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Viv says: >There has been previous debate on this list on the question of "poetry" vs. >"lyrics". So, now that I've got my computer up and working again, I'm going >to "stir the pot": when it comes to "performance poetry" and "song lyrics", >I think that the likes of Tom Waits (etc. etc. - add your own preference >here - Neil Young? Jackson Browne? John Lee Hooker? Chuck Berry?!!) piss on >performance poetry from a very great height - well, any performance poetry >session I've ever attended. Of course, 'performance poetry' covers quite a range. When it means someone like the Australian poet Kominos, who is apparently very popular down there, at least from reading his work I have to say it seems pretty weak. I als confess to not getting much form some of the same kind of poets in Canada, whose rhyming rants seem light, often cliché, & turn a lot on their comedy (sometimes the performers seem to be okay one-liner comics, whose lines happen to rhyme). On the other hand, most sound poetry is definitely performance, & when I think of the late bpNichol, & The Four Horsemen of which he was one, the late Ernst Jandl, a number of other Canadian sound poets I know, certainly Jerome Rothenberg performing the Horse Songs, or Jackson MacLow, or, as I heard him in Glasgow once, Tom Leonard, then this is 'performance' of a very high quality indeed. On the other hand, versus the poets presented as 'performance poets' rather than 'sound poets', I'd choose the best singer/songwriters every time... Douglas Barbour Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5 (h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521 http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm no is e against the silent sleep bpNichol %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%