Ears For Eyes (Part One)
Performance Poetry is poetry conceived, composed, and (sometimes) transcribed, for the purpose of speaking aloud. Its preoccupation with voiced sounds makes it - in essence - very different from the sort of poetry which is born and has its life and death, not to mention a few marriages and any number of kids, within the confines of the written page or a collection of pages.
For a long while now, performance poetry has incurred the indifference - if not the indignant wrath - of a large and vociferous section of the academic literary community in Australia. Living in New York and California in recent years, I have come to realize that "the performance poem" is not held in much higher esteem among American academics either. Too many tenured minds have written it off as a kind of un-poetry - something which frustrated actors might engage in between paying jobs, but not the sort of activity any serious writer would waste his time on. "That poem isn't as good as you make it sound," they say, as if the printed page is the real source of power; and, in a way, given the inherent prejudices of our materialistic society, they are right. How does one quantify and examine and test that which dissolves in thin air? Academics, like most of us, feel more comfortable when they're in charge. A written poem is more controllable, more predictable. It is something that can be taught, dissected and manipulated repeatedly for any number of English classes. It is mute, it is safe, it is manageable.
Not so the oral poem, the poem-in-performance – that bastard son/daughter of theatre which is more than words; which is flesh and breath, silence and gesture, and always changing. It is far too messy for those in the business of tidy extrapolations on text analysis.
Since the 1970s, more and more has been written about this phenomenon by those who have sought to marginalize it for the purpose of advancing along their own, preordained career path. Midst the jargon and discourse, there has been scant attention, if any, paid to the actual practitioners the art. Ezra Pound once said "if you wanna know something about an automobile you ought to go talk to someone who's actually driven one".
In light of the darkness surrounding performance poetry, I offer a brief collection of thoughts and comments by several performance poets whose work I thoroughly respect. These opinions, however, should not be construed in any way as being prescriptive. I know of no laws, rules, formulas, methods
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