Why is poetry important?
As a spoken word artist, I know our strength is in telling the truth. In creating something bite sized that can illuminate the listener. As so many of us fall into a kind of social media hypnosis, I find poetry is thriving because it doesn’t demand a long attention span and so much of it has become instrumental in bringing forward the idea that we need to really decolonize our minds and embrace our shortfalls as starting points for learning. Once we really move away from the more academic parameters of poetry, it really becomes a tool of the people. They don’t call them three minute power poems for nothing.
One of my favourite spoken word pieces, “Whitey on the Moon” by Gil Scott Heron, recently got a lot more airplay after Elon Musk started taking fellow billionaires to space. I’m a huge lover of the power of satire, and that poem is just devastating in it’s effectiveness. I’m big on horrifying and funny as a political tool.
The act of writing has helped me to process so much of my long indoors of the past few years. Writing keeps me from stagnancy, keeps me from silencing myself, and being able to produce during this time has really helped with my mental health. Here I can imagine myself an earthworm, a multiheaded alien, a person who can just be free to wander, at least in my mind. It is dreaming while awake, and when the landscape is bleak, it can really fill it with emotion and resilience.
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