Young Writers Society

Helloooo, poetry enthusiasts!

I need to find poems. Not necessarily for a school project, but I guess you could say it's for something like that. I won't disclose the details, mostly because I don't want to bore you.

I will tell you that I need to find other poets' works, and I will be performing them while using my own interpretations. Sort of like a poetry slam, but with less slam, and it's not my poetry.

I've found it very hard to sift through the internet in search of interesting modern poetry, while also making sure the author is credible and not some random eleven-year-old writing some whimsical poetry on Pinterest. I also don't want to scrounge through an entire book of poetry to search for a poem I'm looking for.

I've been wondering how to search for poetry for a while now, anyways, not just for this "project." However, I am specifically looking for poems more on the spoken-word side, as I will be reading these poems aloud.

If anyone has any suggestions, or websites I could use, that would be awesome!

(Also, I wasn't quite sure which forum to put this on, so I just went with this one, considering it was about poetry)

I have a patreon where I post a lot of my poetry that I don't post here.
https://www.patreon.com/user?u=100863706
Most of it lends itself to reading it out loud, and some are straight up supposed to be. I know that, to you, I am a random stranger, but most people say that these are decent. Take a look! If you need more, I can give you others that I didn't post there or here.

This response might be a little late! But my two go-to sites for sourcing poems are poets.org and poetryfoundation.org. They are definitely credible sources that won't be providing you with random poems snippets from instagram accounts! And you can sort through time periods and forms to narrow your search, if you just want to browse for poems—for example, on Poetry Foundation you could select time period: "1951-present" and form: "dramatic monologue" to see recent poems that are designed to be spoken aloud. Poetry Foundation also has an entire "audio poetry" section that might also be useful to look for poems that are meant to be listened to. I hope this helps!

@avianwings47 in addition to the resources suggested by Hijinks, if you are looking specifically for spoken word poems you may be interested in some works by "Button Poetry" link - that's where I first heard many spoken word poems for the first time (fair warning some of the poems are mature in nature, so probably double-checking the titles for content you may be uncomfortable with would be a good idea)

I have also written a YWS resource for making Slam Poems, which can be found here in the YWS Knowledge Base and may be helpful to you. It has four of my fave slam poems within the thread towards the end.

I've competed in a poetry slam once, and have been a part of a few poetry readings online and in-person, it can be a really great experience and a fun way to enjoy poetry. I also used to do Oral Interpretation Tournaments when I was in High School where I interpretively read other people's poems that I memorized - I found that for those sorts of contests it can help if you are able to choose something with a bit of a narrative or something you personally feel passionate about.