Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter ...

This thursday I went to my first live poetry slam ever. Until this day I knew poetry slam just from lots and lots of youtube videos I watched, most of them from american poetry slams. So it was quiet interesting to see german poetry slam live.

The 'Wuppertaler Wortpiraten' do a monthly poetry slam with changing guests, there even is a livestream of all the shows online. I liked it very much but I still noticed a few differences to the american poetry slam. Maybe I'm wrong, I haven't seen this much from the german side, and my view about the american poetry slam may be biased because of my interests. Just my thoughts during the show.

Most of the german poetry slam I know is really funny. Don't get my wrong, I like funny stuff and I like a good laugh, but sometimes I don't really get the difference to comedy. When I mention this, some people look really offended, but they can't really tell me the difference, except in poetry slam it's okay to read your texts, in comedy it isn't.
The american slams I watch are often highly emotional, often also political, they are about love and hate, racism and feminism, about things that are wrong in our world but we are so used to that often we don't even realize them until someone says it out loud and there's a lot of poetry in them.
In germany such slams often are called pretentious and are not received so well.

Don't get me wrong, I like both ways and I know that it's normal that different countries develop different styles of things. I don't even say that one style is better than the other.

But the differences are so big that they just leapt out at me and I had to write my 2 cents about it.

The video above is from Sarah Kay, I love her spoken word poetry and her style, I hope you enjoyed it as much as  I did :)