Spoken Word Poetry
Written by Jenna Sewell, Former Student on Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Alex Zwarts, a senior at SHS, has a hobby that isn't commonly heard of around the school: Spoken Word Poetry. Spoken Word Poetry is when a poem is used as a piece for performance art, you perform in front of an audience and you are judged for the writing of the piece, the way you perform it and if it conveys strong emotion.
Zwarts has been writing poems since she was ten and has been performing her poems since she was thirteen. She has always loved acting and poetry. One day a teacher suggested to her that she try spoken word. She immediately got hooked since it put together dramatics and poetry, two things she says she adores.
In performances, you can either use a poem written by someone else or use one you have written yourself. She has always only used her own pieces, she finds that it is easier to portray her own emotion and it is a good release for pent up feelings.
Zwarts says she tends to mainly write about break ups and heartbreaks. Sometimes a couple happy poems or love poems sneak in there, but most of the time she writes about the emotions she needs to get out right away. "I'm a teenage girl. I have a lot of emotions and this is the best way to get it all out so i don't have a breakdown, to be honest," says Zwarts.
It usually only takes her ten to fifteen minutes to write a poem, but sometimes she has to go back and redo the entire poem when it's a particularly difficult emotion to capture. When asked about what her writing process generally tends to look like, Zwarts replies, "tear stained pages, no joke. it takes a lot to write out exactly how I feel because I am a person who will cage up feelings so long that by the time I get to writing I can't exactly say what I wanted to say, but besides that, its mostly me in my room at night. I think the fact that I'm close to sleep really opens up my psyche and really helps me connect to that place where my emotions are. I love how you can use the weirdest types of emotion. Like instead of saying I love you, you could say something like, 'the burning item of my desire.'"
Zwarts only shares her poems with people she is close with or the people she is performing to. She doesn't feel like other people are privy to the feelings closest to her soul. Although she doesn't plan on making any sort of career out of her hobby, she is definitely going to keep it as a big part of her life.
