FAQ
1. What is spoken word?
2. When and why did you start writing?
3. What inspires you to write/why do you write?
4. What is the writing process like?
5. What is involved in getting ready for the performance?
6. What’s it like performing/how does it feel to perform?
7. What do you hope to get across to the audience when you perform?
8. What do you think the future for spoken word is?
9. How can others get involved/ what can they learn from spoken word?
10. Can you suggest any resources/books/tv/movies re: spoken word to check out?
1. What is spoken word?
KZT: For me, spoken word is a performance poetry that originates from many many different bloodlines. It comes from the centuries-old tradition of oral poetry that exists in nearly every culture. It comes from the Black Arts movement of the 60′s and ethnic nationalist and urban folkloric traditions from the Black, Latino/a, Asian and Native American communities across the country. It comes from punk rock screaming, folk music singer-songwriters, hip hop mc’s, b-boys, dj’s, graf writers, and beatboxers.
It comes from feminism and page poetry, the Beats and stand-up comedians, church preachers, R & B, soul, gospel, classically trained actors and playwrights, the rhetoric of our political leaders. It comes from poetry slam competitions. It comes from political activism. If you really look deeply at the spoken word artists who are writing and performing in our generation today, our range of influences and techniques that we employ are as vast and diverse as this. Which is part of why, I believe, it is so very powerful.
2. When and why did you start writing?
KZT: I’ve been doing spoken word since I was about 15 years old. I’ve always been into writing, performing, and politics, even since I was a little kid. My first exposure to spoken word itself was through a high school English teacher who used to bring me and a few of my friends to the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, which is known as the birthplace of the international poetry slam movement. So I grew up as a teenager writing and performing poetry. For me, poetry was always a living art, created and performed by people who come from every walk of life and experience. Writing and performance have always been integrally linked for me as an artist. In some ways, it’s hard for me to really understand a hard and fast distinction between the two.
As for why I started writing — it’s pretty hard to believe these days, but I was quite shy as a little kid. Actually almost painfully shy. Some of my early stories as a child spoke to some of the pain and confusion of my own internalized racism and feelings of being “othered” even as a very young child. As I grew older, I started to understand that writing was my way out of the limited imagination that this culture has for who I am and what I could be. Writing became a way for me to write my own future, my own expansiveness, and my own freedoms. I didn’t understand it, but I knew that I kept on writing no matter what. Even when I hated it and thought it was stupid and worthless and dumb, it was something that I could not give up and it could not give me up. It became and continues to be a deep source of my own survival and self-determination through art, which fortunately has the effect of helping to expand the emotional, spiritual and political survival of others as well as opening the door for new ways to envision each person’s and community’s self-determination.
3. What inspires you to write/why do you write?
KZT: I am most inspired by the idiosyncrasies of the human experience. A lot of my poetry comes from an initial discomfort or curiosity about what is “known” or generally accepted in our world and then envisioning what would happen if we turned that “known” or generally accepted thing on it’s head or revealed some other layers of the roots of that thing whether its Western romanticized notions of communism in “Little Red Books ” or what is rape itself in “Grey Matter” or the concept of weapons of mass destruction countered in “Weapons of Mass Creation.” I’m a very inquisitive person by nature (and I’ve been told rebellious, ha!), so to put a question into people’s minds has always been my goal with my writing even from a very young age. So in an organic way, my work tends to be both very personal and political, because there is no personal experience that is not happening within a larger socio-political context. As there is no socio-political occurrence that is not happening without a deeper impact on people’s lives.
I’m also a pop culture junkie whether it’s movies or tv or music, so I reference pop/hip hop culture icons a lot (Missy Elliot, Lauryn Hill, Courtney Love, Luther Vandross, etc.), and I think I do this for multiple reasons 1) I like to explore the lives of these people as real people, who are human and vulnerable, which is consistent with a lot of my poetry that is inspired by the real people in my life 2) pop and hip hop culture icons often become the means through which our generation experience mentorship, role models, to some degree even family as surrogates for our own emotional experiences, maybe unlike any other time in human history. Our media-saturated generation develops intimate emotional relationships with “celebrities” whom we oftentimes will never meet and cultivate an intimate relationship with in real life. The relationships may not be real, but our feelings of intimacy and how we use our feelings as related to these symbolic people in order to emotionally process our own lives is what I am most interested in exploring in my work.
4. What is the writing process like?
KZT: Every poem is different, and every project is different. I find some poems come from their own accord as if from another source (“Aftershocks”). Some poems come from a deep cataloging and recalling of people, places, and experiences in my life and are honed and shaped quite a bit during the performance process (“Real Women I Know”). Some poems (“Black, White, Whatever…”) start off as a little idea and get filed away in the back of my mind (Destiny’s Child’s Kelly Rowland saying, “we love everybody, black, white, whatever you are!”) until it explosively joins with another concept or context years later (the racial rhetoric of the 2008 presidential election). Some poems are written expressly for people in my life (“Lili’s Hands,” “Wai-Puo”) or for special events with a specific audience whom I care deeply about (“Making Guacamole” for an Asian Pacific Islander American youth conference, “By-Standing…” for an anti-war rally in Chicago post 9/11, “Weapons of Mass Creation” for a youth activism national summit tour).
For me, I tend to free-write nearly every day, and then I look back on the free-writes and see what I can carve out of the free-writes I like best. The poems tend to be fairly close to the initial concept of the first free-write (i.e. I rarely try to frankenstein multiple concepts together after the fact). I approach editing on multiple levels. I ask myself what is the deepest desire of the poem to communicate, and how can I strengthen that as much as possible. One of my mentors, Ruth Forman, who is an amazing poet based in L.A. quoted Yusuf Komunyakaa saying: “Always subtract, never add.” So I think of carving out the best possible poem out of what is there, unless there is some major piece missing — in which case I usually just try another free-write approach. My process is always changing, and I’m as committed to developing excellence in it and trusting its evolutions as I am with the actual poems itself. I’m writing more dramatic works (a solo show, an opera, a screenplay) right now, which require some evolution of my process as it stands to sustain a longer cohesive narrative within the spirit and form of spoken word and hip hop culture.
5. What is involved in getting ready for the performance?
KZT: Besides the regular logistics of getting there and working with the presenters re: what the flow and the intention of the evening is — there are a couple of things that I regularly do in order to prepare for the performance. As soon as I get in the car with the event organizers, I ask as many questions as I can about what the event is, who the expected audience will be, what is the history of the event or producing organizations, what is the culture and tone of the event, what are major issues that the community may be facing right now. It helps me a lot, since I usually have a general idea of what I would like to perform for the evening, but sometimes i switch it up entirely depending on what I feel like the energy and needs of the audience is for that night. After that, I check out the space and see how it’s set up.
As a spoken word artist, I’ve performed in so many different kinds of spaces (theaters and cultural institutions, outdoor venues, coffeehouses, music clubs, classrooms, juvenile detention centers) that I have a pretty good sense of whether the current set-up will help to bring together the energy of the audience or dissipate it. So if the set-up looks like its gonna kill the focus or energy of the crowd, I ask the organizers to change the set-up or I strategize which poems I can spit, how I can move through the crowd, ways to work with eye contact and call and response to develop a relationship with the audience (a lot of this is just internalized instinct at this point, so it’s not even a verbal process at all). One of my poems “Player’s Girl” is my warm-up poem so I try to spit that backstage if I have time, since I feel like it hits all of my registers emotionally, vocally, physically and it is one of my oldest poems that I still perform from time to time so I have a lot of personal history with it. My performance rider asks for a green tea and a fruit cup and lots of water, so I always have those with me as well. Some stretches and stuff, and usually I say a quick prayer or blessing and dedicate my show to someone who has meant a lot to me that week in my mind.
6. What’s it like performing/how does it feel to perform?
KZT: Performing spoken word for me is the best feeling in the world. To be able to step to the mic with my life and experiences and have people be moved by it. To see themselves within the work, to open up a new sense of their own possibility and meaning is so tremendously powerful. It is native to me, perhaps even another home, since I’ve been doing it so long. Poetry has probably been one of the most constant companions to me in my life, so to be able to travel the world and share my work, to develop relationships with audiences and other artists through the performances itself is incredibly rewarding. I’ve learned over the years that there is such a wide range of physical responses that people have to performance especially when it hits them on a deep emotional level or intellectually in some way.
Even the shows where I might have felt like I did my worst were actually full of a lot of moments of authentic connection and their own kind of miracles. Performing for theater though is a bit different than performing in a spoken word context, as is performing musically or with dancers or on tv or film, etc. Your relationship to the audience or camera sometimes is different, and each space has its own cultural norms and different ways that the audience expectations shift what they want from and how they experience your work.
7. What do you hope to get across to the audience when you perform?
KZT: I think I touched on this some in the other questions, but after a multiple hour conversation with a director I worked with a few years ago named Lenora Pace — we both arrived at the idea that what is most universal is what is most specific, not the other way around. A lot of times as artists or as human beings, you are asked to make something more universal by stripping away at difference (whether that is race or gender or class or ethnicity or sexuality), but the opposite is true. The deeper you get into the true specificity of your life, what makes it unique beyond any other experience in the world — the more an audience and others can understand you and relate to you because of the sheer fact of authenticity.
People can relate to and understand vulnerability, reality, authenticity. All of these things can be present in fictional work as well, but you gotta keep reaching for what is most true if not for yourself, for your characters in the worlds in which they exist, etc. So I feel like my greatest opportunity and duty is to reach as deeply as I can into my own life, so I can share with the world what I have found to be most honest and most true, which transforms the world in and of itself.
8. What do you think the future for spoken word is?
KZT: The future of spoken word is what we make of it. Performance poetry, sung poetry, oral poetry will always have a place in our cultures no matter what. But as for our generation of artists, if we want to continue to have the work be promoted and distributed as a form of commercial entertainment and/or as a viable and reputable creative form within the context of current arts and entertainment communities and industries, there is a lot of work we each need to do in terms of producing and innovating new formats for people to experience spoken word beyond poetry slams or “Def Poetry” or being subsumed into other arts and entertainment categories whether it be theater, literature, or music.
We need to create new artistic formats for audiences to experience spoken word and then produce, promote, and develop and audience for it in unprecedented ways. So in addition to my creative work as a writer and a performer, I am doing a lot creatively as a producer for my production company Moving Earth Productions LLC in terms of developing formats for my work as a spoken word artist on film and television, theatrical stages, in a musical context, in new media, in visual art — in order to make that possible.
9. How can others get involved/ what can they learn from spoken word?
KZT: The best way to get involved is to go to your own local spoken word poetry venue or open mic (so keep your eye out for flyers at coffeehouses and community centers and club venues, search online for “poetry slams,” “spoken word,” and your city, or check out the listings online at http://www.letsdoitontheroad.com/venueseries.html for poetry events across the country or in New York at http://www.poetz.com/calendar/. There is also a good FAQ on http://www.poetryslam.com put together by Poetry Slam Inc. Or even better start your own!
Each open mic is like it’s own university, so if you don’t like it — keep on checking out spoken word venues until you find a community that you vibe with and feel inspired by even most of the time (you can get a lot of inspiration from “bad” poetry as well, so don’t count it out quite yet — see what you can learn!). If you feel like you’d want to be surrounded by a different crew of writers or performers, then start your own open mic or slam and you create the norms, the culture, and community of what you want to have that space be like. Running a poetry venue and/or hosting a slam is its own art. It requires patience, dedication, learning, humility, vision, listening.
Even today, I still love going to check out how people run their “houses of poetry.” You create a lot by hosting, organizing your own venue. Oftentimes, you create a community and experience for people that saves their lives, teaches them to be more powerful, and that they matter and are important in the world (that is, if you can get past all the drama, back-biting, and ego – but if it’s your house of poetry, it’s you who sets the tone on that). But it’s incredibly rewarding and will teach you a lot not only about writing, performing, and community leadership, but also what it means to be human and search out how to articulate what is most important to you and what moves you in so many diverse ways. The open mic has been my greatest educator throughout all of my work and my travels.
10. Can you suggest any resources/books/tv/movies re: spoken word to check out?
A Few Spoken Word Anthologies/Books To Check Out:
Aloud: Poets from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam
Check The Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets and Emcees
The Spoken Word Revolution
The Spoken Word Revolution Redux
His Rib: Poems, Stories, Essays by HER
Words In Your Face: Twenty Years of the New York Poetry Slam
A Few Spoken Word TV Shows/Films To Check Out:
Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices (HBO, 2009)
Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry (HBO, 2000-2007)
Lyric Cafe (BET)
Spoken (Black Entertainment Family Channel)
United States of Poetry (PBS)
Slam (1998)
Love Jones (1997)
SP!T (2006)
Slam Nation (1998)
A Few Spoken Word/Poetry Organizations To Check Out:
Acentos Bronx Poetry Series & Workshop
Asian Pacific Islander American Spoken Word Summit
Asian American Writers Workshop
Cave Canem
Hip Hop Theater Festival
Kundiman Asian American Poets Retreat
LouderArts
Poetry Slam Inc.
Urban Word NYC
Young Chicago Authors
Youth Speaks
A Few Writing/Writing Process Books To Check Out:
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Steven King
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Writing Alone & With Others by Pat Schneider
June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint by June Jordan
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg
A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver
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