And it is in part because of this association that spoken word's speech-based poetics has emerged recently in the commercial spotlight of music television and the rock press.
Spoken word is a poetry characterized by a poetics of presence.
It amounts to getting poetry back into the street where it once was, out of the classroom, out of speech departments, and off the printed page. We have, at the end of the millennium, brought it to life and televised it to the masses.