Spoken Word Poetry

A figure walks onto a bare stage, stands by a lone microphone and begins to speak. A hush falls over the audience. Words flow from this person effortlessly. A well-constructed poem is spoken like a monologue. This is world of spoken word poetry. I have, in one of my earlier posts, mentioned spoken word poetry and of my favourite spoken words poets, but there is so much more to explore.

Spoken word poetry is a form of word based performance art. Since its inception, the spoken word has been an outlet for people to release their views outside the academic and institutional domains. The spoken word and its most popular offshoot, slam poetry, evolved into a platform to express  views, emotions, life experiences or information to audiences. The views of spoken word artists encompass frank commentary on religion, politics, sex and gender, often taboo subjects in society.

I became interested in spoken word poetry though the works of Sarah Kay and her TEDx performance.  Someone posted her poem “If I should have a daughter” on my Facebook wall and suddenly I was hooked to this world. These poets are truly word-smiths. Crafting sentences into beautiful images.

Sarah Kay is the full-time co-director of Project VOICE along with her long-time friend Phil Kaye (No relation.) Project V.O.I.C.E. (Vocal Outreach Into Creative Expression) celebrates self-expression and encourages people to engage with the world around them by using Spoken Word Poetry as an instrument to better explore their culture, their society, and themselves.

Sarah and Phil’s “When Love Arrives” is one of my all-time favourite poems. (PS Ashliegh and I are writing a response to this poem. Watch this space.) Everyone has expectations about what love will be like. And when love finally arrives, it doesn’t always match those expectations.

I have spent long nights hanging out with my friends, watching spoken word poetry on Youtube. My friends would knock on my door and then end up staying until past midnight watching amazing videos and spoken work performances. I discovered Martin Ingle, A.K.A “Bread and Bullfights, through a response video he made for Sarah Kay entitled  “If I should have a son.”  I love Martin and his poetry, because he is so awkward that he comes off truly sincere.

Poets like Katie Makkia, aren’t afraid to challenge social conventions. This is her poem “Pretty.” 

H20- Dealing with a water “crisis”

[In honour of World Water Day. Which was today!]

Think about your day and about the amount of times that you have used water. I showered, flushed the toilet, made some tea, did my laundry and washed my dishes. All of these activities used a lot of water. I only recently fully realized how important water was when Rhodes was struck by a 4-day water ‘crisis’. For four days we did not have any water and people were miserable (and smelly.)

I must admit that I was also quite moody about the situation. Res smelt bad due to the clogged toilets and I had to mission all the way to a friend’s digs just to shower. Every day it got worse and worse and we prayed for the water to come back. And it then it did. ‘Crisis’ over.

Once I was showered, it dawned on me how incredibly ungrateful we all were being. Our water came back. The only reason we missed it so much was because we knew what it felt like to have water. We knew what it was like to have flushing toilets and taps just across from our beds. We called it a water ‘crisis’ when there are woman in Ethiopia who have to walk one hour twice a day to collect water for basic things.

Water.org is an organisation founded in order to provide water sources for the 2.6 billion people across the globe that are truly going through a water crisis. That means that they do not have access to clean, safe water supplies. I would suggest you look them up in order to understand truly what they are all about.

(Fun Fact: Actor Matt Damon is one of the co-founders of Water.org. One of role models, Hank Green, is also actively involved.)

http://water.org/

Follow Hank Green's time Haiti:

A change in perspective

I don’t often use the word “epiphany” causally, and I certainly would not usually associate Friars (or St. Patrick's day) with any kind of epiphany, but last weekend I was hit with quite powerful moments of clarity after a series of unexpected conversations. A trilogy of enlightenment.

The first was a compliment received  from a person who I thought disliked me. Here was a person who I thought looked down on me. I did not expect their nice comments about one of my personal qualities. Suddenly their good qualities were revealed and I understood that my one dimensional view of them was quite incorrect.

 The second revelation was when I realized that I had severely misjudged a guy based on gossip about him and the people he hung around. I found myself sitting across from him at the bar and I could feel my scowl forming as he began to speak. I was quite unprepared for the friendly: “Hi, Elri.” Using someone’s name is a powerful thing. It means that you acknowledge them as a person. It means you listened. Long story short I ended having a lovely conversation with him. Turns out we have a lot in common.

I think the third conversation had the most profound effect on me. I ran into a fellow Writing kid (who isn’t Ashleigh) and we somehow landed up talking about our class and where we fit it.  I shocked to find out that I wasn’t the only one that felt like they didn’t clue about what they were doing. I was shocked to realize that I wasn’t the only one that felt like my opinions weren’t good enough to be voiced in front of the others. Let alone having my work read out. And I was shocked to realize that I wasn’t the only that felt like they didn’t belong. Ironically this person used to be someone who intimidated me. I thought they had their life sorted more than I did. Turns out they are just like me.

I’ve always had Ashes in Journ. We often tell each other that we would not survive Journ without each other. But not everyone has an Ashleigh.  If I look at our class it’s now clear to me that most of us are very good at hiding these feelings. Writing is a very intimate thing. It’s also quite lonely. As John Green put it:  “Writing is something you do alone. It’s a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story, but don’t want to make eye-contact while they do it.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." I know he was talking about the struggle of human beings to achieve their goals by both transcending and re-creating the past, but the image of boats beating against a current speaks to what we are going through. We are boats beating on against the current. Struggling just get a little ahead and not sink.  Maybe we should try beating on together.

It’s quite a calming thought to know that we are not alone.

(I know that this blog post is a little out of sync with the rest of my posts and it’s a little muddled, but moments of enlightenment usually are. I promised the person who inspired this change of perspective that I would write a blog about it, so I’m sticking to that promise.)

Why I write.

In a paper entitled “Why I write” George Orwell claimed that many writers write out of sheer egotism and from my experience as an aspiring writer I’d have to agree with Mr Orwell.  After all he was not merely an aspiring writer, but rather a great one.

Many, not all, writers have the desire to have their work recognised. The American writer William Faulkner is quoted as saying “Don’t be a writer. Be writing.” With respect to Orwell, I think Faulkner had a better point. It means nothing to simply call yourself a writer. It means something to write.

 Truth be told it’s not easy being a writer. It’s not easy stringing a bunch of words together like the charms on an expensive bracelet. Pluck one loose and the rest fall into a pile on the floor. Scattered pieces of something that used to be beautiful, but now has no meaning. We write simply because we can. We know how to. As difficult as this may seem to believe, writing is hard. Finding the right words to express something is far from comfortable, yet why then am I so ready to sacrifice my time and sanity for a life consumed by the words?

I write because I believe that the world speaks to me. I see the world through different angles. Like looking though a camera lens. A different story can be told if you just change your perspective.  I write, because there is so much beauty around me that needs to be described. I write, because even the string of words in a sentence can be beautiful.

Writing is an emotionally fuelled activity. You write about something that angers or disturbs you; something that causes you joy or deep sorrow. Writing is the spilling of these emotions on a page.  Lord Byron once said, “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I’d go mad.” Similarly, Orwell describes the desire to write as a demon that one can ‘neither resist nor understand.’ For Orwell, and for me, writing seems to be a natural instinct. A way of making sense of the world we live in.

That is why I write.  I write so that I can make sense of all that is going on in this confused mind of mine. I write to make sense of the ‘what ifs?’  That which could have been. Or that what might be, if I give it life.  I write, because every moment of every day I am surrounded by untold stories. Stories of pain and stories of joy. There are stories of adventures; of failures and of victories. I write, because, like Byron, I would go mad if the words and stories in my head did not have an escape. I write, because it’s the one thing in my life that makes sense. 

Nick, from the New Girl

I'd give you the moon if I could afford it

Words. Powerful little buggers, which can build up or break down empires. Words can be infinitely beautiful and beautifully infinite in the way in which they capture the essence of the world we live in. My close friend, Ashleigh, recently wrote an absolutely beautiful blog post  about the power and magic of words.

“Magic”. I think that was the prefect word to use in this case. Ashleigh and I were procrastinating together the other day and we stumbled upon a bunch of amazing spoken word poets on Youtube. (See Youtube isn’t just for cat videos!) By the quiet in the room it was clear to me just how nerdy for words Ashes and I were.

Even as I am writing this it’s clear that these words used to be just scribblings on a page, but now, through years of literary development, they contain meaning. The words “sorrow” used to be nothing and it became a way to explain a deep sadness, a loss; something so much more than a simple, six-letter word. I guess that’s why I like spoken word poetry. I can’t really say why a word or a phrase touches me, but for that brief moment those words connected to something I knew I felt, but could never express.

For example the poem “Not a love poem” by Martin Ingle- known by his Youtube name, Bread and Bullfights.

It makes no sense to me rationally why the words of an awkward Australian boy my age would speak to me, but they do. The words speak to me, because I have felt the emotions that Martin describes. It’s more than just understanding that it’s not a poem about love. It’s about grasping the fact that here is a person speaking to Love as if it were a person. Every word of the poem was picked, because it creates feeling and emotion. Words can do that. Words can touch things within us that we can’t understand, but can relate to in another person. Words create that common connection between us.

“I’d give you the moon if I could afford it, but my words will have to do instead.” 

Proof-reading

I seriously need to learn how to proof-read. I have just read over a few older posts and was shocked by the incorrect grammar and needless spelling mistakes. For someone claiming to love words so much I clearly haven't been giving that aspect that much attention. From now on expect better from me! 

Ironically, I even made a mistake while writing this short post. I think the problem is that I write like I speak. It all comes out before I can even think about what I said. You know, at least 

you will always be entertained.

PS- hopefully my grammar will never be this bad: