On Tue, 28 Feb 2006 22:23:20 -0000, David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>Rupert, Jane
>
>joolz was quite entertaining. I did feel a certain sadness in that her poems
>are potentially quite good but she gravitates towards a kind of slack alice
>prose all the time and hence knackers the poems.
>
>Good fun anyhow, if not really poetry. Problem is that there are people who
>think not really poetry should be encouraged against the real thing.
>
>There the head aches.
I think there is a hugely interesting point here, or latent debate, about when poetry is real poetry
and when it isn't really. Linking in, perhaps, with the recent suggestion that Simon Armitage's
work is 'fake' poetry.
This is definitely a time when beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Most performance poets would
categorise their work as poetry, regardless of whether or not it works on the page. And I'm sure
Simon would consider his work poetry, even though I can sympathise with the suggestion that it
may be lacking in something which I'm sure we'd all love to see in our own work. Mythic
proportion, perhaps. A complexity that can't be replicated by the same message in a different
form. Something within the poem itself which reaches back to what I think Harrison referred to in
his poem Fire-Eater as 'Adam fumbling with creation's names.'
Having shifted a little myself away from 'page' poetry - as it's often known in performance circles
- to poetry that works rather better on stage, this is a question that's constantly on my mind
whilst writing and performing. I would love writing for performance to be a simple case of
retracing our roots as poets, going back to the pre-writing days of oral delivery when a poem had
to be cast in a certain form to be more easily remembered - in particular, using the three 'R's of
rhythm, rhyme, and repetition - but alas, such techniques have fallen into disrepute. Rightly or
wrongly, we now equate them with poetry that is facile in its form and superficial in content - i.e.
poetry that is 'not really poetry' - and that image is not helped by the vast majority of performance
poets in the UK who believe that there are only two traditions within performance poetry; the
confessional, up-close-and-personal poem, and the political rant, quite forgetting that there is a
third strand which is rarely attempted these days but which I believe has the power to redeem the
image of both performance and page poetry, and that's the longer narrative or character poem.
But my head aches too, David. It's a difficult topic.
Jane
www.janeholland.co.uk http://poetsonfire.blogspot.com
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