Call It Poetry / Tonight : An experiment in performance poetry

During the work-shopping process we ran through the playing order or the poems, and blocked the movements. The poets directed themselves with the use of a video camera which caught all of the action on tape and was screened each night with all of the poets in attendance, studying, commenting and offering suggestions about what they were seeing and hearing. Decisions about modifications to blocking, set layout, pace, etc., were arrived at collaboratively, with hithertofore unheard-of respect and cooperation among all concerned.

From the present writer’s point of view, the experience of working on a project such as this diminished – for all time – my interest in the mere poetry reading as a form of conveying poems orally. The static, out of context way in which a poet stands there, behind a dais or microphone, intoning one poem after another, seems a rather lean and unsatisfying way of engaging an audience, of lifting it almost bodily out of the weight of presuppositions in which the art of poetry has been stagnating for more than a hundred years.

"History has been made with Call It Poetry/Tonight", wrote critic, Bob Evans, in the Sydney Morning Herald. "This theatrical assemblage of performance poems and fragments by a group of nine poets is the first collaborative presentation of performance poetry in play-form ever presented in Australia, and perhaps in the world. A mix of solo set pieces, duologues, sound poems and the piano-bar blues of eric beach, keeps the audience alert and engaged for nearly two hours. At one point, poet Grant Caldwell takes an envelope from his coat jacket, takes out a letter and 'silently' reads it to himself as we 'hear him' – in voice-over – reading the missive... and all about the set - which is an inner-city bar - are concrete poems in the form of neon signs, interjecting with their own mute messages. The show has a flow and rhythm that expands and contracts. It has a light touch, much of it humorous. This is not ponderous poetry. It’s incisive, and anything but reverential."

By the end of the second act the audience "twigs" to the fact that what everyone in the bar has been waiting for is a poetry reading, delayed by a tardy master of ceremonies who finally arrives from the back of the theatre, strides to center stage and delivers what turns out to be a poem disguised as an

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