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Yes, agree with this and most of the other stuff you said Lawrence, or at least, agree with the questions etc. The being able to remember and recite your own poems is looked upon as a necessity by the performance poets - without having to follow the lines on a piece of paper you can then put all your eye-contact, facial expressions and 'actions' towards the job of performing the poem - make contact with your audience and all that stuff. At such an event once I was talking with one of the competitors who just didn't understand why I could not remember my own poems, and he was even more astounded when I said that I really didn't care and that being able to remember my own poems meant absolutely nothing to me - it wasn't what the poetry was about. Yet I love reading them, performing them, from the page - I like that dynamic between the reading and the human voice - that hesitancy that exists in the second of decision on how to 'say' a word. You don't get that dynamic, that reality, that confrontation, with the experienced performance poets - you get a performance in the worst sense of the word, a seamless practiced reconstruction of a verbal. It holds very little interest for me - and most of the time I find it highly irritating and affected, especially when what it is saying is next to nothing yet is choca with cliches and telescoped rhyming. But what I am referring to here is the traditional thing we call performance poetry, that thing that conforms to sets of rules, expectations and assumptions that the promoters of such events are usually looking for. There are interesting exceptions, mainly from those who have come from a different background, the performative and so on. Cheers Tim A. On 19 Oct 2011, at 18:58, Lawrence Upton wrote: > Calling it performance poetry because you commit it to memory and then > perform it, seems odd to me. I *perform poetry all the time. Many > (most?) > of us here do, I am sure.