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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