Writing is a solitary act. The writer explores the unknown as they put words on the page until the piece is ready to be shared. The performance of spoken word adds another element to this act, as well as a greater level of vulnerability.
Poet and spoken word artist Andrea Thompson’s work is a phenomenon; over the last 20 years, she has covered grand subject matters, including the human connection, the devastating climate state of the planet and relationships between one and the universe. Thompson has also vehemently celebrated the history of works of black literature.
Thompson got her start as a volunteer for a radio show at the University of British Columbia. From working with these shows, she developed the confidence to share her own work on stage. Her two albums, One (2005) and Soulorations (2019), were released to wide critical acclaim, and One even received a nomination for a Canadian Urban Music Award. She has also worked as teacher, inspiring and encouraging her students at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD) Brock University, and currently has the longest-running spoken word course at OCAD. She wrote and released her first novel, Over Our Heads, in 2014 and worked as a co-editor for an anthology, Other Tongues: Mixed Women Speak Out, released in 2010.
White Wall Review had the pleasure of interviewing Andrea Thompson about her experience in the spoken word community and her work.
WWR: Can you describe spoken word for those who are new to the genre?
AT: Spoken word is the art of speaking one’s truth to an audience. It’s also an umbrella term for a hybrid form that blends literary art with other genres – incorporating elements of creative expression that reflect the preferences and passions of the practitioner. Some spoken word seems like storytelling, some like performance art, stand-up comedy or a capella rap. Many spoken word artists fuse their words with music – from dub poetry to jazz poetry to punk poetry to cowboy poetry… Other spoken word artists’ work seems more like traditional literary verse – taken off the page and shared with animation and an awareness of audience that is similar to the theatrical performance of a dramatic monologue.
Most spoken word artists draw on a variety of influences. My personal favourites are the ones who, like e.e cummings described in his essay, “A Poets’ Advice to Students”, use their authentic voice and their own unique aesthetic to create work that sounds like “nobody but themselves”. The most popular kind of spoken word is slam poetry, which is less a type of spoken word than it is a format for performance. In slam, the use of audience members as judges and Olympic-style scoring gives a spoken word event a vivacity and audacity that Marc Kelly Smith (the poet who invented the format over twenty years ago) had hoped would challenge the conventional literary establishment and bring poetry performances up to a new level.
WWR: How would you compare the spoken word scene in the present to when you started in the mid-nineties?
AT: The spoken word scene is a completely different animal now compared to when I started performing in the mid-nineties. For one, it wasn’t called spoken word back then,
it was most often called “performance poetry”.
Another key element that had a huge effect on the scene when I started performing was the fact that the mid-nineties was a pre-internet era, so creative communities tended to be more insular. The work coming out of Toronto in those days seemed to have a more musical flavour – likely because of the influence of Dub poets like Lillian Allen and Clifton Joseph. In Vancouver, there was a real infusion of theatre into the work, which I believe stemmed from the influence of artists like Mercedes Bains and Sheri-D Wilson. In Montreal, artists like Victoria Stanton, Cat Kidd and Alexis O’Hara were also pushing the boundaries of both theatre-infused and experimental poetry, and while the slam poetry scene was flourishing in the U.S, it hadn’t yet made its way north of the border to Canada. Without the ability to click on a video on YouTube, creative cross-pollination worked as a slower process.
WWR: How do you choose the music to go along with your spoken word?
AT: When I’m performing a capella, I let the poem decide what elements of musicality best suit it. This is a kind of intuitive process that evolves out of experimentation and rehearsal – playing with the poem to see how different approaches feel. With some poems I’ll work with repetition or I will try to sing certain lines. Other poems will feel like they want a more straight-up, narrative approach. There isn’t a formula to the way I approach these decisions. When I’m working with musicians, I’ll often come to them with some ideas of what I think will work; I’ll communicate the idea, get their feedback and then see what they cook up, so the piece will evolve through this creative dialogue.
WWR: What inspired you to teach spoken word?
AT: I honestly don’t remember why I began teaching. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t long after I had started performing that my passion for teaching got lit. I remember one of my earliest, and most profound experiences teaching spoken word was during an environmental youth conference in Vancouver in the late nineties.
This was back when the idea of global warming was just entering the consciousness of popular culture – so I prepared for my session thinking that the youth in the workshop would welcome the chance to unpack and process all the information they had absorbed during the conference. I had expected to hear poems about what the human race was doing to the planet. I had let them have free reign over their subject matter with that assumption. But what they ended up cooking up were extremely personal, vulnerable poems. It made me realize what a privilege and responsibility it is to lead people in sessions when they open up their hearts like that, and what a powerful tool spoken word could be in terms of managing emotional well-being and improving mental health.
WWR: What moved you to performing your pieces instead of only writing poetry?
AT: I always loved the sound of poetry spoken out loud. My grandmother – one of my all-time favourite human beings – was always sharing poems she had learned to recite when she was a girl. If something reminded her of a poem that expressed the sentiment she was thinking, she’d give me the poetic version. She never wrote herself, but she was a fabulous story-teller.
WWR: As a student, Ode to the Occuptionally Challenged was a poem that I related to strongly. How closely do you relate to this poem?
AT: Yes, the concept for Ode to the Occupationally Challenged came directly out of my personal experience. In the poem, I rattle through a factual list of jobs I’ve had as a young artist trying to find a way to make a living while still finding time to work on my craft. Though the jobs I name are almost ridiculously diverse, I think that these days it’s common for people to have such an eclectic mix of work experiences over the course of their lives. The structure of the poem also evolved directly from the data entry job I had at the time that the poem was written. I love sharing that story with students as a way to get them think about structure. At the time, the poem was a mash-up of bits and pieces that I didn’t know how to bring together coherently. I was struggling to find a way to bring it all together, then I realized that the answer was literally under my nose in the resumes I was typing up day after day.
WWR: How was the process of creating A Selected History of Soul Speak?
AT: I wrote A Selected History of Soul Speak in response to a request by Valerie Mason-John and Kevan Anthony Cameron for a poem to be included in their anthology, The Great Black North. I saw spoken word in Canada as a kind of ocean fed by many cultural and creative streams. The idea of writing a poem that encapsulates all these tributaries overwhelmed me, so I decided to focus on my own ancestral past and how Black literary history and culture has influenced contemporary spoken word. I begin the poem with the slave songs of the American south and lead up to the hip hop and slam scene of spoken word today. It is one of my favourite poems to perform. It touches on different musical styles like gospel, blues, jazz and reggae so gives me a rich palette to play with in terms of musicality.
WWR: (R)evolution touches on climate change, an untrusted government, a revolution starting within the rebels, and many other important themes. This was released in 2004. How relevant do you believe it fits with present day?
AT: (R)evolution was written in response to an awareness of the relationship between politics, greed, the industrial military complex and the history of war on the planet. I wrote it during the first American Bush administration in the early 90s as a way to process what I was seeing in the media. The images of the Persian Gulf War at the time left me feeling over-stimulated, oversaturated, overwhelmed, and powerless. It was during a time in my life when I was a bit of a media junkie – constantly reading the newspaper and watching the news reports on television. The more media I consumed the more angry, fearful and depressed I felt, so the poem reflects the process of trying to work through the emotions I was experiencing as a result of binging on human trauma. At the time I felt very disillusioned by the human condition, and kept ruminating on the idea that eventually our shenanigans would lead us to the point where we wiped ourselves right off the earth.
I also kept thinking about personal accountability as an antidote to feeling powerless. I’d think – “okay, maybe I can’t stop the carnage and bloodshed of war, but what can I do?” Which led to me reflecting on the places in my own life where I had let greed, lack of empathy and a hunger for power overwhelm me. The poem ends on what I hoped was an encouraging note, and a call to others to join me in this exercise of self-reflection and begin a revolution from within.
WWR: How did you find your experience writing Over Our Heads and having the transition of writing in prose?
AT: Writing Over Our Heads changed the way I approach writing by way of necessity. I was used to working in a format where it’s possible to go from blank page to finish first draft in one sitting. A novel is a whole different animal – one that forces you to think about, not only what you’re writing, but how. My first attempt at writing a novel saw me spending about a year and a half writing and rewriting scenes – approaching them from different points of view, writing in past tense then present tense… In the end I was surrounded by stacks of paper that had no narrative arc or story whatsoever. I felt completely overwhelmed. I was quite literally in over my head.
So at that point, I decided to go to grad school and complete my novel as the thesis. It took two years of hard work – writing and reading and studying, but I am extremely grateful for the time I spent working on the book as a part of my master’s degree at the University of Guelph. In the end, I’d say that what I learned is that mentorship is gold, and that it’s important to be kind to yourself while you’re learning. Oh – and that about halfway through writing a novel, it’s normal for it to look like it’s all a hopeless mess you’d be best to just give up. That’s the moment before it all comes together. I have a hard time being happy with things I’ve written after some time has passed, but I still love my novel. I think it’s my best work.
Find more about Andrea Thompson through her Instagram account at andreathompsonpoet and her website https://www.andreathompson.ca/. Her albums, One and Soulorations, can be found on music streaming sites.