I’m very grateful to my mother for raising me on spoken word poetry. As somebody who was never much for reading and over analyzing poems in school, I there’s so much beauty in hearing people speak their words and being able to feel what they’re feeling. Spoken word provides that, and the ability to hear poems that encapsulate feelings you couldn’t put words to on your own.
Spoken word poems, while often dismissed as being emotional, self-pitying or arbitrary, carry so much power. It’s one thing to read an article about injustice; it’s another to hear the passion and pain in a person’s voice as they bare their life story for anyone to hear. Below are 12 of my favorite poems, on topics ranging from mothers and their children to feminism to dogs to systematic oppression.
1. "If I Should Have a Daughter" – Sarah Kay
Best line: “But getting the wind knocked out of youis the only way to remind your lungshow much they like the taste of air.There is hurt, here,that cannot be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry.”
2. "Scars" – Rudy Francisco
Best line: “I have this envelope, it’s full of all the butterflies the first time she relaxed the Velcro on her lips and smiled in my direction. I think most of them are still alive.”
3. "Shrinking Women" – Lily Myers
Best line: “I never meant to replicate her, but spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits- that's why women in my family have been shrinking for decades.”(Possible TW: eating disorders)
4. "The Last Mile" – Noah St. John
Best line: “There are too many moments when we are unbreakable and in this moment we are one family, constructing road as we go, burning bridges behind us, adding mileage like graceful aging.”
5. "Somewhere in America" – Get Lit
Best line: “The greatest lessons you will ever teach us, you will not even remember. You never told us what we weren't allowed to say. We just learned how to hold our tongues.”
6. "Cradle" – Anis Mojgani
Best line: “When you fall in battle, they will take your body with the life you made in this world and set it off to sail behind you in the next, so that you will stay a king, remain forever the golden being you breathed as on this side of the mountain.”
7. "Subtle Sister" – Alix Olson
Best line: “And we just cackle, we’re a f***in witches choir. And we sing sharpen your knives, sharpen your daughters, steam up the mirrors, bake us some dreams, cook up some riots, fry up some screams. And when you’re sick of your skirts, slice open the seams.”
8. "I Sing The Body Electric, Especially When My Power’s Out" – Andrea Gibson
Best line: “You stand kicking at your shadow, staring at the river. It does not want to find your body doing anything but loving what it loves. So love what you love.”
(TW: mention of suicide.)
9. "A Letter to My Dog, Exploring the Human Condition" – Andrea Gibson
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Best line: “I don’t care that you never talk about capitalism or patriarchy or the heteronormative hegemonic paradigm. I know you’re saving the world every time you get poo stuck in your butt hair and you don’t go looking for someone to blame.”
(I said I was going to limit myself to one poem per poet in this article, but I need both of these Andrea Gibson poems in my life, so you probably do, too.)
10. "Lost Voices" – Darius Simpson & Scout Bostley
Best line: “Movements are driven by passion not by asserting yourself dominant by a world that already put you there. You speak to know pain you only fathom because we told you it was there. You know nothing of silence, until someone who cannot know your pain tells you how to fix it.”
11. "To This Day" – Shane Koyczan
Best line: “If you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself get a better mirror, look a little closer, stare a little longer, because there’s something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit. You built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself, you signed it, 'They were wrong.'"
(Possible TW: mention of suicide.)
12. "Guitar Repair Woman" – Buddy Wakefield
Best line: “We can stretch Van Gogh paintings on billboards from Seattle, Washington to Austin, Texas and you still won’t find the brilliant brush strokes it takes to be a single mother sacrificing the best part of her dreams to raise a baby boy who – on most days – she probably wants to strangle.” (Side note: I saved the best for last because this is probably my favorite poem ever.)
