Mel White Poetry | Spoken Word

Scroll down for videos of Mel’s performances

Mel White is a multi-award winning spoken-word artist and a page-poet, known both for performing dynamic poetry at events focused on sustainability and social change, and for bringing social and environmental issues to literary and spoken word events. She’s been a regular performer at Electric Picnic for over 10 years, and has also performed her poetry at multiple festival stages, poetry slams, and even economics conferences!

Through her dynamic and moving spoken-word performances, Mel pokes fun at some of our social norms, highlights the very real need for change in response to global crises, and invites her audience to engage on a personal and emotional level with her chosen topics, and to connect deeply to each other and to what matters most to us.

Mel considers it her responsibility as an artist to use her art as a platform to advocate for the change she’d like to see in the world. Through her poetry she calls for a New Mythology: let’s change the narratives we believe about human nature and the world we live in, and shift from the current dominant system to a society that aims to meet the needs of all within planetary boundaries.

Skip to Videos
  • Division - Mel White - spoken word poetry video

    Division - Mel White - spoken word poetry video

  • Mel White - Beauty

    Mel White - Beauty

  • Mel White - A Moment of Silence - Spoken Word Poetry for Extinction Rebellion

    Mel White - A Moment of Silence - Spoken Word Poetry for Extinction Rebellion

  • The New Mythology - Mel White

    The New Mythology - Mel White

    A live recording of of one of Mel White’s best known poems. The New Mythology is also the title for Mel’s collection of poetry. Read some of her thoughts on the choice of title:

    I think of a mythology as a framework through which we make sense of the world. In the distant past this framework contained Gods and Goddesses, who we had to appease in order for crops to grow. We were able to explain natural disasters and the general shit that life threw at us by telling ourselves we must be out of favour with the Gods. It was a coping mechanism.

    The mythology of our times is very different, but it’s a mythology nonetheless, in the sense that it’s a belief system through which we understand reality. For the most part we don’t recognise it as a belief system, we think it’s just the way the world is. Like the fish in water metaphor: it’s the sea we’re swimming in, and we don’t even notice we’re in water.

    Once we recognise our current mythology as a construct and not reality, we have a choice about whether to change the narrative. Concepts such as the Divine Right of Kings, once perceived as the natural order of things, now seem unthinkable. Homosexuality is now accepted as normal. If we’ve made these leaps in our collective thinking in the past, we can do it again. I’m particularly interested in the idea that the cultural norms which promote wealth above wellbeing could be changed.

  • I Dance My Truth - Mel White - spoken word - Electric Picnic 2022

    I Dance My Truth - Mel White - spoken word - Electric Picnic 2022

  • Synergy, by Mel White - Spoken Word Poetry

    Synergy, by Mel White - Spoken Word Poetry

Poetry awards

Most recently (in 2024), Mel was runner-up in the Fingal Poetry Festival Poetry Slam final after winning the Malahide heat of the same competition. She’s previously won the Cuirt Festival of Literature Spoken Word Platform and the Eigse Michael Hartnett Best Original Poem competition, placed 2nd in the W.B.Yeats’ Poetry Slam, and 3rd in Westport Arts Festival Poetry Competition. She’s also been shortlisted for Listowel Writers Week Poetry Competition and has twice qualified to represent Munster in the All Ireland Poetry Slam finals.

Publications

Mel is in the final stages of preparing her first full collection, The New Mythology, fo publication (watch this space for updates!). Meanwhile, you can find individual poems in the following publications: Boyne Berries (To the Woman Handing Out Jesus Leaflets on O’Connell Bridge); Crannóg (Magnetism); Dodging the Rain (Creases and The Serpent’s Defence); Modron Magazine (Polycrisis); Panning For Poems (Electrons Repel); Silver Streams Journal (Drama Games), Skylight 47 (The Gospel According to a Red Fridge), Solstice Sounds Audio Magazine; Stanzas (Heliocentric, Self Portrait with Pieces Missing, and Victoria Station at Rush Hour); the Stanzas Anthology.