Spoken Word Poetry

I've never been into spoken word poetry, but a friend of mine has been pushing it on me lately so I can't help but talk about it.

This all started when I told my friend I was taking a poetry class. He told me he liked poetry and we talked about it for a while and then he brought up the name Saul Williams. I had never heard of Saul Williams and I didn't know what to expect when I searched his name on Google, but when I hit the enter key I was surprised to find a lot of Youtube videos of his spoken word poetry. I was surprised for two reasons, one, because I didn't know he was so popular and two, because I didn't know what spoken word poetry was. So after a while of going from video to video listening to all this poetry I felt, for the time being, that I had a pretty firm grasp of what spoken word poetry was. For those who don't know spoken word poetry is exactly what it sounds like, people reading their poetry but they usually have a beat or music in the background like a song would.

I was glad my friend showed me this because it expanded my horizon of poetry knowledge, but it also expanded my musical knowledge. I think that the mix of poetry and music just makes people think of normal songs where people sing to the music, but I thought it was interesting to have the music with just speaking because the music can help set the mood easier than writing about it and I think it helps get the natural rhythm of poetry into the person's ear better.

So overall I wouldn't say that I love spoken word, but I think it's an interesting idea. What do other people think of spoken word poetry?