Performance poetry: the word of the moment
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Version 0 of 1. It's not been a great week in the world of language and literature for those who want to see the modern out in the cold. First, an A-level board dared suggest that young students could explore a wide variety of written English – then the Turner prize judges put a spoken-word artist on their shortlist. Performance poetry in Britain is flourishing. Alongside the poets with rock star status, such as John Cooper Clarke and Benjamin Zephaniah, hundreds are filling clubs and arts centres with their words. Performance poetry is not one genre. Some chant, sing and dance. Some stand rooted to the spot and stare. Some chat their way in and out of their poems like stand-ups. Some confess, some rage. Some play with words, some talk plain. The point is, it's live and in the moment. So is this the heyday of performance poetry, the moment it finally receives the recognition and respect it has always deserved? To answer, it's worth looking at its history - and it has a long, rich but discontinuous tradition in Britain. Around the year 1000, the scribe who wrote down the Old English epic Beowulf knew he could mention narrative performance and his audience would know what he was talking about. Grendel, the monster, hangs out in the darkness, while in a hall warriors have fun as a scop – a bard – plays the harp and tells tales. My tutor at university had a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon harp, and would perform Beowulf while whacking the instrument to the rhythms of the alliterative verse. Looking across the many strands of poetry, we can never be certain which poems were only read in private and which were performed - and there are thousands of poems which were performed but never got written down. It's easy to imagine The Canterbury Tales performed, but we don't know for sure. Shakespeare's sonnets and Donne's lyrics frequently adopt a spoken voice – "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"; "Mark but this flea…" – and it's easy to imagine them as indoor entertainments. In Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, the ballad-seller Autolycus flogs street literature, including poems that were shouted, sung and read – part of a popular tradition that didn't die until the 20th century. It may not have been called performance poetry at the time, but it was clearly flourishing. Meanwhile, throughout the history of education, children have chosen or been coaxed to recite poems. Robert Burns has lived in the speech of millions since the early 1800s; and other so-called dialect poets of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Samuel Laycock from Lancashire or Lewis Proudlock from Northumberland, wrote wonderful performance poetry, recording the lives of working people. Many people can recite these today - though again, not usually calling it performance poetry. Alongside these traditions there were the "reciters": cheap, popular books that anthologised poems and prose extracts thought to be good for performing. Once recording was invented, we got microphone performance poetry. Listening to Tennyson chanting "Break, break, break ..." is a glimpse of a theatrical performance, while Sylvia Plath shows how the microphone can eavesdrop on a more private reading. Between Tennyson and Plath, just before the first world war, lies the pivotal moment of the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury – founded by the troubled Harold Monro – which offered poets a venue for performances. Monro was inspired, in part, by Ezra Pound and his mates performing their poems to each other in a corner of Soho's Eiffel Tower restaurant – Pound observed pounding (yes) the table as he read. I came from a home full of the sounds of my parents performing poems or playing recordings of Robert Graves, WB Yeats and Dylan Thomas. One of my parents' fondest memories was seeing Auden and Isherwood performing The Ascent of F6 in 1937. It seemed to them as if poetry emerged from the closet then, becoming thrilling and public. My equivalent experience was seeing Adrian Mitchell performing Tell Me Lies About Vietnam at the big demos in the late 60s but, sadly for me, I didn't get to the great Allen Ginsberg event at the Albert Hall in 1965. Thanks to the Caribbean influence of poets such as James Berry, Grace Nichols, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Jean "Binta" Breeze and Zephaniah, "British" poetry has been redefined. They've "spoken back" in their voices where their forebears had only been "spoken of". I learned to move from microphone poetry to public performance thanks to working alongside many of these great poets, though my wake-up moment came one day in a primary school in Kensal Rise, in London, in 1975. I started to read from my book without looking out at the hall of 400 children. Sean McErlaine, the teacher who had invited me, interrupted, calling out to the children: "No, no, no … it doesn't go like that, does it?" "Nooooooo!" they called back. And the whole school, led by Sean, chanted, wriggled and danced one of my poems back to me. Ah, I thought: so you have to live the poem with your whole mind and body. This is why performance poetry has had not one great heyday, but many. You pass a poem to the audience through the words as embodied – literally – by the rest of your human form. And the people listening and watching come back at you in an equally embodied way. |