There’s a lot of slam and performance poems popping up all over the internet. The lead purveyor of performance poets has been Button Poetry for the past several years, and had contributed to the overall demand of performance poems (full disclosure: I have a poem up on Button). Recently, new channels have sprung up, such as Texas’ Write About Now channel, that challenge to usurp Button as the lead performance poetry channel. There are also channels that are venue specific that offer fantastic poems and a more comprehensive survey of individual poets, such as Bower Poetry Club, Vancouver Slam, Poetree (out of Eugene). and other channels such as All Def Poetry by Russell Simmons have been around for a while.

With this enormous proliferation of performance poetry, how do we recognize incredible performance poetry aside from the YouTube playlist count? How do we say what is a great performance poem outside of the scores it receives in a slam? I am going to attempt to embark on mission to seek out and find great performance poems to feature on the blog section of my website. I would like to give at least 100 to 200 words as to why I believe the poem is great. While the written literary world has a compendium of analysis of the written work, I would like to try and do the same for performance poetry.

I will try to keep up with all of the spoken word that comes out. If there is an incredible piece of spoken word or performance poetry that you are into, feel free to send it my way. While I will likely bring up vintage performance poems to analyze, I will do the best that I can to stay on top of new poems. I will feature a new piece weekly on Thursday or Friday.