Shavonda Robinson – “The Rebirth of a Visionary Woman” – The Power of Spoken-word Poetry
Award-winning spoken word artist, Shavonda Robinson is an author of many written and audio works. She has a degree in Creative Writing, as well as two beautiful children, and lives in Nashville, Tennessee. The founder of Creative Something For The Future – a poetry magazine for upcoming poets and writers – she is also the owner of the Color Me Beautiful Collection from her online store Inspiring Your Desires. Increasingly today, poetry is becoming a striking method of self-expression. Spoken word poetry especially, reaches out to a wide audience base and builds a powerful platform for artists to speak on various social, cultural and political issues through their own identities and experiences.
Spoken word poetry can be loosely defined as poetry intended for performance. Shavonda Robinson is spoken word artist who, on her album “The Rebirth of a Visionary Woman”, combines relationship conflicts, parental experiences, love, abuse, pain, self-empowerment and feminism with a powerful poetic rhythm unique to them.
Despite what you might have been told, there’s a lot more to the spoken word craft than sub-par student union slam poetry. It’s a true art form, and those who are good at it, are really good. Shavonda Robinson is one of the more interesting stanza-spitting wordsmiths around.
When Shavonda opens her mouth, someone is moved, someone smiles, and someone is called to action, but everyone listens. Poetry in this contemporary style is still regarded as an underground culture. Yet, abandoning the idea of being able to exist only and exclusively on paper, it is quickly opening a gap in the everyday life of more people and attracting the attention of an ever widening audience.
Shavonda Robinson makes it easy to spread her oral messages, through a medium the younger generation most definitely prefer, as she mixes banging beats and intellectual narrative, with emotional and empowering lines on “The Rebirth of a Visionary Woman”.
From the moment she starts out with the opening track “Colors”, which sets an immediate mood, and quickly lays out her game plan: “I have the paint brush. You are the canvas. Wherever I choose to create, I will make it so beautiful, for the world to see.” From that instance onward, Shavonda never lets up.
What follows are 13 tracks of intense poetic ruminations which will not leave you indifferent. Shavonda’s unique take on the art form here, is that she never needs to raise her voice to extreme pleas, cries, shouts. Instead she raises awareness and consciousness almost entirely through the power of her words alone.
“I am here because I gotta purpose,” says Shavonda in “Excuse Me”, atop a thumping dancefloor beat, “and I won’t let you stop me from getting my message out to the world.” Which is exactly what she proceeds to do for the rest of the recording.
She deals with the laws of attraction in “My Love”, and then falling out of love on “Love Is Gone”, to toxic relationships and physical abuse on “The Pain. “Shining Star” is all about self-empowerment and believing in yourself. “Chasing” weighs up the attraction towards material riches as opposed to finding the riches within ourselves and our loved ones.
“A Women’s Strength” is what it says: “Nothing like the strength of a strong, confident, bold black woman.” Moving on, Shavonda keeps turning out her anecdotes and thoughts. From the empowering “Hey Sis You Are Beautiful”, to the sad “Lost A Life”, and the resonating autobiographical title track, “The Rebirth of a Visionary Woman”, where Shavonda exclaims: “I am a warrior. Did you hear me? I am a warrior!”
The album draws to an end with the laments of a crumbling relationship due to a defectively transformed partner in “You Are a Disaster”, and then ultimately shuts down with the self-empowering “The Crown”.
It is undeniable that the propagation of verses through the appropriate implementation of music have more impact, and at the same time it is also true that Shavonda Robinson has developed her Spoken word poetry into an incredible art form that does just that- it connects people with honest, beautiful and inspirational stories of overcoming life’s difficulties.
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