Jamie,
The only thing I would disagree with below is what you say about it
(performance poetry) being poetry or not. As you say, this is treating
poetry as a universal. I would never stand by that myself, but I see
huge philosophical debates between essentialism and nominalism on this
potential horizon, so I'll skip back home again.
Cheers
Tim A.
On 30 May 2011, at 12:57, Jamie McKendrick wrote:
> Tim,
> This is an interesting map of the various strands that constitute
> performance poetry. I just don't know enough about it to comment.
> But the term itself has always struck me as a weird redundancy -
> it's either poetry or it ain't. Ok I realize that this idea of
> poetry is posing as a universal, but I'd stand by it! Early on the
> scene, a figure like John Cooper Clarke was writing poems, and his
> superb perrformances just added to the pleasure. Perhaps he'd be one
> you'd think of as taking his cue from the sixties, or maybe 70s
> northern punk? Same goes, as in writing poems, for Linton Kwesi
> Johnson, though it's a different tradition.
> This is way back, but I can recognize in the present scene some of
> the features you mention.
> On the question of accents, I remember a German - who'd lived here a
> long time - observing that the English liked their poets to have
> regional accents and their novelists to have RP accents. The first
> to be gritty and authentic (which assuaged a middle-class discomfort
> with poetry) and the second because it seemed fine to sound
> 'neutral' or omniscient in the novel. Or something like that. The
> remark has stayed with me.
> Best,
> Jamie
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