Urban cultures hold a bowl of intriguing ingredients. In Bangalore, we have several slices of culture that make up the big pie that is the city. Music, fashion, food, theatre, dance, you name it! But something that started to catch on to Bangalore’s urban culture is spoken word poetry or, the punchier alternative, ‘slam poetry’. If you ever walk into a café where an enthusiastic individual monologues a considerable extent of verses, with accented facial expressions and hand gestures to an audience, you just waked into a slam poetry session.

APM conducting a spoken word workshop at Atta Galatta Cafe in Bangalore

Spoken word poetry, among many staged performances, is where poetry meets performance. It is basically enacting a poem you wrote, expect it needn’t adhere to the routine poem structures that you find on paper. In one of the TED Talks podcasts on Youtube, Sarah Kay, a spoken word poet from New York says, “ Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry… it involves creating poetry that just doesn’t want to sit on paper; that something about it demands it (spoken word poetry) be heard out loud or witnessed in person.” In order to pull off a spoken word poem, you’ll need “a heavy use of rhythm, improvisation, free association, rhymes, rich poetic phrases, word play and slang,” states The Nelson-Atkins Museum Of Art in Missouri, USA, in their website.

Reminiscent of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance in Harlem, USA, spoken word poetry came up as a form of rebellion among marginalized African –Americans who were subject to racial discrimination. It later caught on with feminists and the queer community as they voiced out their lyrical contempt to unfair conservative social constructs. Spoken word poetry also started taking ground when a recognized group of poets and musicians of the African-American Civil Rights movement called The Last Poets came around in the 1960s; they are said to be the pioneers of Hip Hop and slam poetry. The Last Poets derived their name from the poems of a South African poet named Keorapetse Kgositsile who believed in “writing poetry before guns and battles would take over”; the African American society shared the same sentiments. With much cause to fight and to express a community’s grief, spoken word poetry found its place in urban culture. As of now, there are several clubs in Major American cities that carry on the slam poetry culture.

In India, spoken word poetry is organized by the Airplane Poetry Movement (APM), an initiative that promotes performance poetry in various cities all over India that includes Delhi, Pune, Mumbai and Bangalore with open mic performances, poetry slams and workshops. Poetry slams have the competitive edge to it, where poems are performed without props, costumes or music. After such a performance, the poets are judged by the audience with and applause or ‘polite silences’. In their recent activity, APM teamed up with Menstrupedia that had young poets talking about taboos and issues about menstruation in a podcast called ‘Menstruation Diaries’. There is also a national level slam poetry competition held every year. In Bangalore, APM has organized quite a few poetry workshops and slam poetry events in coffee shops like the Humming Tree and AttaGalatta.

Suzana. P. Joel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Fhg0sltks