March 1, 2024

What is Spoken Word in 2024?

I have fallen out of touch with the Spoken Word and live literature scenes in the city I live in (and all the cities and towns beyond it). This is sad because it was the live poetry scene that pulled me into London from my own orbital town in the first place. Back then, I'd buy a copy of Time Out and scan through the two little columns of live events that appeared at the tail end of the books section. That row of columns gave an overview of a buzzing, chaotic and fractured network, not unlike the topography of the city itself.

The scene attracted its fair share of weirdos (of which I was probably one) because it was so accessible. You didn't need any special gear and, to be painfully honest, you didn't need much talent either. The internet at the time was in it's basest html form and even the blockiest, low res video or low bitrate audio could sometimes take hours to download before you could experience them. Home internet was still the luxury of early adopters with many poets using internet cafes for their email and surfing.

The poetry scenes in London were pluralistic and multifaceted too. Some venues would cater to broad demographics like the Poetry Cafe. Other venues and promotions would be more specific. You'd find a young, black crowd at events at some venues in Brixton such as the Dogstar while a white working class audience would gather a few doors down at the Prince Albert for more ranty fare. John Paul O'Neil would run the Farrago Slam at the Post Office Theatre or Filthy McNasty's and Paul Lyalls and Jem Rolls would run weekly events where it felt like a sign or real recognition if your name was on the bill. While Apples and Snakes started out as a part of the disparate ranting and dub poetry focused 80s scene, it had become a registered charity by the end of the decade and a national organisation a couple of decades after that. Many poets had found ways to make some money, taking a modest cut of the door money at the more reputable venues, but getting a gig with Apples and Snakes and other funded orgs would be seen as a stepping stone for poets who sought to make a proper living from their craft.

Some poets from the live scenes crossed over into mainstream publishing, such as Benjamin Zephaniah, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Patience Agbabi. But mainly, literary poetry was white, male, middle of the road, middle aged and midlife crisis. While an all male shortlist was sometimes called out, the very fact that the same shortlist consisted of white people didn't seem as obvious or objectionable to the literary scenesters. This would thankfully be brought to attention by Spread the Word's Free Verse report which identified that only 1% of poets sampled from a broad sample of UK poetry publishers would come from non-white backgrounds.

Forward poetry prize: who got rid of the women? | Forward prize for poetry | The Guardian

Sarah Crown: The all-male shortlist for this year's prize is sadly true to form. But apportioning blame is not easy

https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/free-verse-report/

It's no wonder then, that among the attention seekers and eccentrics on the live poetry scene, there would also be broad range of talented poets from minority ethnic and working class backgrounds who took to the stage in the face of the indifference of the literary world. As if conscious of the contrast it projected against the seemingly staid and academic literary world, the performance scene of the 90s was more theatrical, ranty and declarative. While this Atomic Lip performance might not have aged well, it's a good indication of the attitude towards poetry and performance that existed in the 90s. I show a lot of older performance recordings to my students and often tell them that the feeling of "cringe" is nothing more than the discomfort of the students' own values on what a performance should be contrasting with the values of the performers a couple of decades back.

The dominant medium for live poetry in the 90s was the stage. If there was another medium that exerted an influence at the time, it was television. Numerous pilots were filmed, most were never picked up. Murray Lachlan Young rose to the level of mass media interest when he was reportedly signed to a record label for a million pounds and subsequently got his own television special out of it. The press releases described him as a cross between Byron and Bolan and you can tell that his aesthetic was driven by this glib alteration. Meanwhile, across the pond, Def Poetry Jam raised the profile of the Slam scene as part of a regular HBO series.

Many years ago I wrote an essay that caused some discourse, not all of it complementary, called Notes on the Death of Performance Poetry. The essay was slightly tongue in cheek and the title was deliberately provocative but there was a serious point made about the changes that I was observing at the time. While I was aiming for a kind of genre hybrid between literary and performance with my own work, it seemed to me that the theatrical style of Performance Poetry was being replaced by a different style known as Spoken Word.

Remembering the Death of Performance Poetry - Niall's Notes

DON’T PANIC!!! Apologies in advance for the alarmist title. This post is not about some imminent collapse in the Spoken Word boom, far from it. It is intended as a meditative look back at the cycles that happen within spoken word cultures and how history tends to repeat itself, especially when there’s no history available to learn from. It centres around a certain historical point within the poetry scenes in the UK.

Spoken Word as it was in the UK from the mid 00s to the 10s was more a blend of two distinct styles that were prevalent at the time. One element seemed influenced by the Slam and Spoken Word styles of the US and TV shows like Def Poetry, sharing elements with more "conscious" genres of rap. Another element felt more personable and conversational, such as the poetry of Holly McNish.

The stage was still a native medium for these styles of poetry but Web 2.O was beginning to exert an influence on how live poetry was consumed, appraised and promoted. Initially, Myspace accounts featured live gig recordings as a means of spreading the word and getting bums on seats but it soon became apparent from the launch of YouTube that live poets could reach a far bigger audience than they could fit into any live venue. 

In the same way that the metrics of score cards at poetry slams created genres and styles tailored towards optimising those metrics, Spoken Word evolved and adapted to optimise clicks and likes. If a former barometer of success for a poetry performer was to get a television gig or win a big slam, the biggest barometer of success in the Spoken Word age was to go viral. Earlier live poetry videos on YouTube would often feature a recording of a live gig but the poems that would do better would be poems performed to the camera by the poet, often just with a laptop or phone. 

This was because recording while alone in a room would often cut out a lot of the elements that would make a live performance video hard work to get through, such as ambient noise and the transformation of the poet's voice when amplified through a speaker. Also, a video where the poet addresses the online audience directly would always feel more intimate and personal than a recording of a poet addressing a live audience. Much like the reader addressed in the Billy Collins poem "A portrait of the reader with a bowl of cereal" the way in which the watcher of the video is addressed would also carry over into the style of the poem. The watcher could often feel like they were being spoken to by the poet over a breakfast table rather than being bellowed at from a stage. It's interesting that this shift didn't really happen in the US, possibly because of more professional gig recordings from YouTube channels such as Button Poetry. 

More importantly, in terms of the feel of the new media, nobody wants to feel like they're being bellowed at over a breakfast table. Incidentally, I think that one issue with the aforementioned Atomic Lip video is that it's a theatrical live performance recorded without an audience, with the performers addressing the camera. Judged by the rubric of a 2010s Spoken Word video, where viewers expect a more intimate, private experience, this would indeed feel uncomfortable. But, being a product of the 90s, the Atomic Lip video was probably made for the medium of television or for theatrical projection, both of which put more space between the screen and the viewer and are more sociable, shared viewing experiences. 

If you wanted to get booked by a promoter for a gig in the 90s and 00s you had a few options. Promoters would often come to open mics to hand out flyers for their events and would sometimes scout the event for new talent. If that didn't work then there was always the option of paying a visit to their event and cheekily handing over a demo tape. There weren't any live poetry reviewers at the time (at least none with the same clout and consequence as other reviewers) and so the main rubric of quality would be word of mouth or how many punters your name might bring in. 

But YouTube changed this as social networks returned the brute, indeniable statistics of likes and view counts. Some videos that did well looked more like music videos than live performances such as those of George the Poet and Suly Breaks. Whereas other videos such as Holly McNish's Mathematics were recorded in a room with a laptop webcam but, in McNish's case, garnered over 2m views. While Mark Grist pulled in millions of views with a cinematic version of his poem "A Girl Who Reads", an earlier version recorded across a table with a phone camera still managed to find around a quarter of a million views.

So it should come as no surprise that a more intimate, laid back style of poetry performance characterised a lot of Spoken Word that was showing up online and onstage in the 2010s. This style, so open and personable, would also become popular with advertisers. When a number of poets appeared in advertisements for a building society, there seemed to be a bit of a schism between the older generation of theatrical, politicised performance poets and the Spoken Word generation, many of whom featured in these adverts. 

The previous generation's relationship with the field of advertising would have been mutually antagonistic. Bar the odd Cooper Clarke/Honey Monster collaboration, advertisers didn't want ranters to hawk their product and the ranters were wary of selling out. Whereas the Spoken Word generation saw it more as an opportunity to popularise their art form, especially with some of these ads appearing during prime time broadcasts of shows like X Factor. However, it should also be noted that many advertisers would also mimic the same personable Spoken Word style without offering any meaty commissions for UK Spoken Word poets. Advertisers would simply write the work themselves and get actors to recite them. George the Poet continued to reap the benefits with a commissioned piece for Coca Cola that heavily leaned into collective anxieties about the pandemic. When I showed it to my students I couldn't help but voice my concerns. My students, on the other hand, didn't seem to find as much to object to and took more than a little bit of joy in pointing out the bottle of Coke Zero that I'd just taken a swig from.

Spoken Word was a big deal in the UK in the 2010s. Though it shouldn't be denied that many acts from that era are still doing well for themselves. Holly McNish is still selling out venues on National tours while being more at home on Instagram rather than YouTube) and Kae Tempest is still thriving as one of the UK's most prominent polymaths. But it's time to look at the question asked in the title of this post. What is Spoken Word now?

Rather than do what I did before and call an art form "dead" which was needlessly provocative the first time I did it, I want to look at the different factors that affect poetry and Spoken Word in the UK and beyond in the mid-20s (what? We're in the mid-20s?). In this sense I want to borrow the metaphysics of the late Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who stated that nothing ever really dies. The many things that make it up simply disperse and manifest in a multitude of ways. So, when I ask the questions "What is Spoken Word now?" I'm not just asking about a specific form, I'm also asking how it continues to manifest in different ways and surprising places.

The first answer is, obviously: it's still going! It might not be setting the world of social media on fire as much as it used to but there are plenty of events such as Outpsoken and Apples and Snakes' Jawdance that are still selling out and filling up venues. That said, as far as London is concerned, the smaller venues that were once the lifeblood of the scene, all seem to be in much smaller supply. The Poetry Cafe is still closed four years after first lockdown in 2020, and its future is still uncertain despite a recent petition for its reopening collecting over a thousand signatures.

Petition · Reopen the Poetry Cafe in London for the Benefit of Poets and Enthusiasts · Change.org

Reopen the Poetry Cafe in London for the Benefit of Poets and Enthusiasts

The next answer is in relation to the mainstream, literary poetry scene. Remember that lack of diversity I mentioned a few paragraphs back? Well, after a lot of consciousness raising, mentoring and initiatives, the literary scene is a lot more diverse, not just with regard to the poets that are published but with regard to the shortlists and winners of the major prizes too. The inaccessibility that once steered black and asian poets towards the performance and Spoken Word scene is no longer a factor. Other poets that were a part of the earlier performance scenes, such as Roger Robinson, Anthony Joseph and Joelle Taylor, have all gone on to have great success with their literary projects.

The next answer is the most interesting one for me. When online media such as YouTube became the ultimate way of reaching an audience, it also went on to become the goal itself, rather than a means to promote a career that revolved around live performance. There was a time when open mics and slams were the only way for a person to verbally express themselves to an audience. But once YouTube, Twitch and TikTok presented opportunities via vlogging and video essays, the need to distill your feelings and thoughts into a poem became less of a necessity. People that would click away at the merest mention of poetry could find the same ideas and opinions being extolled by a streamer as they played the latest big video game instead.

I have to put my hand up and say that, since the pandemic, I've not been going to many live poetry events. But I look through a lot of spoken word content online and have found that a lot of it looks and sounds the same as the Spoken Word that was happening ten or so years ago. I look for where the innovation is happening and it seems to be happening elsewhere, such as with the hybrid, literary/performance poets that having been rising to prominence. 

(I should add that I also spent a few hours on TikTok watching poetry and Spoken Word videos. It's, erm, not for me. I'll leave it at that ...)

Another place where real innovation seems to be happening is the podcast medium. Ross Sutherland, formerly known as part of the "poetry boyband" Aisle 16, is creating astonishing work with his Imaginary Advice podcast, as are Dave and Lizzy Turner with You Don't Know. Dave's recent lyric essay about his Dad taking a bath is also worth a read and listen. While I have not been the biggest fan of George the Poet's forays into advertising, his BBC Sounds Podcast is consistently brilliant across its many episodes. We don't judge artists by their comissions, we judge them by the projects that their commissions allow them to create for themselves. FInally, The Blindboy Podcast doesn't need a plug but it's a massive inspiration for me and my own work. If you haven't listened yet, you should. 

https://www.imaginaryadvice.com

ABOUT — you don't know

BBC Sounds - Have You Heard George's Podcast? - Downloads

Podcast downloads for Have You Heard George's Podcast?

The Blindboy Podcast on acast

Hosted by Blindboyboatclub, who is an artist and author. An eclectic podcast containing short fiction, interviews and comedy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

But, when I open up my definition of Spoken Word to include acts of public speech that aren't necesarily poetry, I see lots more to get excited about. While a lot of video essayists use a documentarian style, there are others such as CJ the X who are more dynamic and less passive in their speech. I can't help but feel that these artists are the current innovators in the way that they marry philosophical and social commentary with comedic lyricism and performance art. Another Canadian YouTuber, JREG, blends sincerity and irony to such a violently clashing degree that the final product still feels intensely meaningful in a way that short circuits the performative earnestness of a lot of Spoken Word. It also doesn't surprise me that JREG was a Spoken Word poet before he pushed further into YouTube as a medium.

Here's another interesting development, in this interview between CJ the X and JREG, both of them have recently changed their strategies and are organising local community activities and live events. CJ the X's upcoming tour seeks to embrace the idea of killing the internet and will require all participants to switch off or surrender their phones on entry.

There's something to the live experience. Success online often depends on the feelings that you project onto a little number that appears under your video. No matter how big that number is, it just doesn't compare to the feeling that arises when you are in front of a live audience, no matter how friendly, hostile or indifferent they are. I like the freedom that online creation allows me, there are things I can do online that I was never able to do onstage at poetry gigs, but I still remember the thrill of being able to see the faces of my audience. There really is nothing like it. I miss it. 

Thanks for reading this!

As with a lot of essays, this is one I've been sitting on for a while and, in the absence of another big idea administered to my brian by the fickle muse, I took it off the back burner and rushed it out. The cool thing about revisiting these ideas a few days later on my YouTube channel is that I'm able to revisit some of the things I think I left out in my rush to churn out an essay. I'll be recording and publishing a new video over the weekend and it will probably be a more personal recolleciton of how a lot of the changes in the live poetry scene affected me and my career in the art form.

Niall O'Sullivan - YouTube

Poetry and gaming related stuff. There will be the occasional video on this channel but if you want to keep up with everything I'm up to then hop over to my newsletter https://buttondown.email/niall

I left a lot of my own experiences out of this because I thought the central ideas about the relationship between a live art form and its associated mediums was interesting enough without turning it into a story of regret and sour grapes. If you like that kind of thing then you might enjoy my Inside Llewyn Davis essay.

The Morass of Mid Career: Inside Llewyn Davis and Me • Buttondown

Llewyn and Ulysses Rusty Niall is now hosted on Buttondown instead of Substack. This essay also contains plot spoilers for the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn...

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