Spoken Word as a Vehicle for Change
AVG in the front of a communal classroom just before starting his workshop. He is dressed in blues and neutral colors to give a calm, earthy impression.
Workshop Description:
In Audre Lorde’s pivotal article, “Poetry is Not a Luxury”, poets are faced with an essential question: how will our work reveal the deep, ancient truths of our world and facilitate needed change?
This workshop fleshes out the first few lines of Lorde’s article as a lens to view issues of desensitization and apathy towards others. It signals one problem of practice in education as the decentralization of the human condition—the state of our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls. By leveraging spoken word as a medium with multiple dimensions, we get to draw our audiences into a visceral experience. It is the chief work of the poet to make what seems so foreign familiar again. Often times, that foreign thing is our emotions.
Using Lorde’s text, excerpts from Joshua Bennett’s Spoken Word: A Cultural History, and a performance by Steven Antoine Willis, students are invited into the world of spoken word and how it contrasts with written work (both prose and poetry). It would be a pleasure to offer this workshop to you and your community!
Objectives:
Identify the 4 components of communication
Use the framework above to compare and contrast the written and spoken word in prose and poetry
Strengthen the visceral influence of our writing and performance
Reflect on the reasons why we write and perform spoken word
Feedback from the most recent workshop session:
“I really appreciated the flexibility with which Gabe led the class. He was super open to hearing our thoughts and willing to change the direction or cut something out so we could spend time on what was exciting us. He was clearly very knowledgeable about spoken word and I loved how he brought in these little tidbits of knowledge to contextualize our discussions without his expertise sounding exclusive. I loved when he read his poetry - it was awesome!”
“As someone who writes poetry (a poet? I’ve never called myself that before), I enjoyed your visit because I think it really broke down what I find enjoyable about poetry for those of us who may not be as interested in the subject…. I think having the class think about the figurative, the literal, and the auditory was a key point that you brought in well with the juxtaposition of the prose piece and the poetry. I would have loved to see more of the class sharing their initial thoughts on what poetry seemed like to them (based on learning it in school, seeing it outside of school, etc) and then comparing that to how they felt about slam or how they feel about seeing poetry read out loud by someone who is conscious of the literal, the figurative, the auditory, and the nonverbal elements. Thank you so much for coming! I loved your poem and your energy!”
