Short answers, pulled from the story.
Spoken word is an oral poetic performance art shaped by phonaesthetics, meaning the aesthetics of sound, including live intonation and voice inflection. Unlike written poetry, its quality depends less on the visual appearance of words on a page and more on how those words sound when performed aloud.
American poet Marc Smith is credited with starting the poetry slam in November 1984. The first National Poetry Slam took place in 1990 at Fort Mason in San Francisco, and it is now the largest poetry slam competition in the world.
The Epic of Sundiata is one of the best-known griot epic poems, created for the founder of the Mali Empire. It represents the long tradition of performance poetry in Africa, which dates to prehistorical times and was accompanied by instruments such as the kora, the xalam, and the djembe drum.
Speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., Sojourner Truth, and Booker T. Washington brought oratorical elements into the spoken-word movement within African-American culture. The Last Poets, formed in the 1960s out of the Civil Rights Movement, helped increase the popularity of spoken word, and Gil Scott-Heron's poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" brought the form to wider American audiences in 1970.
Ancient Greek performers called rhapsodes used dactylic hexameter, a structural framework that organized complex information into a predictable musical cadence. This meter allowed them to recite thousands of lines from memory during live performance.
The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is located on New York's Lower East Side and was founded in 1973. It is one of the oldest American venues dedicated to presenting spoken-word poetry.