Our Mission

The SPokenword LAB mission incorporates SPLAB’s unique characteristics, passions, and outlook and is the driving force behind the organization.

SPLAB is an intergenerational spokenword performance, resource, and outreach center, dedicated to poetry, storytelling, conversation, debate, consciousness, and building community through shared experience of the spoken and written word.

The SPLAB membership includes poets, poetry organizations, and individuals that maintain a distinct presence in field of poetry both in the United States and internationally. As the SPLAB gathers support, finances, and staff to deploy its resources it will first concentrate its efforts in the Pacific Northwest, extending to other regions of the US and eventually reaching into Latin America.

Our Vision and Values:  Building the Community

SPLAB is driven by a vision of community.

The SPLAB community:

• informs and inspires its members by bringing artists from disparate disciplines together to encourage discourse and debate;
• challenges the established conventions surrounding art and its influence, human consciousness, and the role of the artist in the community;
• contributes to the community through outreach and an ethos of sustainability;
• supports artists, especially those of written and spoken word, through events, forums, and strategic partnerships across the Pacific Northwest.

SPLAB is committed to these values:

• We value creative development. SPLAB exists to provide a forum where individual poets, the art of poetry, and their respective artistic energy can be brought together through a variety of media for individual, collective and cultural transformation. SPLAB creates supportive educational programs and encourages discourse among poets and other artists so they may strive for deeper creative experiences and enhance cultural dialogue in an effort to transcend the industry-generated culture.

• We value the voices of our community. SPLAB recognizes the importance of individual histories and encourages their preservation through interviewing, storytelling, and archiving.  Cross-generational conversation and mentoring strengthens the voices of the present and inspires those of the future.

• We value human consciousness. Humans are inherently creative beings, even when they are not actively composing through music, visual media, movement, or spoken and written word.  SPLAB seeks to cultivate a richer vocabulary for the discussion to enable higher consciousness, mind/body connection, morphogenetic field theory, as well as spiritual and esoteric thought.

• We value sustainability in all of its forms. Fostering a community of artists begins with certain fundamentals.  SPLAB supports local farmers, whole systems agriculture and biodiversity practices, innovative approaches to healthful living, and a general bioregional ethos.