The stuff of Podcasts

Since my piece is about contemporary performance poetry, I feel that I need to provide examples of this, in whole, not chopped up. It feels like a violation to chop up little pieces of a poem and offer them as examples of the whole. The professors of my course may have had something else in mind when they assigned the task of creating a podcast (they probably want something like a radio piece), but my particular topic seems to call for the use of this medium. So here is a plethora of contemporary performance poetry of different sorts and I hope to continue adding to it. (Of course, I have to figure out how to put these into podcast format)

One of the best performance poets I have seen yet is Regie Gibson. He has a wide range of styles and I may end up including more of his stuff. Luckily, he has given me permission to use his intellectual property for this.

This is a comic poem written by Oscar Brown Jr (Regie is just performing it):

This is an original:

Here are some examples of Slam Poetry, from a recent slam at the Bowery Poetry Club:

Molly Katherine:

Kareem Johnson (I like this because, unlike most slam poetry, it isn’t self-centered, identity driven):

This is something a little different. A poet named Eve Packer and two jazz musicians create a funky fusion:

Bob Holman, head honcho, MC of Manhattan poetry, reads d.a. levy at a reading in honor of levy’s birthday. Levy is a legendary Cleveland poet/anarchist, died when he was 26, in the 60’s:

All of these have to be formatted. I want to just have a blank screen with the name of the reader, the poem, and a little context written in white over a black background for the duration of the reading. This entry is a work in progress.

Here is Bob Holman’s reading in Podcast format, with some contextual narration added.