I call what I do 'modal structures.' Sometimes they're songs, sometimes they're longer, sometimes they're this mantra - I've never called myself a spoken word poet.
Orphans, dead parents, lonely children at Christmas, morose spoken word recordings, everything you love about the holidays. Move the turkey over so you can fit your head in the oven.
There was something about stand-up that music wouldn't give me, which was my love of the spoken word and the mercurial tendency of language to respond to what happens to you.
What I love is the comedy of the body. It's a little highfalutin', but you can even say pre-verbal comedy. People laugh differently at stuff that isn't brought to them via the spoken word. It's from a different place; it's a different quality of laughter.
The pictures are created by the listener, with a little help from the broadcaster. The pictures are perfect. If you're showing pictures, different things in that picture can distract from the spoken word.
Beta males and females historically fare poorly in anchor positions, and whoever has the dominate, or more alpha, personality will always win out in spoken word count simply because they don't wait for an opening.