There is also a more serious or even intellectual niveau of
performance poetry, tho whether these qualities are there on the stage
or extrapolated by theorists after the event I don't know. John Hall
is expert on this kind of thing. Is he among us? I wonder what he
makes of Kate Tempest.
p
On 5 Oct 2014, at 15:42, Tim Allen 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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