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.