Poetry Videos and Spoken Word Poetry in Ireland

Spoken word poetry in Ireland has been flourishing since the late 2000s, coinciding with huge social, political, and economic shifts, from the 2008 recession to the referenda on marriage equality (2015) and abortion legislation (2018). The practice of live poetry, while not new in Ireland, has developed into a vibrant scene in the last two decades. Poets perform at major music festivals, at international poetry slams, and at open mics across the island. An open mic in the basement of University College Dublin is where I, as an exchange student, first experienced spoken word poetry. That evening marked my first open mic performance — to be followed by more in both Ireland and Austria — and sparked an abiding love for spoken word poetry in Ireland that led to my current PhD research.

While live poetry performances have been central to the revitalization and popularization of poetry in Ireland, so have poetry videos.¹ Viral videos such as Emmet Kirwan's Heartbreak (2017) make this quite obvious. The six-minute poetry video, directed by Dave Tynan, has over 391,000 views on YouTube and 1.6 million views on Facebook as of July 2026.² Increased access to digital technologies, including recording and editing software, as well as the internet—and social media in particular—has all contributed to the importance of the online sphere for the circulation of poetry, and poetry videos in particular. These range from highly produced, corporate-sponsored videos to low-budget DIY productions to recordings from live events uploaded online. For poets for whom oral performance is central, poetry videos present a vital way of disseminating their work beyond ephemeral, one-off performances. Poetry videos circulated on the internet offer access to this material for people who cannot attend in-person performances, who are interested in recordings from the past, or who simply want to revisit and share favorite performed poems. This diversity of poetry videos in Ireland is the central interest of my essay, and I particularly focus on videos made by or in collaboration with poet-performers, exploring the affordances of poetry videos in the context of the Irish spoken word scene, as well as how these videos are important for academic study.

Poetry Videos, Poetry Films, and Performance-Poetry-Clips

Before we delve into Irish poetry videos in more detail, I must bring some clarity to the terms used here. Poets, filmmakers, and scholars have written at length about the different relationships between poetry and film. The history of these overlaps and collaboration can be traced throughout the twentieth century, with different terms such as "cinematic poems," "film poems," "poetry films," and "videopoetry" emerging at different times to refer to different versions of these practices.³ I use "poetry videos" to refer to any video or film that centers poetry, and then differentiate broadly between poetry films and performance-poetry-clips. Sarah Tremlett's definition of poetry films is useful in drawing concrete distinctions between terms:

Poetry films are a genre of short film, usually combining the three main elements of the poem as: verbal message [audible and/or visible]; the moving film image (and diegetic sounds); and additional nondiegetic sounds/music to create soundscape. The often complex interweaving of the elements could be said to give poetry films their uniquely associative character.⁴ (Italics in the original.)

What Tremlett calls "associative character" is tied to what Canadian poet Tom Konyves describes as the "poetic experience" that emerges through the "non-illustrative juxtaposition of image, text and sound [which are] suggestive of meaning, yet denying clarification of the purported meaning."⁵ It is this flexibility and ambiguity in meaning(s) that is central to poetry films. Poetry films can be created by various combinations of artists, frequently, but not necessarily, including the poet themselves.

Another form of poetry video is what poetry and media scholar Martina Pfeiler refers to as "performance-poetry-clips," defined as video clips in which poets perform their own work (though sometimes other performers read a specific poet's work).⁶ These clips include recordings of performances at live events, recordings of studio performances, videos that center performance but also have filmic characteristics, videos that use a spoken word poem as a soundtrack and draw on MTV music video aesthetics, and videos in which actors recite or perform a poem.⁷ As poet and poetry film expert Lucy English writes, these kinds of clips often "recreate the atmosphere of a live performance, with a stage, background lighting, and in a venue, which looks like a theatre. These films and many other spoken word films, like music videos, tend to rely on the physical presence of the performer."⁸ The performance of the poem, usually by the poet-performer, is central; there may be less focus on semantic multiplicity created by the filmic dimension that is seen as central for poetry films as defined above. However, the line between performance-poetry-clips and poetry films is a blurry one, and many performance-poetry-clips can also achieve the "poetic experience" proposed by Konyves.⁹

In the Irish context, poetry films and performance-poetry-clips have not been extensively researched to date; this is in line with the tendency for Irish poetry scholarship to focus on traditional and print-based poetry. When poetry videos are mentioned in the literature, it tends to come from the field of electronic literature scholarship. James O'Sullivan, digital literature scholar, discusses the increase in poetry videos created by poets and filmmakers in recent years in connection to multimodality and e-literature in Ireland in general.¹⁰ We can see this rising popularity of poetry videos on many fronts: since 2012, Ó Bhéal, a Cork-based poetry event organizer, has hosted an international poetry film competition featuring many poetry films created in Ireland. Many of these films are screened at their monthly events, which are now run by Ó Bhéal go Béal.¹¹ Well-known, established poets such as Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Julie Morrissy are exploring film and installations for their poetic work.¹² The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, while based in the USA, has produced professionally filmed poetry performance clips featuring many Irish poets performing their work, as well as videos in which Irish poems are recited by others.¹³

A number of poetry films and performance-poetry-clips have gone viral in the past decade, including Kirwan's Heartbreak and Stephen James Smith's My Ireland, commissioned by the St. Patrick's Day Festival. Poet-performers are frequently commissioned to create poetry videos by corporate or cultural entities, such as FELISPEAKS' The Best of the Pub, which was commissioned by Guinness GB. In terms of live event recordings, while no central archive exists, YouTube serves as a repository for hundreds of videos of poetry performance uploaded by event organizers,¹⁴ poets, and audience members. I have made dozens of YouTube playlists since beginning my PhD in 2021, and I continue to find old recordings on inactive channels quite frequently. In interviews I conducted with poet-performers in Ireland as part of my research, many—though not all—poets remarked that circulating their work on the internet in video form — both as poetry films and as performance poetry clips—is an important part of reaching new/other audiences, keeping a record of their practice, as well as expressing themselves creatively.

Independence & Collaboration

Poetry videos and spoken word poetry share a concern with sound, particularly orality and voice. For poets who want their work to live off the page, poetry videos—performance-poetry-clips in particular—are a way of publishing their work in a medium that can maintain both the audible and visible components of performance. In live spoken word poetry, performance through the voice and body of the poet-performer contributes significantly to the meanings of the poem. Performance style—including tempo, rhythm, accent, pitch, timbre and more—can be lost on the page but preserved in videos. The visible presence of the poet-performer may also contribute to a poem's interpretation: performance-poetry-clips can maintain that dimension. For artistic purposes, poets may want to retain the importance of their own vocal and bodily performance in their poetry. Given the increased availability of digital technologies, poetry videos have emerged as a way in which poets can do this beyond live performance.

Poetry videos are a form of dissemination that accounts for what is important to spoken word poets and can be an alternative to print publishing. Alternative forms of publishing are particularly important for poets who face barriers to access in relation to traditional print publishing. As Irish Studies researcher Anne Mulhall describes, both performance poetry and online poetry videos make it possible for poets "to produce their work independently of the funding, publication, and circulation structures of established Irish literary institutions."¹⁵ This has been especially important for poets of color in Ireland, who are faced with marginalizing practices enacted by those institutions.¹⁶ As Ailbhe McDaid, Irish literary scholar, states, "alternative channels [of publication], including through spoken word poetry, e-publications, multimedia innovations, and collaborative ventures . . . exemplify the barriers to entry for poets of color and, at the same time, challenge the mainstream publication industry's authority as the pathway to publicizing and circulating creative work."¹⁷

Poetry videos provide a DIY method of circulating poet-performers' work. Even poets who are not filmmakers can, on their own or with minimal support, create performance-poetry-clips. Frequently, these are relatively simple, with a single camera angle, no extra-diegetic sound, and only the poet-performer in front of the camera. These videos can be intimate and immediate. Intimacy is evoked not only by the voice and body, which are often quite close to the camera, but also through the DIY aesthetic itself, which does not create distance through visual and audible polish. Indeed, this aesthetic may align with spoken word poetry's countercultural and anti-establishment impetus, as German poetry performance scholar Henrik Wehmeier argues.¹⁸ These videos can be quickly uploaded to video hosting and social media sites by the poets themselves. This quick process facilitates immediate responses to on-going debates, such as Irish poet and activist Sarah Clancy's performance-poetry-clip For All of Our Heartbeats. The poem was written in support of Together for Yes, which was campaigning for abortion rights ahead of the 2018 referendum to repeal the 8th amendment which restricted abortions in Ireland. This support is intimated by the sweater Clancy wears in the video, in addition to the poem's subject matter. During the Covid-19 pandemic, livestreams of all levels of complexity were frequently used by Irish poet-performers as a way to maintain a performance practice when in-person events were not possible.¹⁹ Often, these livestreams remain online as forms of event recordings, falling within the category of performance-poetry-clips.

Poets with more sustained interest in video filming and editing also create cinematographically complex poetry films as part of their creative output. These may be the work of an individual, such as Irish poet and filmmaker Alana Daly Mulligan's The Beach Woman or For Bucharest, which they wrote, performed, shot, and edited themselves. However, do-it-yourself doesn't necessarily mean do-it-alone, particularly when it comes to poetry videos. Collaboration is central part of poetry videos. For English, "Collaboration is a shared space but it is also a space where individual talent can thrive and be celebrated. In a filmmaker's hands, the poetry film becomes more than the poem; the images and sound used, expand the interpretation of the poem rather than merely 'illustrate' it."²⁰

The collaboration between poets and filmmakers, videographers, and musicians may reflect pre-existing artistic relationships. One such example is the work done by Irish writers Karl Parkinson and Dave Lordan, the latter of whom is also a videographer; their work includes the 24-minute avant-garde poetry film The People Died. Parkinson and Lordan frequently embrace alternative publishing methods, and Lordan has written about the importance of live performance and multimedia work in operating outside of the literary establishment.²¹ Another example of a long-standing collaborative relationship is Stephen James Smith's work with the musicians and filmmakers Basciville. Smith and Basciville have collaborated in live performances, on the spoken word and music EP Tell It to a Tree (2022) with Cursed Murphy, another Irish performer, and on the poetry film Only for This (2020).

Other times, collaboration is project specific and may be supported by the organization funding the project. The "Read By" poetry film series, produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, was directed by Matthew Thompson.²² Irish-Nigerian poet Dagogo Hart's poetry film Uruemu's Home, part of his The Home Project (2021), was commissioned by Poetry Ireland and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. This large production involved Hart as writer, director, and performer, as well as another actor, a videographer, sound and graphic designers, a cinematographer and a production assistant. The video is edited with cuts between black and white shots of Hart performing his poetry in a studio space and color shots of the uncredited, silent actor in domestic spaces. The video thus combines a focus on the poet as performer with a narrative interpretation of the poem.

A different form of collaboration emerges in the inclusion of other people as performers within poetry videos. In Northern Irish poet Colin Hassard's Foreign, a group of people are individually filmed holding signs that say "I am foreign" in different languages on one side, and the country they are from on the other. Even as Hassard does the voice over of the poetic text, the people on screen, filmed in various locations around Northern Ireland, expand the reach of his personal reflections outward; a sense of collectivity emerges. Sometimes, multiple performers are invited to actually speak the poem for a recording. In Irish writer Sarah Maria Griffin's We Face This Land, directed by Dave Tynan, around 30 women, many of them well-known figures in the Irish cultural scene, came together to perform Griffin's words, individually and as a group. The video was created in support of the repeal movement for abortion rights discussed above. The "us: of the poem's text, women in Ireland, is expressed by a plurality of speakers, strengthening the sense of community and solidarity. These two examples demonstrate another way that collaboration contributes to meaning within poetry films.

Preserving & Promoting Performance

Poetry videos are useful in that they allow poetry intended for performance to be archived and made less ephemeral. This longevity is significant for many poet-performers, commissioning bodies, researchers, and future poets, as I explain below. But for an art form that often defines itself through live performance and interaction with the audience, the move towards videos and online publication can be challenging. Not all poets are interested in pursuing this form of publication or record keeping, especially when it is strongly connected to social media and commercialization. Some have no desire to create poetry films or perform to a camera, while others understand their work to exist only in the moment of shared embodied experience with the audience. I respect poets' decisions to abstain from the video format, even as I come out in favor of preservation in this essay. While I focus on the benefits that poetry videos can have for poet-performers, I do not wish to hide the diversity of opinions within the Irish spoken word scene.

For many poet-performers, maintaining an online presence of some kind has become a central part of their career. While English urges spoken word poets to "remember that their art is about craft, not appearance," and that "[t]hey are not music stars, they do not need to sell their work by how they look on screen,"²³ this sentiment does not adequately address the reality facing many poet-performers in today's world. In addition to personal connections and word-of-mouth, social media plays a role in networking, booking gigs, reaching new/other audiences, for good and for ill. Videos on social media can lead to increased engagement, which may have positive consequences for poet-performers' visibility. Similarly, event organizers often maintain presences on social media to promote their events. Recordings of previous events may whet the appetite of the audience for the upcoming event, as well as give insight into the atmosphere of the event. Videos of live events can be used as promotional material for and by both individual poets and event series.

The fact that poetry videos can reach large audiences is also something recognized by organizations that commission poems from poet-performers. Frequently, the results of these commissions are not one-off performances, but rather poetry films that are then shared widely by the organization.²⁴ These videos are stable objects that can be used by a commissioning body for a longer period and to reach more people than most individual live performances would enable. Many cultural entities have been at the forefront of commissioning poetry videos in the past years, including the St. Patrick's Day Parade, Dublin City of Literature, and Poetry Ireland. Businesses have also recognized the potential of spoken word poetry videos to capture attention and serve as advertisement. In March 2021, during the Covid-19 hospitality closures, Guinness released a video titled The Best of the Pub with Felispeaks. The commissioned poetry-performance-clip features FELISPEAKS performing their poem in an empty bar, expressing nostalgia for the experience of going to a pub. It is worth acknowledging that a large, anonymous audience can also have downsides. While many of the videos referred to in this text have perfectly pleasant comment sections, this is not always the case, particularly for women and poets of color.²⁵

Poetry videos help spoken word poetry find its way to new viewers. This online viewership includes people outside of Ireland who might otherwise have never encountered the work of Irish poet-performers. Just as importantly, these videos welcome new practitioners into the world of spoken word by introducing them to this kind of performed poetry and inspiring them to create their own. Videos on social media and YouTube are often the first point of contact between young writers and spoken word poetry. Many poets speak about coming to poetry via videos on YouTube, often those published by the US organization Button Poetry. Watching these videos—now also on platforms such as TikTok—can be a source of inspiration and lead to new voices emerging on the scene. As a poet myself, I can speak to the influence watching poetry videos has had on the development of my performance style. I have encountered rhythms that make their way into my work, learned from the skilled use of body communication, and adopted intonation patterns that I find particularly striking.

From my perspective as a researcher, poetry videos are an incredible resource. Recordings of live events are foundational to my work. Without recordings, it would have been incredibly difficult to write about a scene in a place where I am not living. Close viewing, the kind of analysis I conduct in my PhD, is predicated on attending events live or on having recordings available as the objects of study. Without recordings from earlier points in time, I could not have traced the aesthetics of the practice in its historical dimensions, because the performances themselves would be lost. Without these recordings, events would be only available through memories of participants, as there is no established reviewing culture for poetry performance events.²⁶

Future scholars will similarly be indebted to the work of individual poets, audience members, and event organizers who are creating self-archives, community archives, and rogue archives that are the foundation of poetry performance research.²⁷ Crucially, I have been able to spread a personal and academic appreciation for spoken word poetry by sharing these poetry videos with students and colleagues.

Conclusion

Poetry videos — including poetry films and performance-poetry-clips — are a staple of the spoken word poetry scene in Ireland. From handheld live performance recordings to cinematic poetry films to avant-garde experimentation, poetry videos in Ireland are an important artistic medium for poets who want to maintain attention on the oral and performative dimensions of their work. They are a space for collaboration, which has aesthetic and political implications.

As a mode of circulation, poetry videos are not dependent on the literary establishment but are increasingly embraced by large cultural and commercial entities. The form broadens the reach of Irish spoken word poetry, as new audiences and new performers find their ideas of poetry expanded through these performances. To many poetry performance researchers like me, poetry videos are a necessity; without them, our work would not be possible in the same way.

Above all, poetry videos are also simply a pleasure: I can listen to my favorite poems as I sit in my home in Vienna, a thousand miles away, and allow the voice of the poet to "wash over me, wash over me, wash over me."²⁸ And so can you.

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Claire Palzer (@clairemsp.bsky.social) is a PhD researcher at the University of Vienna focused on spoken word poetry in Ireland, with an emphasis on voice and place. She has lectured on contemporary Irish poetry and spoken word in the EFL classroom. Her passion for Irish poetry was cemented during her year abroad at University College Dublin (2016/2017). Her recent publications include "'All your disembodied little heads floating on a screen': Liveness During the Pandemic in Mel Bradley's Ms Noir's Seven Deadly Sins (2020)" in Open Library of Humanities Journal, three articles on the role of interviewing in poetry performance research on the Poetry Off the Page blog, as well as a podcast episode on Lingo, Ireland's spoken word festival. She is also a published poet and has performed at and hosted events in Ireland and Austria. 

Funding Statement

This article is part of the "Poetry Off the Page" project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement Number 01002816).

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References

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2. "Heartbreak," posted January 17, 2017, by davetynan, YouTube, 06:52, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv9oax2N160; "Heartbreak", posted January 17, 2017, by Emmet Kirwan, Facebook, 06:52, https://www.facebook.com/emmetkirwanartist/videos/heartbreak/1254328681314795/. ↩︎
3. Sarah Tremlett, The Poetics of Poetry Film: Film Poetry, Videopoetry, Lyric Voice, Reflection (Intellect Ltd, 2021), 8-34. ↩︎
4. Tremlett, The Poetics of Poetry Film. xxi ↩︎
5. Tom Konyves, "Videopoetry: A Manifesto," 2011, https://www.academia.edu/1479620/VIDEOPOETRY_A_MANIFESTO. ↩︎
6. Martina Pfeiler, Poetry Goes Intermedia: US-Amerikanische Lyrik Des 20. Und 21. Jahrhunderts Aus Kultur- Und Medienwissenschaftlicher Perspektive (Francke, 2010), 172. ↩︎
7. Pfeiler, Poetry Goes Intermedia, 172-75. ↩︎
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12. O'Sullivan, "Electronic Literature in Ireland"; Lucy Collins, "Certain Individual Women: Julie Morrissy's Variations on Performance," paper presented at Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe: Advances in Poetry Performance Research, Vienna, Austria, June 14, 2025. ↩︎
13. "Films," The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, accessed August 7, 2025, https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/films. ↩︎
14. Cork event organization Ó Bhéal has hundreds of live video recordings on its YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@OBheal/videos. ↩︎
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16. Mulhall, "Arrivals," 192. ↩︎
17. Ailbhe McDaid, "'Dubh': Poets of Color and New Irish Poetry," in Race in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Julie McCormick Weng and Malcolm Sen (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 260, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009071802.014. ↩︎
18. Henrik Wehmeier, "Professional Amateurship and Haptic Intensity: Poetry Slam on YouTube," in Audioliterary Poetry Between Performance and Mediatization / Audioliterale Lyrik Zwischen Performance Und Mediatisierung, 1st ed., ed. Marc Matter et al., Poetry in the Digital Age 4 (De Gruyter, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111561356-012 ↩︎
19. Claire Palzer, "'All Your Disembodied Little Heads Floating on a Screen': Liveness During the Pandemic in Mel Bradley's Ms Noir's Seven Deadly Sins (2020)," Open Library of Humanities 11, no. 1 (2025): 1-28, https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.19044. ↩︎
20. English, "Spoken Word Poetry Film," 211. ↩︎
21. Lordan, "The Multimedia Revolution in Poetry." ↩︎
22. The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, "Films." ↩︎
23. English, "Spoken Word Poetry Film," 221. ↩︎
24. George Cox, "Archived Bards the Double Life of Performance Poetry on YouTube," C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 8, no. 1 (2020): 13, https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.1402. ↩︎
25. "The Best of the Pub with Felispeaks | Guinness GB." The pinned comment underneath the video is by @GuinnessEurope and states that they have deleted "a small number of offensive comments". ↩︎
26. Nicky Marsh et al., "'Blasts of Language': Changes in Oral Poetics in Britain since 1965," Oral Tradition 21, no. 1 (2006): 46, https://doi.org/10.1353/ort.2006.0016. ↩︎
27. Banerji, Shefali, "Spoken Word Poetry and the Problem Wonder of the Archive," Poetry Off the Page, August 28, 2025, https://poetryoffthepage.net/spoken-word-poetry-and-the-wonder-of-the-archive/ ↩︎
28. "My Ireland - Stephen James Smith @sjswords." ↩︎