I'm not familiar with the guy. Clever video though. It's been a while since I really paid attention to spoken word or slam. I think Saul Williams is pretty good, though I wonder what his success would look like if no one ever saw him perform; how would people react to his poems on the page?

For me, that's the disconnect in regard to slam vs. page poetry. In universities and colleges, people that study poetry tend to focus on how things look like on the page and only occasionally focus on the sonics and even then, it's mostly on rhythm, meter and rhyme rather than flow and phrasing (by which, I mean rhythm and meter used musically, rather than the stilted music of dust settling on turning pages). On stages where slam is celebrated, people pay attention to the person and their voice more then the words or the meaning and of course, all enjambment and the power of linebreaks and shape are lost to that "slam intonation" the one that lets people know they're listening to a poem just as the droning of a priest lets everyone brace themselves (and the knees) for a sermon. Take for example, Beau Sia and compare the delivery to that of Williams, how the vowels stretch, the way that words are attacked.

Ultimately, I'd like to reconcile the two and technology seems like the way to do it. What I'm working toward is displaying poems on the page while providing the audio of how I would read the work alongside it, letting the words shape the voice rather than the opposite.

To be clear, I'm not shitting on slam fans or people who love the page. To be sure, I've found pleasure in both, I just think that there's something missing and that this division, these two ways are really just people taking detours when what I feel people should be doing is stopping to build a bridge.