Poetry International Web: Introduction

Issue 4: August 1, 2006

Welcome to the fourth UK issue of Poetry International Web, which takes for its focus poets who work within live performance and the spoken word, important forces within contemporary UK poetry. Our guest editors, Melanie Abrahams and Segun Lee-French, are both experts within that field: Abrahams is the Creative Director of renaissance one, "an agency that curates, programmes and produces poetry, prose and spoken word events", and Lee-French is the Regional Coordinator (North West) for Apples and Snakes, an organisation devoted to promoting poetry in performance.

I am being careful to hedge around the phrase 'performance poets' here; it is a phrase that many poets, however excellent they may be in performance, dislike, mistrust, or endeavour to redefine through their work. The poet Jane Holland calls it "an umbrella term which is often misused", preferring to refer to "poetry in performance" on her discussion and events site, Poets on Fire. An example of that misuse is (at the time of writing) visible on the Wikipedia entry for performance poetry, where it is claimed, dismissively, that "much performance poetry does not work well when printed". That idea could be argued away, by reference to, say, Tony Lopez's recent collection of essays, Meaning Performance ( Salt: Cambridge, 2006), which refers to this practice's "interesting developments and destabilizing complexities for our conception of poetry". However, it would be more effective to send you to the poets presented here - Michelle Green, Anthony Joseph, Shamshad Khan, and John Siddique - as their work can refute that idea comprehensively.

Rather than setting up a distinction between 'page poem' and 'performance poem', then, it may be more productive to ask how a poem uses its page or its performance to achieve its effects. This may be interpreted as an invitation to all this issue's readers to read the poems aloud! (Web links for Anthony Joseph, Shamshad Khan and John Siddique allow readers to hear their performances too.) However, like any classification imposed on an artistic practice, it is far more interesting to observe how the actual poems inhabit and ignore the boundaries that it sets up. Michelle Green's use of space, for example, is a pleasure of the page; Melanie Abrahams, in her introduction to Anthony Joseph, describes "a writer whose imagination and writing has reacted to and burst through stricture and tidy definition". All an editorial can do, following that, is to encourage you to untidy any definitions you may have had, and to invite you to enjoy the poems.

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