The Australian "performance poet", Pi O, has frequently spoken about the orality of the text of a poem. "The fact is... what we call 'performance poets' is really a movement of 'oral literates' whose poetry is an assault on writing itself, not against it per se, but against the 'writerishness' of poems whose language is deaf to the sense of sound."
This idea of poetry-as-sound is not new. Frost wrote about the sounds of words and sentences, and Stevens spoke about poems as stages upon which words perform. One need not dredge up the evidence of Aboriginal song poetry or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to lend dramatic longevity to the notion that poetry is a form of ancient storytelling, told by the mouth to the ears. Nevertheless, the significance of orality has found little credence among academics whose deaf worship of the book and written word is no doubt fed by an anxious clamoring for sacred tenure. It is unfortunate. Many of the students who pour into high schools and colleges each year might have found they enjoyed poetry had it been given half a chance. Instead, they have been turned into an army that has no idea what poetry actually sounds like, and therefore dismisses it as both boring and useless.
How many poetry readings have I given where someone - or even lots of people - has come up after the reading and said in so many words: "Why couldn't poetry have been like that when I was in school!" Since the days of The Beats, the entire sub-culture of the poetry-reading scene has been undergoing what is little more than an exercise in irelevance, except for the fact that its renewed popularity means more venues and audiences for that small but exceptional group of performance poets who have been all but ignored by the minions of print. In short, performance poetry has shed poetry of its unfasionable-ness. The ancient tradition has turned into "the new oracy".
An extreme example of this "new" oracy is the poetry slam where, to the shouts and applause of the audience, poets vie for acclaim performing their best "stand-up numbers" within a designated (usually a minute) time period. Whether slam poems qualify as good poems, of course, is another matter. The point is: poetry has been in the process of re-inventing itself, or more precisely, of being returned to its original form - to the voice and to the ears. The slam is only one manifestation of this. The street-saavy authority of rap and the power of the spoken word to attract new listeners and readers to poetry, cannot be denied. Poetry readings can be found every night of the week in almost every major city in the world.
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