Spoken Word Performance Quotes

Living in Barcelona, I have my own little ghetto utopia. There are 3,000 ghost towns in Spain, and I've used the images of them a lot in my backdrops for my solo spoken-word stuff. The ghost towns could be from two buildings to 40 - things died out, or there were plagues, the roads don't lead there, whatever.

My writing just kind of exists out there in the air-it's all sort of intended as spoken, or sung, word. So, to commit them to the page...that way was kind of intimidating to me, yet intriguing, to try to reflect the rhythms and connotations and emotions that you can deliver, speaking-wise, on a page.

Chris Chandler is the best performance poet I have ever seen.

I've always tried to keep reinventing myself and to keep appealing to young people and when I go to colleges now and do my spoken-word show it's astounding to me how I get older and the audience gets younger. To me, that's the best compliment. That's better than money, that's better than anything.

Chris Elliott could read the phonebook and he's funny.

I wanted to do 'Manzanar' because I'd never done anything like it before. The spoken word there is between a drama and an essay, and I'd never worked in concert with an orchestra.

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.

Well, it's my voice, so it's more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it's very different from writing fiction.

I always like spoken word records.

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.

Shatner will spin lines in ways you don't see coming - he winds the audience down like a spring and hits the line so hard, they erupt. It's amazing to watch actually.

When people see my show, they may not laugh out loud as they do with some of the classic comedians, but they do enjoy it. I regret that I called it comedy to begin with; I should have called it 'An Evening With' or put it down as spoken word. But the emphasis is always on funny stories.

When I started reciting my own poems in public, I worried that it would seem too theatrical, but now I find recitation very natural, because it allows me to address audiences directly.