Yes Phil Jupitus, and Mark Lamarr - and you are probably right about DP's involvement.
If I can just add another smidgen on this. There are some people who genuinely think that anything that 'helps' to make poetry more popular must be a good thing, hence their support and backing to things like performance poetry etc. In my experience these people, though well educated and generally up-to-date on arty issues, tend to know very little about modern poetry, beyond what they get from the broadsheets and browsing the occasional Poetry Review. They have no negative issue with performance poetry or slams because they don't really have any interest in it - all they see is an exciting performer and a pleased and clapping audience, therefore it must be to the good. They remain quite ignorant of what is going on in it so have no conception of why anyone might have a problem with it. Any negative view can just be dismissed as intellectual sneering.
I think I wrote in Terrible Work once something convoluted about for every person performance poetry wins over to poetry it ensures that another two will never go beyond its own limits. Not sure about the maths there but I think I know what I meant.
Cheers
Tim
On 5 Oct 2014, at 15:52, Tony Frazer wrote:
> Tim:
>
> Actually, I don’t disagree with you.
>
> I’ve enjoyed some of this stuff live; on the page it’s almost always inert, if not downright embarrassing. I’m amused that perf. poets want to get into print, when they’ve usually sneered at "page poets”. They belong on video or CD, in my view, and a lot of the material is like bad stand-up. (And didn’t Phil Jupitus start out as a perf. poet?) My main beef is not with Ms Tempest writing and performing this stuff — it’s a free country — but rather the cultural gatekeepers leaping on a bandwagon and trying to appear hip. I would guess that Don Paterson’s involvement was mandated by someone higher up the food chain at that publisher — with DP no doubt gnashing teeth as he negotiated the contact. While I dislike most of DP’s own poetry he is most definitely not an idiot, even if I disagree with him on a large number of things poetic.
>
> I live in a city where 90% of the poetry presented is stuff like this, and the lone contrarian event lost its funding last year. Thankfully Bath is a short distance away, with some contrasting work.
>
> Tony
>
>
> On 5 Oct 2014, at 15:42, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Hi Tony,
>>
>> If I can just use this to add a smidgin - there are some good performance poets out there but they are heavily outnumbered by the awful ones. I tend to judge a performance poem on its 'performance', not on how it might come across when printed - the printed versions are scores, but once the poet or his/her supporters start to champion the text itself then we're in trouble. There are poems which just don't work on the page but can come across really well in performance where the internal deficiencies are hidden and become irrelevant - but this can also happen with normal page poets of course.
>>
>> One of the most common performance poetry tendencies these days is the presentation of a hyperbolic narrative concerned with some personal experience or observation. The personal experiences and/or observation are always something that the audience will immediately recognise, like having a bad cold or being stared at on a bus etc. The 'subject' is then given this increasingly manic OTT treatment as though it is something that is really really important. The energy produced by the rhythm and delivery is interpreted by the audience (desperately willing entertainment upon themselves) as being the result of a genuine emotion. The fact that it is all an empty drama doesn't matter - the rules of the game, the values expected, have been maintained.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Tim
>>
>> On 4 Oct 2014, at 20:23, Tony Frazer wrote:
>>
>>> by the way here’s the link to the poem
>>>
>>> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/04/saturday-poem-on-clapton-pond-at-dawn-kate-tempest
>>>
>>>
>>> Tony
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