JISCMail - BRITISH-IRISH-POETS Archives

I worked in primary schools for 15 years and was startled by how much rubbish gets shipped into classrooms and halls in the name of ‘children’s poetry’. I don’t mean poetry written by children – I mean poetry written by adults for children. One ‘children’s poet’ who tried to arrange a paid reading at the school managed to get the word ‘toilet’ or ‘fart’ onto every page of the sample material he sent. So stunted (and institutionalised) notions of poetry can start early. Vacant rhyming couplets or quatrains, full of sick and poo. Maybe this leads quite smoothly into certain kinds of performance poetry where the aim is to amuse – jaunty, titillating, beery. But not much else.

But there’s another phenomenon which doesn’t seem to me to be much of an improvement. It’s when a bunch of pages arrives with a sprinkling of random words. Words unconnected by syntax, rhythm, sense or music by some pale and autistic soul. I am Sir Oracle,/ And, when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!

This is the opposite extreme. Instead of pandering to the imagined desires of an audience, it demonstrates no awareness that an kind of act of reading may ensue. It’s almost a challenge: you will not read me. I do not deign to participate in an act of communication.

Somewhere between these two extremes is poetry which respects, challenges and includes the reader.

On 18 Jan 2009, at 22:34, rupert mallin wrote:

I agree with very much you've said Tim (I must stop agreeing with you!)

Bloody hell Rupert, what's going on? And I agree with you again. This is good. Have I found a new friend? Yes yes yes to what you say.

Ha, you say, "I shudder when I hear 'Poetry Slam.' Goodness, I was part of (John) Paul O'Neill's original UK 'Poetry Slams' in Hackney in 1993. He still runs them at the Shaw Theatre, Euston..."

Umm yes, I too - now I know you won't believe this - performed with O'Neill in poetry events in Austin back in '96, as part of, my god, the London Slam Team - I was there under false pretenses, had slipped in under their noses so they couldn't get rid of me - strange strange. American slams were different though - far less stylized and predictable than the Brit version, at least the ones I witnessed.

The rugby club thing with the 'get your tits out' type of approach - that's my experience too, the way the worst of the slam atmosphere infected non-competitive readings. Of course the sensible thing for anyone with any sense is to stay out of it, decline the temptation to read, but a sense of adventure and a few drinks and a tolerant why-not attitude still overcomes pride and prudence and you find yourself as a part of the awful things, a victim of 'em. On rare occasions I have seen good poets hold their own in such atmospheres, but with great effort and no return.