Spoken Word Poetry with International Students and Youth from Refugee Backgrounds (by Jennifer Burton)

This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

Spoken word…really cultivates a space for active listening, right?! It creates a space for you to be heard…It’s an interactive thing, right? There is a constant energy exchange that is happening, right? So if you hear something that you like, you snap your fingers [signals to audience and snaps fingers] ‘can everybody snap their fingers? Beautiful, you all sound like sexy rain. That’s wonderful’ [audience laughs]. …‘Mmmmh’, so on the count of three can we get a collective ‘Mmmmh? 1, 2, 3…[gestures to audience, raises hands] “Mmmmh” [audience replied], Wonderful, you all are beautiful, right. So there is that constant exchange, right. There is that thing of the active listening that people are responding to you, right. That all of that energy that is going out into the audience is coming right back to you onto the stage.

The above-mentioned excerpt comes from a TedTalk by spoken word artist Pages Matam as he describes the culture of spoken word poetry to the audience. While presenting poetry in oral form is not a new phenomenon, poetry slams have become “arguably the most successful poetry movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries” (Gregory, 2008, p. 63). A slam is a poetry competition—what Taylor (2015) calls “doing word” (p. 126). 

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