What is the Difference between Poetry written for Performance and Poetry written for the Page?

A few thoughts – making reference to Spoz’ 2019 publication Sometimes Angry.

I don’t have an issue with performance poetry. I have seen artistry as great as any rock star’s on a humble local stage. The capacity of the medium to deliver both emotion and sudden illuminating shocks is unrivalled, because you only have the voice. Interpreting words aurally is something that all of us have done, from the womb. The performer’s command of verbal rhythm, and rhythm’s complement, rhyme – enables an audience to share – moments. Hence the spontaneous applause and the eruption of conversation, sometimes between perfect strangers. It is a mastery of technique that we witness, involving perfect timing, voice-modulation, posture, gesture and, frequently, huge memorisation.

On that basis alone I would argue that performance poetry is closer to theatre than to literature. That is to invite definitions, and definitions are bound to be unfairly exclusive. Theatre seems at least partly visual to me, and takes place over fixed time, whereas time for the reader is malleable and non-linear. Taking out the usefulness of graphics to illustrate the printed poem, it is the reader’s verbal experience and depth of imagination that stand ready, alone and unaided, to absorb the poem.

Poetry is a vehicle for transcendence. As with any art form, it takes us out of the narrow confines of being ourselves. It can search out inner joys and sadness. Using language that we would only encounter in dreams it offers reflection and, more than that, beauty.

The biker-poet and critic of the 1960s Thom Gunn defined poetry as ‘memorable language’ which is inclusive to a fault. I would ask for something more, something like the sketching-out of a mystery. Conversational language cannot always do justice to certain experience, and neither can prose. It is a poem you need.

That is why much contemporary poetry is puzzling, immediately. The reader must ‘join the dots’, and ‘make’ the experience. Poetry will end in a mystery even if the language and theme are plain as in, say, William Blake. There is something borderline or impermanent about it, like the seashore and the sea, and the imagination will respond to this uncertainty.

I anticipate Spoz’ Saturday Books Poetry Breakfast appearance with excitement. He is the small axe, its honed edge cutting away at the withered bark of a moribund media-wielding establishment. He is the devastating satirist, Lord Byron’s heir. He is the unashamed lover and defender of his homeland the gritty West Midlands. He is the searcher-out of roots, and the town-crier for all we have in common. Writing about his own Italian-immigrant background,

There was always room at your Inn for my dad and mum
Yes Brum, it didn’t matter where they came from,
You shot and bombed them in one decade,
Then helped them out in the next one. (61)

The statement is trenchant, literal. In his citizenship, through his working class identity, Spoz articulates the strength of his community. In other poems, this solidarity with the present-day immigrant, indeed the migrant, stands alongside a love for the land, expressed with delightful ambiguity. The denuded countryside of the Lickey Hills countryside in winter, where

… the world appears
And opens itself up like a naked lover
With nothing to hide, yet everything hidden…

is a deep meditation on time, history and the temporality of the poet’s own existence

… throwing sticks for his dog
That one day…will not be retrieved. (34)

A.E. Housman, a poet of the western Midlands from the beginning of the 20th century, would have experienced the mood. Spoz’s gift is contemporary language, sometimes bracing, even crude. Counterbalancing delicacy of feeling is never far away.

Spoz, Sometimes Angry, Verve Poetry Press