Contagious emotion

We’ve been doing poetry for a very long time. Long enough for it to predate history and the invention of writing. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, poetry used to be writing, or at least the very best substitute for it, evolving as a means of communicating ideas between families, communities and generations when the only tools we had were our words and our imaginations.

Our ancestors understood the power of rhyme and meter to provoke emotion and create memory. They used it to remember important things, like stories, prayers and rituals, sitting together and hearing them told over and again, until you yourself could perform them and pass them on.

YouTube Creator Tatiana Feltrin does just that. Below, she performs from Virgil’s Aeneid, which is one of her favourites:

Leap to the beginning of the 21st Century and, for most people, poetry had perhaps understandably been relegated from their lives, slipping from a ubiquitous and culturally essential medium to a peripheral and rarefied art form. After all, who needs poetry to communicate in an era when you can send Tweets to a person orbiting the Earth?

Some will say poetry needs updating - it might be more present than we realise, through forms we wouldn’t have thought of.
This is how Richard Sabak made Baudelaire feel contemporary:

What changed in the past few decades was the ability to connect to new families, communities and generations, using new technologies to reach out and find your audience from an entire planet worth of kindred spirits.

Here, Raymond Antrobus talks about his family move from the Caribbean to the UK in a very touching, intimate self-made animation video.

Video platforms inspired a resurgent wave of poets to restore poetry to its original purpose: communicating ideas and emotion through spoken performance.

Watch confessional YouTube Poet Alejandra Martinez de Miguel performs the emotive and captivating ‘Soy Mujer’:

Instead of folk memories, today’s YouTube Creators are recounting epics of the self, sharing the deeply personal in a powerfully intimate way, gazing straight down the lens into the eyes of the listener and connecting one-to-one.

YouTube Creator ClickForTaz illustrates the above by sharing her beautiful self-written piece about modern dating: ‘When You Love the Wrong Person’.

And if you’d like to know more about spoken word poetry, let UK-based Apples and Snakes guide you from the movement’s roots to its latest evolutions, in only just 2 minutes.

Who knows, as Apples and Snakes suggests, maybe soon you can be the poet?