I wanted to talk about Lozada-Oliva’s spoken word/slam poems for this weeks’ blog post! I loved listening to her pieces in class, because the ways in which viewing the poem versus reading the poem changed the tone of it really stood out for me. Without her intonations, her facial expressions, and even the way she looked around the room at her audience, as well as the shape of her mouth and her particular pronunciations, the *fire* of the poem was gone (in my opinion). Reading the poem on paper gave it a more “somber” tone, and I found myself moving through it at a much slower pace than how Lozada-Oliva read it; the voice inside my head interpreted the poem to be monotone, serious, and much more “flat.” In fact, I had to read it several times in order to grasp what she was saying – in the spoken poem, her underlying “theme” was more evident, simply because of her supercharged presence.
This all made me think about how the genre of slam poetry really is a productive site for making highly charged political or emotional claims. Literature, essays, articles and presentations are effective to an extent – but imagine only READING Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, instead of hearing him SPEAK it out loud! (alternatively, imagine if professors just posted the transcriptions of all their lectures…) There’s something powerful about the way we can manipulate tone, the cadence of our voice, etc. to produce a response from an audience, and while the written word is powerful, I think the spoken word is more emotive and affective – for those willing to listen.
I also had a similar experience reading the poems compared to listening to them One difference that struck me the most was the pacing of her speech and the breaks in the written poem. I’d expect the fast spoken parts to be in a stanza together, and the slower parts to include more punctuation and spaces; yet, the faster parts were split up more than i’d expect to be. Like you said, it has a huge impact on how you perceive the work. I could understand more of her intentions when seeing the performance that I would’ve missed out on had I just read the work instead.
Hi Avery, I found your perspective really interesting! Though I like spoken word poetry, I usually prefer reading a poem to watching its performance, as I find that focusing more on the speaker’s expressions and intonation—while it does make it easier to identify the theme and tone of the piece—causes me to miss a lot of what the author is saying; I felt that I didn’t have enough time to take in the complexity of Lozada-Oliva’s writing and had to work to keep up with the story. At the same time, hearing it out loud was definitely more impactful from an emotional perspective: despite not having the time to fully process each line, her intentions were clear and the message was more powerful. As you point out, there is something about having these pieces performed that makes them so much more dynamic in a way that text on a page just doesn’t achieve.
Engaging and productive conversations, Avery, Kiri, and Izabella. You each lay out persuasive rationale for the strengths of both modes (spoken, written). This makes me think that perhaps our takeaway should be “spoken word is best enjoyed both on the page and on the stage.” In other words, it’s not either/or, but both. I, for one, am delighted with that takeaway 🙂