Spoken word
It is a 20th-century continuation of an ancient oral artistic tradition that focuses on the aesthetics of recitation and word play, such as the performer's live intonation and voice inflection.
"[3] Poetry, like music, appeals to the ear, an effect known as euphony or onomatopoeia, a device to represent a thing or action by a word that imitates sound.
The poet and ethnographer Jerzy Ficowski has studied and written extensively about the Polska Roma tradition of spoken word.
Though the vast majority of Polish-Romani people of that generation did not read or write, oral folk traditions were very strong.
[19] In 1849, the Home Journal wrote about concerts that combined spoken word recitations with music, as demonstrated by actresses Sophie Schroder and Fanny Kemble.
"[9] "Sound once imagined through the eye gradually gave body to poems through performance, and late in the 1950s reading aloud erupted in the United States.
Notable speeches such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream", Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?
", and Booker T. Washington's "Cast Down Your Buckets" incorporated elements of oration that influenced the spoken-word movement within the African-American community.
[26] The Last Poets was a poetry and political music group formed during the 1960s that was born out of the Civil Rights Movement and helped increase the popularity of spoken word within African-American culture.
[27] Spoken word poetry entered into wider American culture following the release of Gil Scott-Heron's spoken-word poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" on the album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox in 1970.
[28] The Nuyorican Poets Café on New York's Lower Eastside was founded in 1973, and is one of the oldest American venues for presenting spoken-word poetry.
Outside of the United States, artists such as French singer-songwriters Léo Ferré and Serge Gainsbourg made personal use of spoken word over rock or symphonic music from the beginning of the 1970s in such albums as Amour Anarchie (1970), Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971), and Il n'y a plus rien (1973), and contributed to the popularization of spoken word within French culture.
In 2003, the movement reached its peak in France with Fabien Marsaud aka Grand Corps Malade being a forerunner of the genre.
Spoken word in Kenya has been a means of communication where poets can speak about issues affecting young people in Africa.
[43] Some spoken-word poems go viral and can then appear in articles, on TED talks, and on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
