Al Letson has really taken it to the level of acting. My own approach is very performance heavy. But I try to have a more intimate association with my audience than a performer would normally have. The performance aspect, he said, harkens back to prehistory. This is how we started entertaining each other thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago.
Performance poetry defies technology, defies modernization of time.
That culture was almost purely oral. Spoken word is a continuation of that legacy, lively, vital, animated. But until recently, he said, he wasn't even aware that there were venues like An Evening of Spoken Word that offered an open microphone to anyone with the fortitude to get up and speak in front of a room full of strangers. What attracted him, he said, was the opportunity to find an audience. Sometimes we feel like nobody is listening.