I used to do lighter, almost stand-up pieces with rhymes – to show my friends that I have a life outside school, and to get over a break-up. But I found my voice in poetry and performance," reminisces 18-year-old spoken-word poet Simar Singh, one of the founders of Unerase Poetry, a platform where young performance poets voice social issues through verse.
What led Singh to discover that he too could make a difference and speak about social causes was a Social Science project in school. "We did a research project on marital rape in India, found statistics and case studies around it. Before this, I wasn't aware of the concept and when I found out, it was shattering," he recalls. Soon after he started work on this project, his agitation about the issue came out through verse, in the form of The Legal Rapist, at a poetry competition. It was his first serious performance piece that now has over seven lakh views on YouTube.
Quite critical of his own work, Singh waves aside his popularity online and says that he is much more comfortable in the role of curator for Unerase Poetry than as a poet looking to be published. "I don't see myself as a poet that people would read," he says, adding, "I feel that with performance I can overcome the lack in writing, but when it's on a page, it's out there, bare. Maybe, many years from now, if I grow tired of performing and keep refining my poetic voice, I can get to that point."
The Literature major from Jai Hind College, Mumbai, speaks mainly about gender issues – marital rape, toxic masculinity or mental health issues in men through his poetry. With Unerase Poetry, Singh is quite sure in his curation. "The core has been social issues and reform through poetry. We have made sure that we are taking a stand on things happening around us. Even when we are perform lighter pieces – satire, funny verses or love poems – we try to think out of the box," he asserts, adding that with fellow poets, he wants to curate a selection of works from Unerase Poetry, though the project is in a nascent stage.
Poets at Unerase, as is now the case with poets in the spoken-word scene at large, are not restricted to English. Many a poet has found his/her voice in vernacular languages. "Malayalam, Punjabi, Hindi, Marathi and Bengali are some languages that have a lot of poets, and audiences who want to see content in their own regional languages," he explains. "In the coming years, I think the scene will be dominated by regional languages and English has to find a way to coexist with that. With spoken-word getting more and more exposure though, I feel that it's a good time to be a poet. There might be 50 viral poets out there with mediocre content but it will encourage good poets also to come up and write and perform, and even those 50 poets can improve."
