A digital home for the first 25 years of the poetry slam movement. Audio. Video. Print. Poetry.
Submitted by Mongo on
When we started P4, we were so focused on gathering audio and video recordings that we admittedly ignored a huge resource of slam history: CHAPBOOKS! Who would have thought that the number of chapbooks we have now collected would now log in at over 500???
Submitted by Mongo on
Ladies and Gentlemen, announcing the Bucky Sinister Chapbook Collection!
Submitted by Mongo on
When spoken word superstar Sarah Kay was teenage poet, absorbing the poetry and cutting her teeth around the slam venues of New York City, her father, Jeff Kay, would accompany her to the shows. But as much as Jeff loved to watch his daughter perform, he often found that his daughter's poetry moved him so much that he spent too much of each evening watching through his tears.
Submitted by Mongo on
I'm proud to announce that P4 has reached an important milestone! While cataloging materials into our database this afternoon, I added our 1,000th item! That's a cool grand of CDs, DVDs, Books, Chapbooks, digital video items, etc. And of course, that number represents tens of thousands of individual poems and performances.
Submitted by Mongo on
Please join me in welcoming Mahogany Browne and Penmanship Books to our list of P4 Partners!
Submitted by Mongo on
Many of you probably saw this poem, which went viral this past week. It's by Royce Mann, who is an 8th Grader. At just 14 years old, he sports a passion and a voice that would be the envy of many of his adult contemporaries in the slam world.
Submitted by Tom on
"Five months after forming their slam poetry group, Muslim Girls Making Change is competing this week in the Brave New Voices international youth poetry slam competition in Washington, D.C. 'We write poems about things that we can't keep inside of ourselves anymore, things that we care about', said Kirin Waqar, 16, of South Burlington [VT], whose parents are from Pakistan. ... 'We will never be white only pretend to be. We hide behind big mirrors and lies unsure of who we really are. African American or the other way around? Pakistani first, American?', they say.
Submitted by Tom on
Submitted by Mongo on
Today we'd like to highlight the work of our friend Charlie Rossiter over at Poetry Spoken Here, a wonderful online resource for the finest poetry, read and performed. And let's start with his most recent blog entry, where he explores the work of our current Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, through a performance poetry lens. Charlie writes:
Submitted by Tom on
We (as least one of us) just returned from a performance of Nice Fish, a play by Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins "drawn from the words of Louis Jenkins." The program contained a Jenkins poem titled "The Prose Poem":