What a spoken word poet is, and how anyone becomes one
What a spoken word poet is
A spoken word poet is a person who writes their own words and says them out loud to other people, which makes it a practice rather than a job title, a qualification or a talent somebody is born holding.
Nearly every one of them started as one of the young writers at the back of a workshop with a single poem, no audience and no plan, and the ones who are still doing it are mostly the ones who carried on after the first performance went badly.
There is no register, no licence and no exam. Nobody appoints a spoken word poet, and the word describes what a person does this month rather than what they have achieved. That is worth stating plainly to a fifteen year old who has written four poems and assumes the title belongs to somebody else.
What the work actually consists of, week by week
The work of a spoken word poet consists of four repeating jobs, and performing is the smallest of them by time. A poet with a gig on Friday will have spent far longer drafting, cutting and saying the poem to an empty room than standing in front of anybody.
| The job | What it looks like | Roughly how often |
|---|---|---|
| Writing | Drafting badly, on paper or a phone, mostly material that will not be used | Most days, in short sessions |
| Revising out loud | Standing up, saying the draft, cutting the lines that only worked in silence | Weekly, once a draft exists |
| Performing | Three to five minutes at an open mic, or a booked set of fifteen | Once or twice a month at the start |
| Listening | Sitting through other people's sets, which is where most of the learning happens | Every time, before and after your own |
Money belongs in this description rather than in a footnote. Very few poets are paid to perform, and the ones who earn a living from the form earn it mainly by teaching: school workshops, residencies, commissions from festivals and arts organisations, and occasionally publishing. A young writer should hear that early, because the alternative is discovering at twenty two that the plan was never a plan.
How anyone becomes one, in the first six months
To become a spoken word poet, do the four things in order and stop worrying about the title.
- Write six poems rather than one, because a first poem carries too much weight and a sixth is written by somebody who has learned something.
- Say every draft out loud from the beginning, since a poem that has never been spoken has not been tested.
- Go to an open mic as an audience member first, and notice what the room does with silence.
- Sign up, take the three minutes, and treat the first performance as data rather than a verdict.
Repetition does a lot of the work in early poems, and one device is worth naming here because it comes up in the first fortnight. Anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the start of successive lines, and yes, a single word is enough to count as one. It is the most reliable structure available to a new writer performing to a room that cannot see the page.
Slam poet, spoken word artist, performance poet: which word means what
The three labels describe the same person in different rooms, and the distinctions are worth keeping straight only because they change what is expected on the night. A slam poet is somebody who competes, which means an original piece inside three minutes and no props, said from memory or from the page depending on what the room asks for. A spoken word artist is the same job with an American label attached, common on billing and in the credits of recorded work. A performance poet is the British and older term, and it usually implies a wider range, including work with music, comic verse and dub.
Slam poetry and spoken poetry are not two styles of writing, which is the most common confusion and the one that changes how a beginner writes. Spoken poetry is the practice, and a slam is a competition the practice can be done inside. What a poetry slam is covers the scoring in detail, and What performance poetry is covers what changes in a poem written for the ear rather than the eye.
What a spoken word poet wears
A spoken word poet wears clothes they can breathe in, and there is no costume. The question comes up constantly because school competitions in several countries award marks for costume, props or a musical backing, and a performer trained in that system reasonably assumes the same applies everywhere. It does not. Standard slam rules ban props, costumes and musical accompaniment outright, and an open mic has no dress code of any kind.
Two practical points survive once the costume question is settled. Clothing that restricts the ribs will shorten the breath, which matters more than it sounds when a poem runs three minutes. And anything held in the hands, including a phone with the text on it, will be visible, so a poet who reads from a page should decide in advance whether the page is part of the performance or something to be hidden.
Titles, laureates and competition winners
Titles exist, they are real, and none of them is what makes somebody a spoken word poet. In the United Kingdom the Poetry Society runs the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award for writers aged 11 to 17, which names 100 winners each year, 15 top winners and 85 commended, and it ran SLAMbassadors, the national youth slam championship for writers aged 12 to 18, from 2001 to 2018. Spread the Word appoints a Young Poet Laureate for London, whose first holder was Warsan Shire. Wales appoints a children's poet under the title Bardd Plant Cymru, Scotland appoints a national Makar, and Northern Ireland and several English cities appoint poets to city and regional posts.
In the United States the equivalent youth title is the National Youth Poet Laureate, first awarded in 2017 to Amanda Gorman, who read at the presidential inauguration four years later. The point of listing them is not to set a target. It is that every one of those winners came in through an open mic or a school workshop rather than an audition.
Spoken poetry in Filipino and English, and what the word means there
Spoken poetry is the term used in the Philippines for the same practice, and a spoken word artist there is far more likely to be described that way, in Filipino, in English, or in the mix of both that most performers actually speak. The route in runs through schools and competitions rather than through pub open mics, pieces are often written tungkol sa pag-ibig, which is to say about love, and the audience for a performer is built on YouTube and Facebook rather than in one venue.
The vocabulary of appreciation differs too. A Filipino student is often asked to write an appreciation of a piece, which is a short written response to a performance, and that exercise has no exact equivalent in British classrooms. What the two versions share is the definition at the top of this site: Spoken word poetry is the practice of writing your own words and saying them, and What spoken word poetry is holds that line for every page here.