Sylvia Plath Quotes

I think you can perform any poem. But what I believe is that the best examples of spoken word poetry I've ever seen, are spoken word poems that, when you see them, you're aware of the fact they need to be performed. That there's something about that poem that you would not be able to understand if you were just reading it on a piece of paper.

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.

I grew up in a place in which, if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it.

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.

I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I'd be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.

It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.

The poetry I love is written with someone's voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone's voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.

My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.

What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.

If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.

Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

For the last 15 years that I have been performing, all I ever wanted to do was transcend poetry to the world. See, it wasn't enough for me to write a book. It wasn't enough for me to join a slam competition, and while those things hold weight, it wasn't the driving force that pushes the pen to the pad.

Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.

In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking.

I saw an amazing film when I was 16 called 'Slam'. It's about a spoken-word poet. Saul Williams is in it.

I take my spoken-word stuff extremely seriously because I feel like that's true writing, true lyricism.

The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we're standing, we're doing stand-up. That's exactly what we're doing.

When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.

Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards...I don't know if anyone's reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established.

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.

The first spoken word poem I ever wrote was when I was 14 and I wrote it because I was accidentally signed up for a teen poetry slam. Because I loved poetry I said that I'd try it out.

Remember how pissed you got when we had to do all that reading about the Rising back in sixth grade? I thought you were going to get us both expelled. You said the only way things could've gotten as bad as they did was if people were willing to take the first easy answer they could find and cling to it, rather than doing anything as complicated as actually thinking.

If I'm engrossed in a book, I have to rearrange my thoughts before I can mingle with other people, because otherwise they might think I was strange.