Twenty odd years ago, when I was publishing and performing poetry, I used to hate the Poetry Society. Despise would probably be a better word.
To me, and to the people whose words I reproduced, the PS was BS. Its members represented the Establishment, and they seemed to us detached and irrelevant. We hated their poems and we hated their delivery: that too sincere, half-breathless, calm, small voice in which they lisped their “readings”. And the poems they wrote seemed dead to us: conceited ramblings of the self-obsessed, dreary and wantonly fey.
These people had forgotten the importance of not being earnest. In their hands poetry became a lifeless thing. To us, poetry was about performance: sound and meaning, the power of the spoken word. It meant talking directly to the audience, grabbing their attention and challenging them to listen. Sometimes it was absurd, occasionally ugly, but it was always live and direct.
For us, poetry was not a pastime for over-sensitive intellectuals, it was a duty, and the poet was required not just to write but to perform. We took as our manifesto the words of Brian Patten’s “Prosepoem Towards a Definition of Itself":
When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers.Why am I telling you all this? Well, it's just a long-winded way of introducing this video of Rong Radio from Benjamin Zephaniah's Black Cab Sessions.
[Edited down from a previous post. More from Poetry Corner]
