“I wonder how they told you, did they sit you down over tea, delicately frosted cakes lining your chipped porcelain? Explain it as a marketing technique, a vehicle to make you more palatable to a culture that demands perfection?”
Pop culture, as our classmates before us have displayed, has created a great many monsters. But it has also birthed productive outlets for society and one of these is spoken poetry. Spoken word poetry is a type of poetry written to be performed. Described as feeling inadequate or dissatisfied laying flat on paper, spoken word poetry demands to jump off the page and be experienced through performance. First taking place in the U.S. in the 1980’s, spoken word poetry was born when open mic sessions started taking place at cafés in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Austin. It is unknown exactly who started the artistic revolution of slam poetry, a competition of poets performing their spoken word, but some point to Marc Kelly Smith, a Chicago poet who is also known as “Slampapi.” He believed that academic poetry was too structured so he desired to introduce a looser poetry medium. He founded the first-ever National Poetry Slam in 1990 and that annual competition still goes on today. What Smith did not anticipate, however, would be how far the poems stemming from Poetry Slams would reach in the years to come.
For over twenty years, the Slam Poetry community was isolated due to its underground nature. This changed, however, with the use of YouTube. Now, poems that would be performed in a smoky bar in Queens can be experienced by someone in Seattle. Poems that would be heard by an upwards of fifty people can now be consumed to an upwards of 13,540,995 times on YouTube like Neil Hilborn’s poem OCD did after it went viral in 2014. This new visibility allowed for this to become a method of expression that millions of people could relate to and begin to stand together and fight for the issues that were discussed. Through this it became a form of resistance.
The virality of spoken word poetry is more than just cultural appreciation of a somewhat overlooked artform. The virality of spoken word poetry in our society today allows for the subject matter of the poems to reach audiences much wider than first expected. The thing about spoken word poetry that makes it so appealing to poets is the ability to write about hard things that sometimes are not socially acceptable to have a simple conversation about like sexuality, gender, racism, societal expectations, sexual assault, etc. Slam Poetry provides a safe place to write and pour out hard things on your mind and heart.
Melissa May, for instance, is a Slam Poet that had issues with Disney’s 2012 Villain Doll line. Disney took the “larger than life” villain and reduced her to “bite size pieces”. This was a hard thing for Melissa to swallow because she identified with Ursula. She saw herself in Ursula’s unapologetic rolling curves. Ursula was the only Disney character that ever looked like her growing up. Seeing Ursula, a curvy woman, made Melissa “feel like living in this body was less of a curse”.
Despite the weight of Melissa’s own feelings and her story, her poem exposes an even deeper problem in society today. Disney, sampling the acceptable qualifications of what a beautiful person woman is, created all of their villain dolls to be a size zero. Found in the runway models and the women on the cover of magazines, skinny is beautiful. Anything bigger than a size zero calls for a dieting tip. By putting all of their characters into size zero bodies, the implication is that every woman should look this way. Because of this, the little girls that play with these dolls that do not fit into the box of a size zero body start believing they, too, are not beautiful. The production of this doll also questions what a woman should be. By reducing the literal volume of Ursula, they, too, are undermining her large and booming character. What implications, then, are made on the expectations of women? Should all women be reduced to a small frame? Should all women be reduced down to “bite size pieces”?
Through this poem, we get an honest account of how the broken Toy Industry can affect an individual and how societal norms can push people into boxes they were not designed to fit in just to become “acceptable”. Through this poem, people are forced to see the hard truth of society today through a painful, frank, heart-wrenching telling of facts. Slam Poetry forces you to feel, even when it is not easy to. Pop culture created this outlet for it to criticize not only the world around us but also pop culture itself.
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