Here's a list of poets, poem titles, total words (tw), and words per minute (wpm). The list is arranged from the most wpm, though I want to emphasize that the arrangement does not connote higher or lower value of the poems. The focus on pace or speed is just one among many other elements that resonate during a reading.
Poet - poem title - tw - wpm
• Amiri Baraka - "Dope" - 875 tw / 186.6 wpm
• Mahogany L. Browne - "Black Girl Magic" - 339 tw / 184.8 wpm
• June Jordan - "Poem about My Rights" - 902 tw / 171.6 wpm
• Etheridge Knight - "Hard Rock Returns to Prison From the Hospital for the Criminal Insane" - 346 tw / 169.8 wpm
• C. Liegh McInnis - “The Bridge (for Medgar at the Crossroads)” - 649 tw / 162.3 wpm
• Sonia Sanchez - "a/needed/poem for my salvation" - 151 tw / 158.4 wpm
• Nikki Giovanni’s "Nikki-Rosa" - 197 tw / 155.4 wpm
• Yusef Komunuakaa - "Facing It"- 165 tw / 150 wpm
• Robert Hayden "Frederick Douglass" - 126 tw / 142.2 wpm
• Langston Hughes - "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" - 103 tw/ 138 wpm
• Michael Harper - "Dear John, Dear Coltrane" - 247 tw / 138 wpm
• Elizabeth Alexander - "Venus Hottentot" - 612 tw / 123.6 wpm
• Kevin Young - "Hard-Headed Blues" - 173 tw / 123 wpm
• Rita Dove (b. 1952) – "The Spring Cricket Considers the Question of Negritude" - 149 tw / 122.4 wpm
• Harryette Mullen – "We are Not Responsible” - 212 tw / 121.8 wpm
• Jayne Cortez - "I Am New York City" - 272 tw / 120.8 wpm
• Robert Hayden - "Middle Passage" - 1,209 tw / 120.6 wpm
• Natasha Trethewey - "Monument" - 149 tw / 118.8 wpm
• Tracy K. Smith - "Wade in the Water" - 175 tw / 116.4 wpm
• Sonia Sanchez - "Summer Words of a Sustuh Addict" - 116 tw / 115.8 wpm
• Evie Shockley - "improper(ty) behavior" - 203 tw / 115.8 wpm
• Claude McKay - "If We Must Die" - 115 tw / 114.6 wpm
• Maragret Walker - "For My People" - 490 tw / 112.2 wpm
• Gwendolyn Brooks - “The Mother” - 264 tw / 109 wpm
• Wanda Coleman - "Wanda, Why Aren't You Dead?" - 207 tw / 108.6 wpm
• Maya Angelou - “Still I Rise” - 240 tw / 108 wpm
• Lucille Clifton - "won’t you celebrate with me" - 76 tw / 108 wpm
Additional notes:
• The list above is not exhaustive, and I will be adding to the selections during the coming month or so.
• The non-linked poems were based on recordings that I own.
• Poets sometimes read and different speeds for the same poem, or they change for different kinds of poems. Brooks, for instance, reads her short poems at a rapid speed.
Related:
• Amiri Baraka's "Dope" in the context of rap freestyle
• C. Liegh McInnis's rapid pace across "The Bridge"
No comments:
Post a Comment