Nick Cannon Quotes

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.

Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.

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.

To me, writing is a matter of voice. I think like that. The expression I sometimes use to myself is 'actual song.' That what I do is somewhere on the line between speaking to you as I am now and actual song. And the things I love when I say one of those poems to myself - it's a little bit like singing, it's a little bit like speaking.

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

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

There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.

I've always been a writer. I've always done writing or spoken-word, hip-hop stuff with my friends.

Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.

My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.

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.

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

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.

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.

I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on.

I've worked throughout California as a poet: in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms.

Poetry has, in a way, been my bridge to my acting career.

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.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

I've always admired the tradition of storytellers who sat in the public market and told their stories to gathered crowds. They'd start with a single premise and talk for hours - the notion of one story, ever-changing but never-ending.

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.

First and foremost, I'm an oral storyteller - I'll make a poetic choice over a grammatical choice every single time.

No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.

We are proud to have with us the poet lariat of Chicago.