Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
In seventh grade, I fell in love with spoken word poetry — I watched it religiously and performed it sparingly.
I discovered Olivia Gatwood’s “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” and Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s “My Spanish” on the YouTube channel for Button Poetry and was amazed at how their poems captured what it is like to feel alive.
As I watched these performers in person on March 7 at Bing Concert Hall, I found that same liveliness unearthed within me. From what I could tell, all of us — the audience and performers alike — unearthed something that night.
The evening began with student performances by members of the Stanford Spoken Word Collective. These performances felt gut-wrenching and raw. As openers, the performers taught the audience how to watch the show: how to listen, participate and immerse ourselves in the words. They revealed how alive poetry can be.
Through an extended ‘dog’ metaphor, an immigrant story and a powerful meditation on alcoholism, the collective’s performers touched on themes of race, place and deeply-seated emotion. Rhythm and rhymes took hold of the audience, alliteration abounded. Clichéd metaphors were made fresh, and impossibly large themes were made poetically succinct.
It’s striking that these performances took place on Stanford’s campus because, traditionally, the spoken word form is known for evading intellectualization. Sitting in the audience, clapping and stomping when the verse speaks to you, it is impossible to get bogged down in analysis and formality. The Spoken Word Collective brought us words off the page and they took on a life of their own.
When Gatwood took the stage, she managed to weave humor into an incredibly real rhetorical question. She read a poem about a high school friend: “I knew of her before I knew her, you know those girls?” — a concise way to encapsulate a universal truth of girlhood. In her poetry, she delved into the class politics of high school soccer, embedded love into a story about linens and poetically (of course) drew connections between the color of Pepto Bismol, “mace for girls” and a pink switchblade knife.
Gatwood revealed that her performance was an unearthing in itself: many of her poems dealt with scenes from a life that time had separated her from: “I haven’t read these poems in, like, seven years,” she said.
Lozada-Oliva was up next. She read poems that included the topics of lovesickness and Our Lady of Guadalupe rolled into one, as well as a breakup that inspired the epic line, “I’m a wet little idiot.” She touched on identity and obsession while interjecting to include humorous context and asides. She then treated the audience to a contrapuntal poem, saying that she’ll likely only write “three in a lifetime.”
Lozada-Oliva ended the evening with a pandemic poem — as she puts it, “everyone gets one pandemic poem.” Somehow relatable while incredibly personal, humorous and dead serious, Lozada-Oliva captivated the audience through her dense and purposeful verse.
Something that struck me about both poets’ performances was their candidness. While artistic inspiration is sometimes elusive and mysterious, Gatwood got real about what inspired her to write her different pieces. This included a poem inspired by a quote which she simply “had to write a poem about,” from event introducer and ITALIC instructor Sam Sax: “relationships are just a little cult.”
In a similar vein, Lozada-Oliva got on stage after Gatwood’s nostalgic poems about her high school experiences and joked, “I wish I were younger.” When referring to her own vulnerability up on the stage, she quipped again about the audience watching her, saying “Oh my god, the eyes.” With art that deals so closely with the human experience, hearing these artists perform their own words with uniquely human interjections, active commentary and humorous asides was quite powerful.
At this year’s Poetry Live! event, the Stanford Spoken Word Collective, Olivia Gatwood and Melissa Lozada-Oliva unearthed personal and global histories, stories of past selves and emotions that feel at once personal and universal. For students and educators alike, Poetry Live! took the written word out of an academic setting and directly into our imaginations.
The audience was a lucky crowd. For everyone else, you’ll have to secure a ticket to next year’s Poetry Live!