I watched a documentary on spoken word poetry in the '60s and 70s . My favorite was Helen Adams. Wow. A crazy old Scottish lady who sang a ballad of a Long Island junky riding the train. Damn. She said that in the traditional ballad, poets would write down verses that were spontaneously made up in the pub after the poet sang the part that everyone knew.
In this lecture that I've been listening to, she reads from Through the Looking Glass and talks about music of poetry. And then she just sings in a nice scottish-y way.
The other best part of the movie was Allan Ginsburg. He's like a tweedy economic professor doing karaoke.
