Spoken word is one of my favorite forms of poetry. It has the power to put you in a trance, activating your auditory senses as opposed to just your visual senses when reading a poem. This genre was born during the Harlem Renaissance, inspired from the Blues movement. It became popular in the underground African-American community in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement with a group of poets and musicians known as the Last Poets. Later in the early 1980s, it was embraced in colleges as part of the Postmodern Art Movement.
On the Lower Eastside of New York, the Nuyorican Poets Café, founded in 1973, is one of the oldest venues of spoken word poetry. In 1989, the first reported poetry slam was held there. With the inception of the poetry slam movement came the HBO TV series Def Poetry produced by Russell Simmons.
A featured poet on this series and also a regular performer at the Nuyorican Poets Café, Mayda Del Valle, is the youngest person and first Latina to win the National Poetry Slam title. She grew up in the south side of Chicago and attended Williams College in Massachusetts, where she discovered her calling for writing after declaring an art major. She graduated in June of 2000 with a B.A. in studio art. Her poetry most often reflects her puertorriqueño heritage and her experiences as a girl growing up in a multicultural, urban environment.
I am fortunate enough to have seen Mayda Del Valle perform live because she came to my high school when I was a freshman, and it was one of the most inspiring, powerful, and passionate displays of catharsis that I had ever witnessed. The delivery of her poems stops time, as the words spill from her soul on the stage at such a fast-paced rhythm that you have no choice but to listen and accept her lyrical expression for what it is. What I love about her poetry is that it is so nonjudgmental, so genuine, and so organic, and it epitomizes what in my opinion is the true essence of poetry.
Click here for a clip of Mayda Del Valle performing at the White House Poetry Jam in 2009.
To watch more of her performances search “Mayda Del Valle” on YouTube!