In the quiet darkness of Bowman Hall, after classes had ended for the day on Tuesday, October 29th, there was lighthearted cheer and laughter coming from room 205. Inside, members of the Poetry Collective, one of the poetry-focused clubs on campus, chatted as they waited for the evening’s event to begin.
The Collective gathered that Tuesday for a spoken word workshop, hosted by club co-founder and president Matt Lewellyn, ’26. From the moment he called the meeting to attention and directed attendees’ gazes to the screen in front of them, it was clear Lewellyn was passionate about the medium.
“That’s definitely one of my favorite spoken word poems,” he said, after showing a video of “When Love Arrives,” performed by the poets, Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye. “But obviously, I used this workshop as an excuse to force you to sit through all of my favorite spoken word poems.”
Forced is too strong a term. From the first explanations and examples, those in attendance had bought into the excitement of working with spoken words and eagerly jumped into the conversation.
Lewellyn began the workshop by outlining the key difference in writing “normal” poetry and spoken word poetry. When a writer sits down to draft a piece of normal poetry, they are creating a visual experience for their reader. It’s the job of the words on the page, as well as their arrangement, to create a world or moment for the audience to explore.
Conversely, spoken word poetry relies on sound above all else. There’s no transcript for an audience member to read along with.
As Lewellyn explained it, spoken word blurs the lines between poetry and performance. Instead of the audience reading words off a page and illustrating them in their mind, they listen to the voice of a performer and absorb their tone, pacing, and body language to build their understanding of the message.
“We aren’t playing with the space on the page, as we so often get the opportunity to do,” said Lewellyn. “Now, we get to play with the [voice and the] body.”
While poetry has been an artform for centuries, spoken word as we think of it today is a recent development.
“Modern spoken word poetry, like the video we saw, started really in the 1920s, with performers reciting poetry alongside improvisational jazz,” Lewellyn said. “For those who aren’t familiar with jazz, there’s a lot of improvising in there, there’s a lot of figuring stuff out as you go along and sort of playing and that lends itself very well to a spoken word medium: somebody who’s not necessarily concerned about rhyme scheme, as you would be in a song, but is still able to have these sporadic moments of rhythm and moments of engagement with music.”
Finding its footing alongside jazz in the 20s and becoming popular with members of the Black Arts Movement in the 60s and 70s, it’s no surprise spoken word poetry often comes from the mouths and minds of marginalized people.
Spoken word lends itself to being more accessible and more memorable than traditional poetry, according to Lewellyn, and is thus frequently explored by activists. He shared one of his favorite examples, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” by Gil Scott Heron, who is often called the father of hip hop. In the example, Heron read his poem over jazz, and the combination of sounds was astounding.
It’s not just racial justice advocates who have found a voice in spoken word poetry. The medium appeals to anyone with something to say, like Anna Binkovitz, another spoken word poet Lewellyn highlighted during the workshop.
In her performance of “Suffragette 69,” Binkovitz used spoken word poetry to invite her audience to question the roles they assigned and enforced on women, particularly when it came to their sex lives. The piece was filled with insight-inspiring lines, like “I refuse to believe that carrying the weight of a movement means leaving my heart on the other side of the picket line, and if the personal is political, I will occupy my skin unapologetically.” Her passionate delivery of the poem gave a voice to the issue that simply could not have been as effectively conveyed with words on a page.
Having learned about, watched, and analyzed examples of spoken word poetry, attendees were then turned loose to write some of their own. With no particular prompt, the subjects of the poems varied: new love, old gods, riding a bike, and everything in between. As they shared their work and gave feedback to their peers, it was clear a new fascination was forming for the poets.
If poetry, spoken word or otherwise, sounds like your scene, the poetry collective meets every Tuesday from 7-8pm. You can contact Matt Lewellyn, Casey Vieira, Will Flynn, or Fallon Maloney for more information.
