Probably my favorite quote regarding poetry is by the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who said, "If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger."
Nothing expresses the joy of language quite like poetry, and neither does anything tap into the root of emotion with the same tender brutality. One of my favorite forms of poetry is beat poetry, or spoken word poetry. The words themselves are brimming with ecstasy and tragedy, but then to have them screamed in your face by an impassioned wordsmith adds a new dimension of power to them. It makes a chill of recognition run up your spine; a shiver of familiarity, and you think, "Oh yeah, this is why we invented language."
Words may have first been made in order to squabble over the mundane, yes, but once we began to play with those words, to arrange them in new and unexpected ways, I believe our species realized then that this is what it had been missing.
Through my perusal of the internet I have come across several astonishing spoken word performances. Here are three of my favorites:
"Hir" by Alysia Harris and Aysha El Shamayleh
Def Poetry by Rives
"Slip of the Tongue" by Adriel Luis, video directed by Karen Lum
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