ABSTRACT
Spoken word has been defined many ways, often arranging some combination of the terms poetry, performance, and style. And yet, as a verbal art more idiomatic than literary and more actual than abstract, it deviates from inherited notions of poetry into the less discrete category of we-know-it-when-we-see-it. Part of the difficulty in offering a pure definition of spoken word comes from the various identified subgenres that both run up against and comprise it. Dana Gioia uses the term “popular poetry” to encompass “rap, cowboy poetry, poetry slams, and certain overtly accessible types of what was once a defiantly avant-garde genre, performance poetry” (7), opting to highlight the mainstream cultural aspects of the phenomena as opposed to the less politically suggestive expression spoken word. But spoken word is inextricably linked to the personal and the bodily, a metaliterary mode of creative expression that is embodied as it is performed, where voice is literal and not merely figurative as it is when regarding creative expression of the page. Meta DuEwa Jones explains that “the term ‘spoken word’ is often used interchangeably with ‘performance poetry,’ since the terminology suggests the poem’s essence cannot reach fulfillment without a staged (in multiple senses of this word) environment” (184). The emphatic staging of “the dynamic qualities entailed in speech” (Jones, 184) is central to spoken word, far more so than to the kinds of formal poetry readings of the modernist era recounted by literary critics such as Peter Middleton and Lesley Wheeler.1
