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What makes slam poetry so different? It’s an open diary. It’s no secret slam poetry leaves your skin goose bumped and your jaw dropped, at least a bit. Hearing passionate meaningful words leaves your mind with overwhelming memories, questions, and thoughts. Slam poetry originated forty years ago but has just risen in popularity. Poetry is honest - it’s what makes poetry. But slam poetry is more than honest- it is human. It is hedonistic: both liberating and torturous. Here are five other reasons to love and appreciate slam poetry:

1. Liberating

Genuine thoughts can become courageous words. Slam poets take the risk of being judged and questioned but the benefits outweigh the costs. Each recited poem is weight lifted from their shoulders and new ideas shared.

2. Remarkable

Listening to slam poetry does many things to us. But if we remember one main thing, it’s how it made us feel. Slam poetry touches the very depths of your feelings. I’ve had epiphanies because of the slam poetry I have witnessed. Poetry does not ask permission to express what needs to be said. Sometimes it makes you feel comfortable and other times it does just the opposite - that is part of what makes this form of art so remarkable.

3. Revolutionary

Slam poetry is perhaps the most excusable form of revolt since it is thoughts written on paper. Because it is thoughts that are soulful, wholesome, and permissible, the words get away with a lot. Freedom of speech does poets a lot of good when criticizing the pillars of our society, politics, and ideals.

4. Honest

The thing about writing is that it allows you to get things off of your chest. It essentially serves as the psychologist who doesn’t really exist. You tell this psychologist , aka journal, everything about your life: your feelings, emotions, opinions, angers, disappointments, excitements, happiness, sadness, achievements, criticisms, failures, regrets, and everything you experience in your day to day life. It becomes an art, an authentic art.

5. Impactful

When writing poetry, there is one goal: to write something meaningful. It doesn’t need to be prudent or polite. Slam poetry criticizes society, rethinks politics, and takes a stance on a controversy. It screams what may be deemed taboo and embraces what makes us feel upset. Writers want to leave you thinking and they want to leave thoughts lingering in the minds of their audience in order to plant the seed of change.

Slam poetry is practicing both writing poetry and performing on stage which, in unison, create a beautiful form of art. I encourage you to take the time to check out a local event - you won’t regret it!

Image: Flickr

We are all afraid of making the wrong choice and it doesn’t help that we constantly have our family and friends telling us what we should or shouldn’t do. When we have so many people giving us advice, how do we ultimately decide what to do with our lives? This question is one that has been asked many times and, because of that, there are so many answers. However, the only one that comes to mind is to take the road less traveled.

This advice is not my own, of course. But if you’re familiar with Robert Frost, then you have read his poem ‘The Road Not Taken.’ It’s a short poem that is seemingly about someone who comes across two paths in the woods, but one of the most magical things about poetry is that it can be interpreted in many different ways. With that said, when the narrator in the poem says that he (or she) “took the road less traveled by,” I immediately think of the unknown, and how scary it is to do something that no one else you know has done before or to go somewhere where no one you know has gone.

Some people push through the fear of the unknown and open themselves up to an adventure, only to find out, in the end, that it “has made all the difference” in their lives, in the way that they look at life, etc. Then there are the people who are terrified to take their own path because they don’t have a shiny, crystal ball at their disposal. These are the people who don’t do what they want to do with their lives because they don’t know where their dreams will take them, but they do, for example, know where majoring in the major their parents choose or getting into the family business will lead them. They have these pre-planned maps laying in front of them, telling them which paths to take to get them to a destination and, for most people, that’s less-intimidating than not knowing where their life will end up.

But you have to remember that not all roads are straight; they wind and bend and sometimes things fall on them, blocking you from finishing the journey that you started. In other words, even with a life map, you can get misguided and led astray. You aren’t free from obstacles just because you’re taking the road that everyone else has traveled.

Life doesn’t simply go from point A to point B. There are so many other things in-between that prevent you from getting to B, and if B is not truly your desired destination, what is going to motivate you to get you there? Yes, it’s scary not knowing where you’ll be five, or even ten, years from now, but even with a ‘safe plan,’ things can go wrong and the future you thought you would have might not be the one you get.

No one is sure of what their future holds and that is why the only way to see your future is to get there. Don’t waste your time moving toward a future that you don’t really want because not only will it be harder to arrive at but you won’t be happy in the end. So think about where you want to be years from now and get there. It doesn’t matter where ‘there’ is, as long as you put all of your energy into reaching a desired destination instead of a destination that you know you don’t really want to reach.

If you want to go to medical school or visit every continent at least once, then make sure you take the road that will allow you to follow your heart because your heart is the only thing that matters when it comes to planning out the rest of your life. Your family and friends might say they know what’s best for you, but only YOU know what that is. And the greatest mistake that you could ever make is choosing to travel down a road where you’re not too fond of the destination. If you’re not happy about where your life is going, that is your heart telling you that you are heading in the wrong direction.

I know that following your heart can be just as terrifying as the unknown, but you don’t want to live a life of regrets; you don’t want to look back when you’re older and ask ‘what if.’ It doesn’t matter if people say that the journey to medical school is hard or if everyone around you thinks that experiencing the world is not as important as getting an education. You do what is right for you, not because it’ll make life any easier (because it won’t) but because you’ll be more motivated to reach the end of that road you chose to travel down. With your desired destination or goal in mind, you can achieve anything, be anything, and do anything you want with your life. The sky is not your limit, because there are planets above the sun and the moon and the stars. Yes, you will encounter obstacles. Yes, the road will wind and bend and, at times, it will be too dark to see what lies ahead, but as long as you remember to always follow your heart, it won’t ever lead you astray.

Image: Unsplash