What spoken word poetry is, and what it is not
What spoken word poetry is
Spoken word poetry is poetry written to be performed out loud, so the poem is finished in the air rather than on the page, in one person's voice, in front of listeners who cannot go back and read a line twice.
That single condition decides everything else about the form: the poem has to land at speaking speed, it carries its own timing instead of borrowing a page's, and the writer is almost always the performer.
The words around it get used loosely, and a room can argue for a fortnight without noticing that two people mean different things by the same term. The short glossary below is the version this site uses on every other page.
- Spoken word poetry
- Poetry composed to be said to an audience. Usually the poet's own words, usually said from memory or from a page held in one hand, usually with no music, no set and no other performer.
- Spoken word poem
- One piece of that work, normally between one and three minutes when it is said aloud, which is roughly 20 to 60 lines depending on the length of the line and the speed of the speaker.
- Performance poetry
- The older and broader term for poetry made for performance, common in Britain since the 1980s. In practice it overlaps almost completely with spoken word.
- Slam poetry
- Not a style. Any poem performed in a slam, which is a poetry reading with a scoring game attached to it.
- Spoken poetry
- The usual term in the Philippines for the same practice, used in Filipino, in English and in the mixture of the two that most school performers actually speak.
- Open mic
- An unjudged night where anybody who signs up gets the same short slot, normally three to five minutes. It is where nearly every spoken word poet starts.
What makes a poem spoken word rather than a poem read aloud
What makes a poem spoken word rather than a poem read aloud is the order the writer works in. A page poem is built for an eye that can pause, reread and see the shape of the stanza before it reads a word of it, so it can hide a turn in the white space and trust the reader to find it. A poem written to be said is built for an ear that gets one pass, in real time, at about 120 to 150 words a minute, and an ear that misses a line does not get it back.
Three things change as a result. Repetition stops being decoration and becomes the structure a listener holds on to. The ending has to arrive as sound rather than as a last line sitting alone on the page, because nobody can see that it is the last line. And the poem has to say who is speaking early, since a listener with no title, no epigraph and no page in front of them has only the voice to go on. What performance poetry is covers those three shifts in detail, because they are craft decisions rather than definitions.
What spoken word poetry is not: rap, theatre, stand up and school recitation
Spoken word poetry is not rap, theatre, stand up or a school recitation, and in each case the difference is one structural fact rather than a judgement about quality. The table sets the five forms side by side on the things that actually separate them.
| Form | Whose words | What holds the timing | What the room is judging |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spoken word poem | The performer's own | The speaker's breath and phrasing | Nothing formally, unless it is a slam |
| Rap verse | Usually the performer's own | A fixed beat, normally 16 bars in four four time | Flow against the grid, as well as the writing |
| Theatre monologue | A playwright's, performed by an actor | A director's staging and the scene around it | A character, inside a story |
| Stand up set | The comedian's own | The laugh, which resets the clock every time | Whether the room laughs |
| Recitation contest piece | A published poet's, said by somebody else | The poem as printed, which may not be altered | Accuracy, understanding and delivery, against a marking sheet |
The recitation row is the one that surprises people, because it looks the most like spoken word from the back of a hall. It is the opposite of it. A recitation contest asks a young person to serve somebody else's poem exactly as written, which is a real skill and a different one. Poetry By Heart runs that competition in schools in England, and the Scottish Poetry Library has run Poetry By Heart Scotland. School recitation in Wales runs through the llefaru competitions of the Urdd Eisteddfod, organised by Urdd Gobaith Cymru, and post primary schools in Northern Ireland enter Poetry Aloud, run by Poetry Ireland with the National Library of Ireland. In the United States the equivalent is Poetry Out Loud, run by the National Endowment for the Arts with the Poetry Foundation since 2005.
Hip hop is the boundary worth arguing about rather than dismissing, because the two forms share rhyme, persona and a written page behind the performance, and only the beat reliably separates them.
Slam poetry and spoken poetry: what separates the two terms
Slam poetry is spoken word poetry that happens to be performed in a competition, so the two terms sit at different levels rather than opposite each other. Spoken word poetry is the practice. A slam is one room the practice gets done in, with a three minute limit, five judges pulled out of the audience and scores from zero to ten. What a poetry slam is explains the format and the scoring in full.
The confusion changes what a young writer thinks the form demands. A slam rewards a poem that arrives fast and lands inside three minutes, so slam rooms tend to produce a particular kind of poem: direct, urgent, built on a repeated line. That is a competition effect rather than a rule of the form. A poem that takes six minutes, whispers, or ends without resolving is still spoken word, and it will simply do badly in a slam, which is a fact about slams.
Does spoken word poetry have to rhyme
No. Spoken word poetry does not have to rhyme, and most of what is performed at an open mic on any given night does not rhyme end to end. The form grew out of free verse and out of oral traditions that used rhythm, repetition and parallel phrasing rather than a fixed rhyme scheme.
Rhyme still does real work when it is used deliberately, and it does more work out loud than on the page because the ear catches a chime the eye would skim past. Three uses are worth knowing. Internal rhyme, inside a line rather than at the end of it, holds a fast passage together without announcing itself. A single rhymed couplet dropped into an unrhymed poem marks the ending as clearly as a full stop. And a slant rhyme, where the sounds nearly match, keeps the pattern audible without the singsong that a full rhyme produces at speed.
What spoken word poems look like in practice
Spoken word poems in practice fall into a handful of shapes that recur in every workshop, and naming the shape is more useful to a new writer than reading one example. This site publishes no poem written by a young writer, so what follows is the structure rather than the poem.
- Write a letter poem, addressed to one named person, place or version of yourself, and never break the address.
- Build a list poem, where each line begins the same way and the last item breaks the pattern.
- Take a persona, speaking as somebody or something that is not you, and let the listener work out who is talking.
- Praise an ordinary object at the length usually reserved for a grand subject, and let the mismatch do the work.
- Answer a question the poem asks in its first line, and make the answer arrive later than the listener expects.
Every one of those shapes can be written about love, which in the Philippines is one of the most requested subjects in school competitions, usually asked for as a piece tungkol sa pag-ibig. The shape holds whatever the subject is.
Spoken poetry in the Philippines, in Filipino and in English
Spoken poetry is the standard term in the Philippines for what the rest of this site calls spoken word, and the practice there runs mostly through schools, in Filipino, in English, and in the mixture of the two that students speak anyway. Named performers circulate on YouTube and Facebook rather than through published collections, which is why searches for the form so often pair it with an individual performer's name.
Two things about the school version are worth stating plainly, because they get carried into other rooms as though they were rules of the form. The first is costume. Contest marking sheets sometimes award points for costume, props or a musical backing, and a young writer who learned the form that way arrives at an open mic expecting to dress for it. Nothing about a spoken word poem requires a costume, and the standard slam rules bar props, costumes and musical accompaniment outright. The second is memorisation, which is a contest requirement rather than a condition of the work: plenty of experienced performers read from a phone or a folded sheet.
What travels between the two versions is the poem itself. A piece written for a school stage in Manila and a piece written for a library open mic in Britain are built out of the same materials, which is the whole argument of this site: Spoken word poetry is one practice with local rules bolted on, and What a spoken word poet is describes the person doing it rather than any particular room they do it in.