Hello folks! So in late March/early April three of the four Loud Poets organisers went to the U.S., myself included, and participated in the spoken word scene there. I was back on the East Coast for a visit home, during which I took part in two poetry events and taught two spoken word workshops on my undergraduate … Continue reading Comparing the U.S. & U.K. Spoken Word Scenes
Update: there's a great discussion going around this post where I linked it on my Facebook artist page - check it out here and please do join in! -K Yesterday the Scottish Poetry Library released its annual list of the Best Scottish Poems of 2015, a selection curated this year by novelist and poet … Continue reading Best Scottish Poems of 2015: A Response
One of my hopes for the new year was to try out new ways of writing and performing, and the start of 2016 has happily involved just that: I've been composing and performing lots of collaborative poems! Before this year I'd never written collaboratively before. Writing poetry had always been an intensely solitary event for me, involving … Continue reading Writing Collaborative Performance Poems
My last post responded to the way media sources were misconstruing Sarah Palin's endorsement speech for Donald Trump as "slam poetry." I gave several reasons why I consider that use of that term to be inaccurate and rather rude, including that the use of 'slam poetry' as shorthand for rambling, incoherent utterances misrepresents a field of poetry … Continue reading Why ‘Slam Poetry’ Is Not a Genre
Hi everyone! Today I'm posting in response to a frustrating effect I've noticed in the public perception of 'slam poetry.' For my research, I subscribe to Google News updates which send me daily emails with links to every media article posted that day containing the words "performance poetry," "spoken word," or "slam poetry." Usually these emails are … Continue reading Misconstruing ‘Slam Poetry’ in Popular Media
Hi everyone! I'm so excited to announce that today we're publicly releasing the new video for my poem "Polos"! The poem is linked at the bottom of this post, but rather than just posting the video up here I thought I'd also share the creative process that went into conceiving and producing this work. It's the product … Continue reading Dance & Spoken Word: Making Polos
Being a performance poet means fantastic live exposure: one can interact with the audience, contextualise poems through between-poem chat, adapt the set for the setting, etc. However, as great as this physical exposure and audience engagement is, performance poetry as a genre also carries with it the drawback that it is ultimately ephemeral. The audience may love your work, but at … Continue reading To Publish or Not to Publish Performance Poetry
Ed. note: This post has sparked discussion on Facebook and Twitter since being published, with feedback from a wide range of perspectives and opinions (some Facebook comments here, Twitter Storify here, some comments on the blog below). I'm delighted that a public conversation is occurring on the importance of trigger warnings, since for some they are … Continue reading Trigger Warnings for Poems?
Recently a friend asked me an excellent, difficult question concerning reproductions of spoken word poems and the ethics of performing someone else's poem. Her query is below: I enjoyed watching the videos of you performing your poems. It got me thinking (I know you wrote a blog post about the difference between writing poetry specifically for … Continue reading Is it OK to perform another slam poet’s work?
One of the first slam poems I wrote is a two-minute piece called "Swallow" which concerns the nuances of female fertility, sterility, and contraception (the poem can be watched here). In the autobiographical piece I express my sadness over the unfairness inherent in a situation in which I, as a young, presumably fertile woman, have the ability … Continue reading “Swallow”: When Poems are Misinterpreted
