING ME SOFTLY