copperbadge:

quasarkisses:

spice-ghouls:

quasarkisses:

yall can make fun of slam poems all you want but I’ve never felt more powerful than listening to women yell about their trauma to strangers

a lot of the difference between people who like slam poetry and people who hate slam poetry is comprised of whether you’ve heard slam poetry used constructively as a platform for the voices of the oppressed and those who would otherwise not have ways to express their emotions, or, alternatively, just heard it used by boring untalented white dudes who want a license to complain about how Smartphones Are Literally The Devil

^An excellent fucking take right here

Chicago recently had a big-ass scandal in the Slam Poetry community over the (predictably, white, middle-aged) guy who basically ran the Slam in Chicago for decades, delivering a poem complaining about how often people were using slam poetry to talk about their trauma. Thus validating @spice-ghouls‘ excellent point. 

It went down like a lead balloon but it led to some pretty great poetry about poetry from those objecting.