At the Intersections of Identity: Talking with Dani Putney
Dani Putney discusses their debut poetry collection, SALAMAT SA INTERSECTIONALITY.
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Posts Tagged: spoken word
The Beat of the Poem: Talking with Tatiana Figueroa Ramirez
Tatiana Figueroa Ramirez discusses her debut poetry collection, COCONUT CURLS Y CAFÉ CON LECHE.
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A Time and a Place: Talking with Faylita Hicks
Faylita Hicks discusses her debut poetry collection, HOODWITCH.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #99: One of These Days It’s Gonna Set You Free
I’m just being an artist. I’m just being creative.
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Complicating Narratives: A Conversation with Bushra Rehman
Bushra Rehman discusses her new poetry collection, MARIANNA’S BEAUTY SALON.
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Making Sense of the World: A Conversation with Dessa
Dessa discusses her recently released album, Chime, where she stands on the intersection of poetry and performance, and self-care for busy artists.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #115: Bao Phi
“Nothing is ever one thing.”
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Both Outsider and Participant: Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi
In Thousand Star Hotel, the bilingual writer’s struggle with expressing himself in English becomes a metaphor for the immigrant’s struggle with navigating the host nation’s hostile-yet-lucrative social terrain.
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Vincent Toro: Challenging Whiteness and Refusing to Be Colonized
Poet Vincent Toro on his debut collection, Stereo.Island.Mosaic, his writing process, and searching for identity.
...morePoetry Inspires Kids to Change the World
To do spoken word, you need bodies, you need people, you need that sense of gathering. Poets have always tapped into an unspoken understanding that language can tap into the ways in which the world works. Over at the Huffington Post, Daveed Digs and Danez Smith discuss how poetry equips children with a sense of voice that inspires them […]
...morePoetry on Vinyl
Fonograf Editions, a new Portland-based vinyl record-only poetry press that aims to publish two to three spoken word poetry records on vinyl each year, is set for its first release on May 17 with Aloha/irish trees by Eileen Myles. The collection features a total of 36 selected and new poems on two sides. The record itself is […]
...morePerforming Words
Dutifully we come out for the readings, we put on our thinking faces, we offer our commentary, but behind our pensive stares there remains that clandestine part of us that’s honestly just trying not to fall asleep. Lucky for us, this literary cabaret series promises to inject a little razzle-dazzle into our stale evenings.
...moreListening to Poets
Should poetry be heard and not seen? In most, though not all, historic literary traditions, verse is distinguished from prose by the fact that the lines or stanzas are identified as such by recurrent patterns of sound (quantity, accent, rhyme, or assonance) which are independent of both the syntax and the meaning. This strict definition […]
...morePeople Talk
In a new history of the evolution of language, Matthew Battles focuses on humans’ relationship with writing. For Slate, John H. McWhorter argues that Battles’s distinction between the written and spoken word misunderstands how we use the Internet: Much of the “collective, aphoristic” writing Battles describes would today be termed tweets and posts.
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The Rumpus Interview with Danez Smith
Poet Danez Smith discusses advocacy, translating spoken poetry for the page, and his new collection [Insert] Boy.
...moreEnvision a Library Full of Blood
From Portland, Oregon, Black Cake Records is compiling an audio archive of contemporary poets reading their work. As they put it, “We envision a library full of blood. We want the very best blood, & we want it everywhere.” Check it out here.
...moreRIP Maggie Estep
Spoken word poet Maggie Estep has passed away. The Los Angeles Times has a wonderful write up of her life and career and how she shaped a whole movement. “In her early work, Estep was a downtown New Yorker who talked tough, joked and was drawlingly sardonic while being sexually explicit. Her pieces often expressed […]
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An Interview with Spoken Word Legend Bucky Sinister
“That was my other big misconception. That if I got sober and went to a meeting they’d make me believe in God. Not true.”
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