Wild child of poetry

Spoken poetry is an expression of your thoughts in the vehicle of dramatised verse.

Rachana Ramesh

A new form of poetry has taken the podium. With anger suffusing her voice, Aranya Johar recites: “My mom telling me to wear skirts out less often, Nirbhaya and more, left forgotten. We don’t want to be another of India’s daughters, do we?” in her performance – A brown girl’s guide to gender. With faint chords of a guitar playing in the background, Johar goes on with her poem, the verses smothered in brutal honesty about India’s misogyny, sexism, and sexual violence. The video of her performance broke the internet with millions of views. The twoand- a-half minute spoken word poetry made thousands sympathise with women who were ever objectified, harassed, or have had to live under the strict rules of patriarchy.

This one viral instance more or less brought spoken word poetry into the mainstream Indian pop culture. Spoken word poetry is a unique hybrid where written words are memorised like lines in a play and are sailed aloud with a performer’s flair. Characterised by rhyme, repetition, improvisation and wordplay, spoken word poems frequently refer to issues of social justice, politics, race, and community. A close cousin of slam poetry, spoken word may draw on music, sound, dance, or other kinds of performance to connect with audiences. While standard poetry is very formal in structure, spoken word breaks away a bit. It is the wild child of poetry.

“Due to the pandemic, I haven’t performed lately, so I really miss it,” says Diya, a final year arts student. “It started as a pastime hobby, but I have now created an art community, where a lot of poets, actors, singers come together to collaborate and experiment with their styles,” she says. Meraz Mandali, the art community, has been a resultant of Diya’s spoken poetry journey and is likely going to evolve into a much wider space of conversations. Many people have taken up spoken poetry as a hobby.

However, this exciting hobby tends to turn into a passion, becoming more than just the expression of a talent. It turns into an art form that is often used to convey important or controversial messages to society. People also often sign up for poetry competitions, which also feature loud and radical poems that display both intense content and sound. This is because spoken poetry is about connecting with a community and having a forum of communication. “Spoken word poetry allows me to be more expressive, and the tone I use while speaking lets my listener get a fuller meaning of what I feel. As much as I love page poetry, I will love spoken word for giving me the expressive advantage,” she concluded.

There are a number of reasons to take up spoken poetry as a pursuit and then let the adventurous journey evolve. Inspired after watching the movie “Gulli Boy”, Arfath, a recent graduate, developed a keenness towards speaking his own truth. “What reached me after a single watch of the movie was that they defined their truth, made music out of it and reached people. I understood the power of words”, he says. He then took up reading literature of all kinds, listened to podcasts and enhanced his vocabulary, helping him in compressing a lot of his writings into a few words. Poetry became a way to channel his emotions, he says.

“It (spoken poetry) shows how powerful the words you use can be. Emotions are your truest experiences, they’re your truth and I link them with words. It is not my hobby, it is more a purpose”, Arfath feels. Spoken poetry helps the writer with their emotional development, and having an internal drive to write and perform. It also helps the poet to feel balanced in everyday life. “My first time was very experimental. It was on World Mental Health day. Holding a mic is a whole different experience, I fumbled a lot and apologised too,” Arfath giggles. On his first performance alone, he says, it made him realise that if you put your words in the right way, it can transform people’s perspectives and change their emotions. “It resonated with the audience and I felt content,” he added.

The performance aspect of spoken word poetry seems to confer several more benefits that would not be found in writing alone, such as social support through connecting with others, to be able to feel empathy from strangers.