Kirk Judd is 74 now. He grew up in Huntington and graduated from Marshall. For at least 50 years, he's been performing spoken-word poetry.

 

H​e's also worked in a steel mill, overseen computer programs, and helped manage a municipal sewage program, among other jobs. "But that was always, for me, trading time for money to feed my poetry habit."​

 

​"I love poetry," he said. "I love the words. I love to read poetry, to work on poetry. I love to recite poetry.  So yeah, that’s been part of my happiness for a very long time."  

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All his life, he has wandered West Virginia woods and waters, writing about things like frogs and fish and the people he meets.

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A poem isn't completely a poem, until somebody speaks it out loud and somebody else hears it, he says.

 

Spoken-word poetry is very different from silently reading poetry on a page.​ In school, most of us were told to read poems on a page, silently. That's like reading the sheet music of a song and not actually hearing the song, Kirk says.

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"Sheet music is documentation of a song, just as poetry on a page is documentation of the poetry ," he said. "The actual music lives out in the world, and poetry lives out in the world too."

 

Kirk brings poems alive in situations ranging from a public school classroom to a concert stage, a civic event or conference or a folk festival. 

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Spoken-word poetry doesn't require a stage, Kirk says.  It could be two people reading poems to each other on a porch. It could be a parent reciting a wonderful poem to a child. 

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How do you do it?

 

T​o perform a poem, you've got to memorize it or at least internalize it, Kirk says, like you would treat lines of a play.  Then you can concentrate on performing it.

 

At the beginning of a poem, Kirk might gesture with a hand, welcoming listeners. Then gradually, he brings his body into the flow and rhythm of words, sometimes closing his eyes, throwing his head back, coordinating gestures and expressions with the words of the poem, as if the body was his instrument.​

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"His gestures welcome you, then capture you and keep you attentive" to the poem, an admirer observed. "Kirk carries with him that grandpa energy, a grey wisdom, warm and quick-witted, contemplative and grounded." ​​

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There are six poems on the right side of this page. You can get the paper version by clicking "download."  Read the paper version, then watch Kirk perform the poem by clicking on the blue box. Notice the difference between listening to a poem and reading it.

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This page includes 11 tips from Kirk on "How to do it well."

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How did Kirk get started?

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Some people fall lin love with playing the fiddle or mandolin as children. Young Kirk fell in love with spoken poetry. "My mother would tell you I started writing poems when I was in second grade," he said.  At the local library, he found - and loved - A Child's Garden of Verses.  

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Then he discovered the library had recordings of Robert Frost reciting his own poetry.  He listened and over, he said.  "And that was a great influence on me, to hear poetry out loud. I guess that’s where I first formulated the idea that 'This is the way you’re supposed to do it.'"​

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"To me, poetry exists in the breath and motions of a poet and in the emotional transfer between the poet and the audience, " he said.​​​ When he's performing

a poem he wrote, "it takes me back to the place and time where that poetry came from... and all the emotional impact the [poem's]words made on me. It comes

back! "
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It's never been about becoming famous

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"When I came back from college, got married, got a job and had kids," he said, "I was always writing poetry.  I’ve thought of myself as a poet for sixty years. I’ve never thought of myself as anything else."

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​He grew up in an almost-rural corner

of Huntington where kids fished, played baseball and basketball, rode bikes and wandered through the woods.  "I was the kid who did all of that, with everybody. Then I'd come home and read. You'd find me reading any time of day, any time of night. I read everything I got my hands on."

 

It's never been about becoming famous, he said.  You don't get rich off of poetry. But poetry gives him unexpected gifts, he feels.  

​​“Writing a poem gives me insights that I didn’t know I had," he said. "I’ll start a poem, I’ll hear something, I’ll get a line going. And any writer will tell you, the line goes where it goes, the characters in a story go where they go. It becomes something that you’re not necessarily in charge of.  And because those lines can take you to different places, I see the world differently after a poem than I did before a poem.

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Poetry gives me insight into what this world may be.”

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