Whisper and Shout

How disappointing to read yet another 'Poetry is Dead' article, this time in The Independent, another round of gratuitous violence in the Punch and Judy show that is the mainstream media's default position when it comes to poetry coverage.

According to Nathan A Thompson: "Poetry is dying. Actually, it's pretty dead already for all intents and purposes and the rise of performance poetry slams is doing nothing to help matters. I know, I used to be a performance poet."

The article continues as a sustained attack on slams, delivered much in the manner of a spurned lover discussing their ex after a few pints at the pub; sober enough to be relatively cogent, yet drunk enough to not worry about whining loudly and aggressively, for the whole pub to hear.

As with any such scenario, there are a number of ludicrous assertions littered throughout, not least of which is his suggestion that "poetry has always been words on a page, open to anyone". The article closes, ironically, with a call for poetry to go back to whispering its art.

Poetry was, for a large percentage of its millennia-spanning history, a purely oral form, one which was reliant upon the use of received wisdoms, mnemonics such as rhyme and alliterative forms to help ease its preservation from poet to poet.

Certainly that changed rather rapidly with the arrival of the printing press, though the process had begun centuries before with Gilgamesh and with Homer's writing down of two great Greek oral epics. The nature of communication shifted most dramatically in 1436 with the arrival of Gutenburg's press, yet even when words were largely delivered on a page, poets were still considered to have a voice, an ear, a music. In other words, the oral tradition provides the backbone for our attempts to describe the art and craft of poetry.

I know of a large number readers who buy books of poetry to read aloud to themselves or others to capture the sounds, who go to readings and performances armed with a knowledge of the work which then comes further alive for them in an oral setting. If that happens now, imagine what must have happened in the information-starved past, in the same way that songs were disseminated via sheet music for people to play in the home.

There are plenty of people who attend slams in dingy pubs or readings in arts centres, bookshops, universities and do not find 'performance' and 'page' poetry to be mutually exclusive. What matters for many of them is the search for a poem or poems that move, amuse, inform, tell beautiful truths or lovely lies.

I've been a 'performance' poet - it's how I started out, though I prefer to think of myself as a poet who is at home performing his work. I took part in the second slam in the country, at Glastonbury Festival in 1994, and it was eye-opening in that I was an abject failure, overcome as I was by festivalitis and nerves. What I took away from the experience was a need to hone my communication from the stage and a desire to make my words sing on page and stage.

In answer to Thompson's assertion that one must aim one's poem pretty low to win a Slam, I can only say this: I won a Slam in Cheltenham Literature Festival's 1999 Spring festival, with three resolutely serious poems, which I like to think whispered quite as much as they shouted. Through Slams and performed events I have encountered a great many poets and poet performers out there whose work is at once subtle and intensely public: Elvis McGonagall, Kate Tempest and Polarbear are all names that spring immediately to mind from the performance scene, who sit happily alongside the triple-headed public laureateship of Britain that Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke and Liz Lochhead are conducting to such effect and who add enormously to the poetic landscape.

I don't subscribe to the idea that Slams are the future of poetry, the idea of which seems to have irked poor, spurned Thompson most, but unlike Thompson, I do believe they are an excellent siege engine against the poetry stigma that some schools can build in children, as well as a very useful part of the make up of an excitingly polygamous live poetry scene which has been in development since the late 1950s, in Britain at least, when my father, along with Adrian Mitchell, Pete Brown, Christopher Logue and others took poetry out on the road with jazz, theatre, art and more under the banner of Live New Departures, as a reaction against the careful library-bound quietudes of The Movement.

In the past 50 or so years, poetry in all its forms has flowered, even as it has been restrained by the rise of ever-swifter forms of communication and easier forms of intellectual gratification. It has taken root and grown through the art scene, high literature, the jazz, rock, dub and punk movements, in rap and performance art, in advertising. Poetry's utter refusal to go away, despite everything that is thrown at it, is one of the enduring testaments to it as an art form, and makes it clear that we need to shake the need for the sort of facile churnalism that can only find withering and reductive negatives or past-ignoring next-best-thingummies to shout about irregularly in the press.

Poetry, like Britain, like the English language, thrives on assimilation. It is at its best when it is at its most inclusive. The idea that any one strand of poetics can be held up as a totem to purity is, and always has been, laughable. About the only thing I agree with in Thompson's article is his assertion that "the drawing of sectarian lines continues to damage poetry to this today [sic]". It is a great shame that, otherwise, this article is a fine example of such sectarian thinking.

You just have to look at the work of outfits and people such as Penned in the Margins, the current poets laureate, the Poetry Archive, the just-launched Verse Kraken website or POEM Magazine, my father's Poetry Olympics, the Poetry Society, Hammer & Tongue, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Jo Bell, Luke Wright (especially as curator of Latitude Festival's poetry stage), Benjamin Zephaniah, Poems on the Underground, Glastonbury Festival's website, which commissions a poet in residence for every festival, Write Out Loud, Carcanet, Bloodaxe, Bang Said the Gun, last year's Poetry Parnassus, Poetry Live and so many, many more to see what possibilities poetry can encompass.

In amongst this list are people and organisations whose ideas of what poetry is differ wildly, be it on a political or poetical basis. Yet it seems clear to me that there is as much out there for people who prefer their poetry found in quiet contemplation as there is for those those who like it delivered through the bassy thrill of speakers. Equally, there is something for people who want something of everything.

"Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people" wrote Adrian Mitchell, long ago. Things have changed since then, but internecine bickering is the only sure way to risk ignoring the people who matter; the audience, the readers and listeners. Continue ignoring the audience in this vein and more and more of them will start ignoring poetry all over again. If only the press would take the long view, and stop employing people to write about poetry in such mealy-mouthed and angry fashion. Any fool can see that there are so many better, more productive arguments to be had.

Further Reading:I can't recommend these two articles highly enough - Poetry is Dead and Poetry is Alive