James Arthur Quotes

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

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.

And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.

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

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.

I find it creatively satisfying to write material and say it out loud in a public place, whether or not anyone's listening.

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.

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.

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.

There's always an added element of a poem when it's read aloud because then you can really hear the rhythm, and the cadence, and even the pronunciation sometimes adds another layer to the poem.

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

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.

In my case, performance is part of the medium. Sometimes I feel that it's my main medium, and that the presentation of my poems on the page is secondary.

Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.

I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.

I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem.

Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

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.

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.

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

I was always into poetry and writing. So the urgency of spoken word is something that really has always appealed to me.

I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose.

You can try and read my lyrics off of this paper before I lay 'em But you won't take the sting out these words before I say 'em