Ears for Eyes (Part Two)
I've known more than my share of button makers who claim to be poets. This isn't to denigrate the art of button-making or its makers, but it does say something about the nature of illusion. "What is a poet?" isn't quite the right question. A poet is a verb, not a noun. A poet is a person who is DOING something, namely, making poems.
Talking about poetry is no substitute for doing it. And what do the doers say when backed-up and pressed into a corner? I am reticent about dragging out my own private collection of wordsmiths to make my points, but perhaps it will interest you to know what some other, practising poets have to say about this art (and craft) which they have learned the hard way - firsthand - in a thousand smokey pubs and clubs on the road between here and there, not to mention an incalcuable number of college and high school classrooms and auditoriums.
"The practice of poetry," Nigel Roberts tells us, "is no longer silent, no longer that practice of words on the page, no longer that mute invitation: 'read me'. Performance poetry... takes its voice from the speech of the people; its structure and perhaps its purpose, from the narrative method; a narrative that has been conditioned and modified by such diverse mediums as jazz, film, theatre and stand-up comedy. The performance poet seeks a more direct relationship with the audience, an audience which may not be inclined to embrace poetry in its written form. Performance poetry is a poetry of the voice and gesture, a manifestation of the poet’s way of being in the world. It is NOT acting. The performance poet seeks to speak directly to the audience in terms which are idiomatic rather than coldly literary. It aims at being informative, not didactic, ordinary rather than rarified."
In another essay, eric beach writes: "the living voice is contemporary poetry... by the time students reach university they're so brain-washed that they elect to study poets who are either dead or describing New York, that is, if they get the choice... if you wanna know what poetry is, ask your children; all I can talk about are poems, not poetry."
Graham Rowlands, in his essay, "Bums on Seats", writes: "Performance poetry is old. It's large. It contains multitudes, and I assure you employs more than rhyme. Like what, you ask? Like dramatic monologue, repetition, narrative, puns, dialogue, found materials, epigrams...".
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