Where to read, watch and listen to spoken word artists

Everything named here belongs to somebody else. Nothing is hosted, sold, streamed or reproduced on this site, and no poem written by a young writer appears anywhere on it. The record exists because a young writer learns this form mainly by encountering a lot of it, and because a teacher planning a block needs to know what already exists before making something worse from scratch.

Are spoken word artists poets?

Yes. A spoken word artist writes poems, and the only difference from a poet who publishes on the page is the destination the poem is built for. The distinction people are reaching for when they ask is a distinction about training and route rather than about form: page poets are assumed to come through magazines, competitions and collections, and spoken word poets are assumed to come through open mics, slams and festivals.

Those routes have been crossing for 40 years and now barely separate. Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose dub poetry was made for a voice and a bassline, is published as a Penguin Modern Classic. Kae Tempest won the Ted Hughes Award for Brand New Ancients, a work made to be performed. Lemn Sissay writes for the page, the stage and public walls, and was chancellor of a university while doing it. A poet who says their work aloud has chosen a medium, not a lower category.

What spoken word performance means

Spoken word performance means one person saying their own words to an audience, usually from memory, usually with no music, no set, no other performer and no costume. The economy of it is the point: the only instruments are the words and the voice, and everything that arrives from theatre tends to make it worse rather than better.

That answers a question asked constantly in the Philippines, where spoken poetry is a school and online genre with a huge following and where competitions are often staged: there is no costume. Wear what you can stand up in. The Filipino tradition has its own deeper root in Balagtasan, the debate in verse named after the poet Francisco Balagtas, in which two performers argue a question in improvised rhyme, and that is a genuine ancestor of the form rather than a local variant of it.

Slam poetry against spoken word poetry

Slam poetry is not a kind of poetry and spoken word is, which is the whole of the difference. A slam is a competition format: poets perform their own work inside a time limit, judges pulled from the audience score it, and the scores decide who continues. Any poem entered into that format is a slam poem for the evening, and the same poem read at a library the following week is simply a poem.

Writing that assumes slam poetry is a style, with a required subject and a required delivery, is describing a fashion inside a competition rather than a form. It is worth being precise about, because the assumption is what makes some adults dismiss the whole thing and some students imitate a manner instead of writing a poem.

The artists people mean

The artists people mean when they say famous spoken word artists divide into 3 overlapping groups: performers who came out of the slam circuit, poets who work across the page and the stage, and poets attached to a place, a scene or a national platform. Any list is a starting point rather than a ranking, and the useful version is arranged by where the work can actually be encountered.

• Britain: Benjamin Zephaniah, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lemn Sissay, Kae Tempest, Hollie McNish, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Caleb Femi, who was the first Young People's Laureate for London.
• The United States: Saul Williams, Patricia Smith, Danez Smith, Sarah Kay, and Amanda Gorman, who was the first National Youth Poet Laureate before reading at a presidential inauguration.
• Ireland: a working circuit in Dublin, Cork and Belfast, with Poetry Ireland as the national organisation behind much of the programming.
• Nigeria: a large performance scene centred on Lagos, where the Lagos International Poetry Festival runs annually and draws poets from across west Africa.
• The Philippines: a school and online scene in Filipino, English and the mixture of the two, with its own conventions and an audience in the millions.

Two other circuits are easy to miss because they rarely appear in arts listings. Church spoken word is substantial in both Britain and the United States, with its own venues, its own audiences and a Christian repertoire that developed largely outside the poetry world. And youth poetry has its own platforms, festivals and laureate posts, which is where most of the poets in the lists above began.

How much do spoken word artists make?

Almost nothing from the poems themselves, and a living, for a small number, from everything attached to them. There is no pay scale, no union rate card that covers poetry specifically, and no published average worth quoting, so the honest answer is a description of where money actually comes from.

• Fees for appearances: a paid slot at a festival, a night or a corporate event, negotiated individually and ranging from nothing to a professional fee.
• Workshops and residencies: teaching in schools, libraries and youth settings, which is what most working poets in this form actually live on.
• Commissions: a poem written to order for an organisation, a broadcaster, a building or an occasion.
• Books and recordings: real income for a few and a rounding error for most, since poetry print runs are small.
• Grants: project funding from the arts council of the relevant nation, which in the United Kingdom means Arts Council England, Creative Scotland, the Arts Council of Wales or the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Two bodies publish the guidance a young poet or a school should be reading before agreeing to anything. The Society of Authors publishes suggested minimum rates for authors doing events and visits, and the National Association of Writers in Education publishes professional guidance for writers working in education settings, including what a school should expect to pay. A school inviting a poet to run a session should assume it is paid work and start from those, and a young poet asked to perform for exposure should know that exposure is what people offer instead of money.

What this record contains

The record contains 3 shelves, and each is written the same way: what the thing is, who made it, and what it is useful for, with no route to a copy of it. Documentaries covers films about young people writing and performing. Books covers poetry a teenager might actually finish and the handful of books that help an adult run a session. Listening to the form covers where performances can be heard, and what to listen for rather than copy.

The organisations that keep the form's own record are worth knowing separately from the works themselves, because they are where a teacher or a young writer finds more of it without a search engine choosing for them.

The form all of this documents is Spoken word poetry, and a reader who wants the practice rather than the record should start there and use this section as the shelf standing beside it.