performance poetry et al
Well some days do feel like a bit of a performance don't they? But this afternoon another session of the very new MA module, poetry with a mixed media slant. Now I'm taking the remit of 'mixed media' very flexibly - about as flexible as can be, and including any input from or reference to other art forms and performances - so we shall be touching on everything from the 'computer poem' to the ekphrastic, with auditory and staged work in between. Today was mostly taken up with workshopping though, as a good creative writing class should be. Five students on this module, and as the weeks progress, individual voices start to make themselves felt and heard. Most of the five as I mentioned last week are relatively new to poetry as a genre of writing, so I'm still working out the right pitch for presenting new material and setting optional research topics and assignments.
When we did lift our heads up from the workshop circle I offered up a few key speakers in the performance circuit. Not, to be honest, my natural habitat as a poet, but it's been interesting to sound the poetry out. We started out with some sterling examples of the form – Patience Agbabi’s ‘Countdown to Zero’; such a simple form, the countdown, and in Agbabi's poem are intricate syncopated rhythms and a panoply of images too. Great, clever fun. Then another British Woman performer, Francesca Beard, whose extensive explanation of and introduction to performance poetry on the British Council’s website,Power in the Voice, is highly recommended. We listened to ‘The poem that was really a list’; again a simple, flexible format, with all the contradictory juxtapositions, insights, shocks and resolutions that you could wish for in a poem. Beard performs from memory as most performance poets do, removing the barrier of the bookish page, so often held between self and audience by more reticent readers as a kind of shield.
Performance poetry doesn’t have to have such a simple format although these two example show that it can work well and strongly just at this level. But we had time for a brief encounter with Jean Binta Breeze too, who work encompasses page, stage and dub. ‘The arrival of Brighteye’ includes song, narrative, dialect, autobiography, pure pleasure too in words and languages. I must direct you to the Poetry Archive for more audio and text examples of Binta Breeze.
It’s refreshing that there is such an interest in performance poetry, although I continue to have reservations about the ethos of the ‘slam’ scene – still I think based more stateside than here. That element of competition that gets the crowds involved but doesn't invite the meditative close reading of a poem – that word ‘slam’, which sound unavoidably angry and violent to me – however. Mark Smith, founder of the movement, protests strongly in his new ‘how-to’ book ‘Take the Mic’ that the competitive element is a theatrical device rather than something to be taken seriously, and I can understand that. And of course there have always been, and always will be, poetry competitions, whose winners will be decided by individual or committee and will not be everyone’s choice.
I just don’t plan to have a slam in the class. Although maybe I should. Would the real performer please stand up?
When we did lift our heads up from the workshop circle I offered up a few key speakers in the performance circuit. Not, to be honest, my natural habitat as a poet, but it's been interesting to sound the poetry out. We started out with some sterling examples of the form – Patience Agbabi’s ‘Countdown to Zero’; such a simple form, the countdown, and in Agbabi's poem are intricate syncopated rhythms and a panoply of images too. Great, clever fun. Then another British Woman performer, Francesca Beard, whose extensive explanation of and introduction to performance poetry on the British Council’s website,Power in the Voice, is highly recommended. We listened to ‘The poem that was really a list’; again a simple, flexible format, with all the contradictory juxtapositions, insights, shocks and resolutions that you could wish for in a poem. Beard performs from memory as most performance poets do, removing the barrier of the bookish page, so often held between self and audience by more reticent readers as a kind of shield.
Performance poetry doesn’t have to have such a simple format although these two example show that it can work well and strongly just at this level. But we had time for a brief encounter with Jean Binta Breeze too, who work encompasses page, stage and dub. ‘The arrival of Brighteye’ includes song, narrative, dialect, autobiography, pure pleasure too in words and languages. I must direct you to the Poetry Archive for more audio and text examples of Binta Breeze.
It’s refreshing that there is such an interest in performance poetry, although I continue to have reservations about the ethos of the ‘slam’ scene – still I think based more stateside than here. That element of competition that gets the crowds involved but doesn't invite the meditative close reading of a poem – that word ‘slam’, which sound unavoidably angry and violent to me – however. Mark Smith, founder of the movement, protests strongly in his new ‘how-to’ book ‘Take the Mic’ that the competitive element is a theatrical device rather than something to be taken seriously, and I can understand that. And of course there have always been, and always will be, poetry competitions, whose winners will be decided by individual or committee and will not be everyone’s choice.
I just don’t plan to have a slam in the class. Although maybe I should. Would the real performer please stand up?
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