spoken word

The tradition & historical record

Spoken word is an oral poetic performance art that is based mainly on the poem's as well as the performer's aesthetic qualities. It is a 20th-century continuation of an ancient oral artistic tradition, most notably the Greek oral-formulaic tradition, which produced the oldest works in the Western tradition, that focuses on the aesthetics of recitation and word play, such as the performer's live intonation and voice inflection. Spoken word is a catch-all term that includes any kind of poetry recited aloud, including poetry readings, poetry slams, jazz poetry, pianologues, musical readings, and hip hop music, and can include comedy routines and prose monologues. Unlike written poetry, the quality of spoken word is shaped less by the visual aesthetics on a page, and more from phonaesthetics or the aesthetics of sound. ¹

Spoken word has existed for many years; long before writing, through a cycle of practicing, listening and memorizing, each language drew on its resources of sound structure for aural patterns that made spoken poetry very different from ordinary discourse and easier to commit to memory. "There were poets long before there were printing presses, poetry is primarily oral utterance, to be said aloud, to be heard." Poetry, like music, appeals to the ear, an effect known as euphony or onomatopoeia, a device to represent a thing or action by a word that imitates sound. "Speak again, Speak like rain" was how a poet of the Kikuyu people, an East African people, described her verse to author Isak Dinesen, confirming a comment by T. S. Eliot that "poetry remains one person talking to another". The oral tradition is one that is conveyed primarily by speech as opposed to writing. In predominantly oral cultures proverbs (also known as maxims) are convenient vehicles for conveying simple beliefs and cultural attitudes. "The hearing knowledge we bring to the line of poetry is a knowledge of a pattern of speech we have known since we were infants". Performance poetry, which is kindred to performance art, is explicitly written to be performed aloud and consciously shuns the written form. "Form", as Donald Hall records "was never more than an extension of content." Performance poetry in Africa dates to prehistorical times with the creation of hunting poetry, while elegiac and panegyric court poetry were developed extensively throughout the history of the empires of the Nile, Niger and Volta river valleys. One of the best known griot epic poems was created for the founder of the Mali Empire, the Epic of Sundiata. ¹

In 1849, the Home Journal wrote about concerts that combined spoken word recitations with music, as demonstrated by actresses Sophie Schroder and Fanny Kemble. Vachel Lindsay helped maintain the tradition of poetry as spoken art in the early twentieth century. Composers such as Marion Bauer, Ruth Crawford Seegar, and Lalla Ryckoff composed music to be combined with spoken words. Robert Frost also spoke well, his meter accommodating his natural sentences. Poet laureate Robert Pinsky said: "Poetry's proper culmination is to be read aloud by someone's voice, whoever reads a poem aloud becomes the proper medium for the poem." "Every speaker intuitively courses through manipulation of sounds, it is almost as though 'we sing to one another all day'." "Sound once imagined through the eye gradually gave body to poems through performance, and late in the 1950s reading aloud erupted in the United States." Some American spoken-word poetry originated from the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, blues, and the Beat Generation of the 1960s. Spoken word in African-American culture drew on a rich literary and musical heritage. Langston Hughes and writers of the Harlem Renaissance were inspired by the feelings of the blues and spirituals, hip-hop, and slam poetry artists were inspired by poets such as Hughes in their word stylings. The Civil Rights Movement also influenced spoken word. Notable speeches such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream", Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?", and Booker T. Washington's "Cast Down Your Buckets" incorporated elements of oration that influenced the spoken-word movement within the African-American community. ¹

Outside of the United States, artists such as French singer-songwriters Léo Ferré and Serge Gainsbourg made personal use of spoken word over rock or symphonic music from the beginning of the 1970s in such albums as Amour Anarchie (1970), Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971), and Il n'y a plus rien (1973), and contributed to the popularization of spoken word within French culture. In 2003, the movement reached its peak in France with Fabien Marsaud aka Grand Corps Malade being a forerunner of the genre. ¹

In the UK, musicians who have performed spoken-word lyrics include Blur, The Streets, Isaac Wood, and Kae Tempest. ¹

In Zimbabwe, spoken word has been mostly active on stage through the House of Hunger Poetry slam in Harare, Mlomo Wakho Poetry Slam in Bulawayo as well as the Charles Austin Theatre in Masvingo. Festivals such as Harare International Festival of the Arts, Intwa Arts Festival KoBulawayo and Shoko Festival have supported the genre for a number of years. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Spoken word”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

spoken word is genre; oral poetic performance art based mainly on the poetic as well as the performer's aesthetic qualities, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 10 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²