An adaptation of a presentation at the 2024 MCTE Spring Conference
On the first day of an artist-in-residence gig, I generally dodge the question: What is poetry?
I’ve been a working poet for twenty years, was on two National Poetry Slam championship teams, performed everywhere from the Target Center to the United Nations, even contributed poetry to a Grammy-winning album—all while traveling the country facilitating workshops, teaching classes, and publishing books… but the truth is that I don’t particularly care what poetry “is.”
I am far more interested in what I consider to be more generative questions: What do you care about? What communities do you represent? What are your values? How might you communicate those values in a way that reaches people, that truly moves them? How might we take the swirling chaos of emotions and opinions in our heads and make them concrete, or “translate” our ideas into something real that the reader/listener can hold in their hands, or close their eyes and see?
Of course, these are all questions that are relevant to any creative writing practice, including traditional page poetry. But I have found spoken word poetry to be the place where they come to life most vividly, both for myself and the students I’ve worked with over the years.
All art and expression is valuable, but I think there’s a reason spoken word resonates with so many students: the visceral immediacy of live performance, the wide range of accessible examples (often via online video) with so many ages, identities, and approaches represented, the fundamental idea that there is no one way to do it: you get to talk about what you want to talk about, in the way you want to talk about it.
That freedom can be intimidating for students (and everyone really), but it can also be liberating. The spoken word unit is never about preparing students for their professional futures as spoken word poets; it is always about more foundational skills, some of which connect easily to standards (like using concrete language to effectively communicate an abstract concept, or basic principles of public speaking and using our voices), and some of which are more… intangible. It’s good to think about how we can communicate our values, but it’s something else to actually have space and encouragement to think critically about what those values might be in the first place—and the spoken word unit is built around that process.
An Introduction to Spoken Word
This is a short piece of writing, so I’m not going to share a comprehensive review of the oral traditions of every culture on Earth. But history is a good starting place: spoken word is not a new fad. A simple timeline exercise can allow students (and teachers!) to see how their own first exposure to the form—if they even have one—fits into the history: from today’s viral poetry videos, to old Def Poetry Jam DVDs, to live poetry slam competitions in bars and coffeeshops, to recordings of Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, to literary and cultural forerunners like Hip Hop, the Black Arts Movement, the Beat Generation, the Harlem Renaissance, and beyond… all the way back to the storyteller, the bard, the griot—the person who traveled from village to village sharing songs, stories, and poems, passing on the values and histories of a place or a people.
What most people refer to today as “spoken word,” “slam poetry,” or “performance poetry” has distinct elements we can examine, but I also think it’s vital to acknowledge how it emerges from that history. It’s still about telling stories and finding creative ways to pass on information about who we are: our identities, our communities, our values, and beyond.
As for definitions, I’m not sure how important or useful a single dictionary definition is. One way of thinking about spoken word is that it’s “original poetry read aloud” (as opposed to the recitation of famous poems). A more precise definition is maybe poetry that is written in order to be performed, where we are thinking about voice, negative space, and body language during the writing process itself. Another way of thinking about spoken word might be that it’s a hybrid form, pulling from poetry, but also from songwriting, stand-up comedy, speech and rhetoric, jazz, Hip Hop, theater, and other forms.
However we introduce and illuminate the concept, I try to land on three foundational points:
- Story: Everyone has a story, and every story matters.
- Freedom: There is no one way to write a spoken word poem—no rules regarding meter, rhyme or structure.
- Community: The goal is not to be the most brilliant individual on the stage; it is to collectively create spaces where we’re all sharing and listening to one other.
The synthesis: When you tell your story, when you talk about what matters to you using your authentic voice, and you do that while also listening to others tell their stories—that is how individuals (and communities, and societies) grow. That is an indescribably valuable thing, especially in this historical moment.
Again, there’s a lot more that could be said here, but I hope that can at least be a bit of context for people who might be new to the concept.
Exploring Possibilities: Application and Integration
A spoken word unit can dovetail neatly with principles related to critical pedagogy, culturally-relevant pedagogy, Hip Hop pedagogy, and beyond. But whether or not an individual teacher identifies with or practices those pedagogical approaches, adding or expanding a spoken word unit can have multiple impacts:
1. Spoken word can be a tactic for encouraging students not just to engage with reading and writing, but also education more broadly, and even the world around them beyond that. In every spoken word residency (to the point of it becoming a cliché), there are students who generally don’t engage much in class but who end up sharing something brilliant, or students who struggle with other kinds of writing and communication but “click” with the idea of exploring their own interests and opinions through performance.
2. Whenever I teach a spoken word unit, I share my own work, but I also make a point to share videos of other active practitioners. These videos, accessible online, feature a range of voices: poets at different points in their lives, holding different identities related to race, culture, gender, sexuality, geographic origin and beyond, approaching the microphone with different styles and techniques. Young people seeing other young people talking about what matters to them is a simple concept, but can be absolutely revelatory for students.
3. While performance and public speaking are, generally speaking, no one’s favorite topics, that can be a strength as much as it is a challenge. When everyone is expected to share, and we’ve reviewed multiple videos of different performers with different voices and styles, and we’ve had opportunities to discuss how we might navigate our nervousness and share tools and tactics for cultivating confidence, the spoken word unit becomes a useful life-skills experience, even (especially) for students who have no interest in pursuing performance as a career.
4. Spoken word poems are great opportunities to both study the craft of poetry and the deeper issues that poetry can be a tool for exploring and processing. So many of the most popular spoken word poems online explore issues related to identity, culture, mental health, social issues, heartbreak, and other topics young people are thinking about. The issues can be a way to invite students into the writing, but also vice-versa: the poems can be ways to invite students into a deeper engagement with these issues, with history, and with the world around us.
5. To expand on the previous point, I think of spoken word as an opportunity to engage with “challenging” issues in a way that is welcoming and brings people into the conversations. So much of my own work has been about counter-narrative masculinity, consent, identity, power, and privilege—lots of terms that, in this political climate, can be seen as “political” or at least “politicized.” But because I’m just a poet, and the “main” thing I’m there to talk about is poetry (even when we are talking about these deeper issues too) it’s sometimes a bit more… approachable. And while every school/community is different, in a general sense, I’ve had nothing but good experiences with students having space to speak their truth and be supported.
Further Resources and Possibilities
In the spirit of spoken word being a kind of expression that is sometimes a bit more relatable and down-to-earth than other forms, I thought I’d end this with something really concrete and practical.
First, this is a link to the resource document I shared during my MCTE presentation. It contains some of the most common resources I share with both teachers and students related to spoken word: how they can find more spoken word to explore, start a poetry club or writing circle, and/or actually dive into the vibrant local spoken word community themselves.
Second, this link is to a resource I shared with teachers for a residency I’m in the middle of as I write this. It contains a handful of my favorite spoken word videos to share in classrooms. There are tens of thousands to review and sort through online, so my hope is that this list of a dozen can be a useful start, a doorway into the culture.
Learn more about the author on our 2025 Contributors page.
MEJ 