Poetry can be defined as any of the following:

1. The art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts.

2. Literary work in metrical form; verse.

3. Prose with poetic qualities.

4. Poetic qualities, however, manifested: the poetry of simple acts and things.

5. Poetic spirit or feeling

This definition is purely technical from dictionary.com. The dictionary calls poetry pretty prose but the poets call it oxygen. We call it water and shelter, sometimes it is both a knife and a bandage depending on the night. Poetry is more than nice syntax and rhyme scheme. It is an expression of the human condition. My first interaction with poetry was much the same as everyone else’s. It was freshmen English class and we were doing a unit on Shakespeare. But also just like most other people this was not the time I fell in love with poetry. This kind of poetry while beautiful and meaningful doesn’t tend to connect very deeply to a 15-year-old who can’t understand old English. So I just thought, “So this is poetry. Lovesick and dripping with fancy words no one can decipher….Eh.” I assumed that poetry was fancy words and slightly overdone metaphors about love and loss that I couldn’t really connect with. You see where this is going. I was very very wrong.

Slam Poetry can be defined as the following:

-Spoken Word is poetry intended for onstage performance, rather than exclusively designed for the page…At its best, spoken word is a powerful, high-energy form of expression that attracts artists and audiences of all ages from a wide range of disciplines and socio-cultural backgrounds.

What’s funny is that this kind of poetry is still very new; so that definition actually came from Urban Dictionary. At its core, Spoken Word is different from traditional poetry because it is meant to be heard and performed. This kind of poetry is not written with the intent of being read off a page. This kind of expression fascinated me. I was on YouTube one night and stumbled upon a channel called ButtonPoetry. They post videos of slam poetry competitions all over the country. One of the first ones that I watched was by a guy named Dylan Garity. He had written a poem entitled, “Friend Zone.” His poem was about his realization that being just friends with a girl was never meant to be a means of potentially have sex with her later. As he says in the performance, “‘As if the only reason to be a good friend or a decent human is if you get something in exchange.’” I kept watching more and more of these videos. One of the next videos I saw was called, “Shrinking Women” by Lily Myers about how she saw the trend of loud and boisterous males in her family was always proportionate to the quiet and tamed females. I watched “Falling in Love with a Divorcee” by Eirean Bradley, and in less than four minutes he helped me understand my mother and father ten times better.

From that point on I couldn’t get enough. I wanted to hear what these crazy passionate people had to say. It was these total strangers talking about their struggles with anxiety that helped me understand my own. It was poets who taught me so many of the things that now I live by. On writer, Rupi Kaur, has been especially essential to me. While the poems of hers that I came into contact with were in print instead of spoken her words had, and continue to have, a profound effect on me. I first found her on Instagram where she posts some of her work. One of the first I saw read,

“Is it love

If they don’t even know

How to love themselves”

For Christmas that year I asked for a copy of her book, Milk and Honey. It was some of her words that helped me through my very first heartbreak. I loved her poems because they had qualities I hadn’t realized made contemporary poetry what it is. The words were raw and brashly emotional without apologizing with pretty rhymes. Some of the poems were only one sentence and others were written in paragraphs full of run-on sentences. She as well as the other aforementioned poets wrote about things like anxiety, sex, divorce, sexuality, high-school, feminism, and civil rights. The poems could be funny or sad or anything they wanted them to be.

What I was learning was that poetry isn’t all sappy love letters from Romeo to Juliet. While plenty of people write about love and loss and war the same way that others have before them, the artform has evolved into an even broader form of self-expression. Now the words can be taken off the page and performed in poetry slams. Poetry is about releasing thoughts into the universe. It is about sharing experiences with fellow humans with the purest of intention: to relate and confide.

One of the first poems I wrote was only one sentence but it encompassed my overwhelming emotions at the time. When I wrote it down it felt like the only sentence in the world that made any sense. Poetry has been a place for me to grow in so many ways. Paper is a silent confidant for all the words I am too scared to speak into existence. It is silently forgiving when I repeatedly scratch out words that just don’t quite fit. Every time I rephrase something I get a rush of energy because i can feel that each time I’m getting closer to the perfect set of words that will explain my unexplainable. The more I write the more I love the quote, ‘The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is really a large matter. ‘Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning,’ from Mark Twain.

I titled this “Spoken Word and How it will Change You.” So before I finish, let me tell you how exactly it will do so. Poetry and spoken word is like a safe hand there to guide you. When you hear another poet put into words the things you never could you suddenly feel not so alone anymore. If you decide to write yourself, you will find two very different things: 1) escape and solace. Even if just for a moment, when you write there will be a moment of calm that comes from putting you thoughts onto paper and giving it a name. 2) you will find the opposite of escape. When you write for long enough you will feel it inside of you when there is a piece to be written about the one thing you want to avoid writing about. You will feel a nagging in your soul to write into existence the feeling that you are ashamed of, scared of, or tortured by. These pieces are either the easiest or the hardest to write. But when you do, and you get it right, the weight will finally be lifted from your shoulders.

So please, explore some poetry! Click below! See what the weird; creative brains of poets have to say. I promise it’s not as lame as your freshman english teacher made it out to be.

Friend Zone by Dylan Garity:

Shrinking Women by Lily Myers:

Falling in Love with a Divorcee by Eirean Bradley: