Transcript of Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz audio

Performance poetry-- As we like to say, it was oral poetry before it was print poetry. All of the early poets, Homer, they all performed it live and to me I think that there is an accessibility there and the invitation there for voices that traditionally wouldn't feel comfortable with print poetry, and to some extent that is also their comfortability with the written word. One of the most moving things that I've heard about performance poetry was an interview I did for my book, Words in Your Face, a 20-year history of the New York City poetry slam movement. I interviewed the woman who runs Urban Word and Urban Word reaches out to inner city teenagers and has them write their own work and perform their own work, and I said to her, "Are you expecting these students to then follow this path and become writers?" And she said, "That's not really the goal of our project. The goal of our project is to empower these kids to know that they have a voice, to know that they can share a story." If you're doing a poetry course in a traditional high school, you might ask them to write the poem, right, and you get it back and the teacher has to, to a certain extent, correct all the grammar, correct all the spelling, and the- and sort of misses the point of what the kid is trying to share. So this kid gets back this page that's got red all over it saying all the things he did wrong and it sends a message that is not encouraging. When you take that away and you just say, "Tell your story in your own words" and you get to be in front of an audience and share it exactly as you want to say it, spelling doesn't matter, grammar doesn't matter because again you're talking about regionalism-- And she says the impact of Urban Word and Urban Word projects such as Youth Speaks Louder Than a Bomb in Chicago is not so much that we're creating a generation of poets but that we're creating a generation of kids who have come from disadvantaged neighborhoods who know they can stand in front of a room and tell strangers their story and what they think- what they believe in and the things- the changes they want to have happen. And she's like "That's going to have a tremendous impact for entire communities" and to me that is what draws me to performance poetry is people telling their own stories, sharing it to their community and then sometimes sharing it to communities that otherwise would never have heard them. And I find that extraordinarily compelling.