Push Me Closer
Meditations on the Phenomenon of YouTube Spoken Word Poetry
So much of intimacy is based in communication so of course things feel different when the way we actually communicate has been upended. And all of this is presented to you in a perpetual slideshow seemingly created for the exclusive purpose of highlighting your own insecurities. Like, no wonder we’re lonely. No wonder the punchline to every joke is that we all want to die.
-Savannah Brown, Metal Magazine
In the beginning was the word. That is to say, in the beginning was the spoken word. While modern poetry has since been relegated to a private endeavour undertaken in leather armchairs with a pen primed for making the piece ours, the earliest examples of poetry began as narratives that were read aloud for an audience. The Edda, the Iliad and the Epic of Gilgamesh were never supposed to belong solely to classrooms and imagination. There is a reason why the Iliad began with song.
The truth is that it is only in very recent years that poetry has become a nearly entirely individualistic art form like the novel. Beyond the humble radio poetry reading, most people who consume work by Sylvia Plath or any other poet will be entering the work from an isolated bedroom. Perhaps they may discuss singular poems or literary devices in a college classroom, but to read the entirety of a poet’s catalogue is to enter a relationship generally consisting of two voices: The poet and the reader.
But even at its height, there have been avenues of poetry that have been more focused on community participation. The most obvious is slam poetry, which is more focused on performance than on the individual print of words. These pieces are often intensely personal, more intimately catered for the digestion of an audience that outnumbers the usual two-party dynamic. While this format is not new, with its American identity linked back to the jazz poets of the Harlem Renaissance, it gained a new lease of life after the rise of social media. My own first interaction was with the poet Sarah Kay’s If I Should Have A Daughter, which was performed for a TEDTalks Conference and was posted on YouTube on March 21, 2011.
For many people of my generation, this was our first exposure to poetry that was alive and that existed with the breath. Many teenagers went on to embrace open mic’s and spoken word tournaments, often grappling with the gap between art and pain as they exposed their traumas for the world to see. OCD by Neil Hilborn, Rape Joke by Get Lit (Belissa Escoleoedo and Rhiannon McGavin), and Don’t Kill Yourself Today by Hannah Dains are some of the first results that I find when searching for slam poetry on YouTube, and they are par for the course.
One of the largest poets to emerge from this circle was Savannah Brown with her piece Things Guys Look For In Girls. This poem has since been deleted from her channel, although there is a recording from her performance at the 2014 USA National Speech and Debate Association. However, my memory of that performance will always be of her before her white bedroom wall in Ohio. She could not have been more than 17 years old, at a time when I was 13. In that particularly emotional time of my life, Brown and her peers were instrumental in tapping into a very specific niche of the teenage mentality.
There may well be a sense that the attempts by Brown and Kay were attempts to return to that soul of communal poetry, but Brown has all but rejected it. As I mentioned, Brown took down most of her videos in the late 2010’s and has since removed most of her online presence. In an interview with Metal Magazine about her third poetry collection “Closer Baby Closer”, Brown begins with a near immediate decrial of the internet’s destruction of intimate connections: “Terrible digital overwhelm! Irrational fears made rational! The illusion of connection! Over-access to others’ private worlds!”
These are intense words for someone who built her legacy on the promise of the digital world. There is something to be said about the sense that something must have failed within the ecosystem of digital poetry for Brown. Button Poetry, the YouTube channel that originally brought many of these poets to the forefront of our attention, continues to publish recordings nearly every day. Yet most of these are not “digital poets”, as Brown was. More than anything, they continue the tradition of live readings from books they have published traditionally. They do not receive the same audience or attention as Kay and Brown. But they were never meant to.
Yet traces of Brown’s legacy remain on the internet, perhaps despite her own wishes. After her dubious hiatuses, modern poetry is still aching for the unique connection of the parasocial poet. Most obvious is the emergence of 23-year-old Dakota Warren. While Savannah Brown has gone on to specialise in more traditional written poetry, Warren has stepped into the void that Brown and her ilk left behind. Dripping with curated poise like a 1940’s starlet, Dakota Warren strives for the goal of being the ultimate poet.
Still, Warren’s field is not true digital poetry, even though it is catered for a viewership. Her work is keenly traditional, with her presence having begun as a form of BookTuber, and with the physical publication of her collection On Sun Swallowing. Although her communication method is rooted in the ethereal nature of the Internet, everything Warren prizes is that of the physical world: Books, wine, flesh, sex, blood. Unlike the previous communication of Savannah Brown, her camera is merely a way of capturing physicality; not of drawing connections. Even if her video captions still appeal to the parasocial with their generous declarations of love, hers is still far less digital than Brown’s ever was.
Hers is an innocent yet beguiling game of the balance between intimacy and distance, as she films the intricacies of her life as a transplant in Europe while embracing an aesthetic that has historically been renowned for its inaccessibility. Her very way of speaking seems to border on something that flirts with the Transatlantic accent- although very keenly Australian, her words are refined and chiselled to the very extents of possibility.
But the YouTube poem is gone. It is no longer the twin of the monologue, filling our recommendations with thumb snaps. The artist may still be present on the platform, but at some point, the dream of those earlier poems has died. It dies hand in hand with that earlier hope of what the internet would bring us; unmitigated connection. Despite our attempts, it has become clear that these videos of intimacy have left us more adrift than ever, whether or not we are aware of it. And how can poetry, a medium designed around the unfolding of barriers and of crossing the existential distance between poet and audience member, survive in such a place?
Footnotes:
https://bookriot.com/evolution-of-spoken-word-poetry/
[2] https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/interview/savannah-brown
Literature:
DeMarco, Nikki. (2023, April 10). Evolution of Spoken Word Poetry. Bookriot.com
Child, Becca. (2023). Savannah Brown: A Digital Love Affair. Metalmagazine.eu
Videos:
If I Should Have A Daughter by Sarah Kay
forming human connections? sounds fake but okay by Savannah Brown
an excerpt from a letter i never sent (a prose poem) by Dakota Warren