Performance Poetry

These days, the worlds of stage and page are closer. Publishers and agents can watch poets performing their work on YouTube and make commercial decisions based on their skills and followers. Performance poets produce more professional-looking books, either through small publishers or online companies. More independent presses that take on performance poets are springing up, and technologies for printing and distribution have improved since the 1980s and 1990s. Some publishers rely entirely on POD technology for poets, and poets who need to produce a chapbook, short collection or bound script of a live show in time for going on tour have a variety of self-publishing solutions to turn to, making it easier for both publishers and poets to take a risk. I might even go on to suggest that the traditional judging criteria of mainstream publishers and awarding bodies has seeped into the performance scene, which has become more polished and professionalised and less anarchic over the past decade. Performance poets, particularly in Slams, are rewarded for seriousness, social consciousness and appearing virtuous and truthful. In practice, this means that some spoken word poets are rewarded for the same things that the establishment, for want of a better word, rewards. These include worthy, serious subject matter, a focus on craft and formal excellence, and general polish and finesse. I feel as though the carnivalesque spoken word of the 1980s and 1990s may have risen at least partly in opposition to these definitions of what makes good writing and who is given permission to create it. 

There are bigger debates here about who has access to the stage and how they are received by the audience and critics. The combinations I mentioned earlier of poetry with music, film and visual arts may also be reinforcing the seriousness of today’s performance poets. These art forms are also quite rarefied and require a certain investment of time and money for someone to become skilled, which are hard to come by in today’s climate for working class and lower middle class writers and creators. Over the last ten or twenty years, the stealthy removal of student grants, art colleges and state-funded childcare have undoubtedly robbed us of some vital voices that we never got to hear. 

When I first saw American-style performance poetry, I knew I had to do it and things would never be the same for me again. Poetry, in whatever form you consume it, reminds you that your life can be changed. There is something about the immediacy and urgency of spoken word, and its antecedents and offshoots in hip-hop and rap, that endures and energises through the most difficult times. The past two years have been unprecedented in terms of isolation and lack of communal gatherings, and the long-term impact of this will be wide-reaching. People will be cautious and accepting of different levels of risk, and there is the additional risk of alienating those who were able to take part in online events but may not attend physical events for a variety of reasons. The future is uncertain, but I have seen resilience on a grand scale, with writers, artists and musicians offered opportunities only to have them snatched away at the last minute, and event promoters scrambling to put a bill together with a few days’ notice, with all the promotion and logistical work that requires. The dismissal of our cultural industries and their economic and soft-power clout is a regular kick in the teeth, as are worldwide policies that prevent parents, carers and people in insecure employment from having the time and mental space to write. Still, they prevail. 

Poetry has always been a space for people to vent their frustrations and write about things that feel ordinary or representative to them, but which others may not know about. Speaking these poems is a way to elevate our lived experience, to give it shape and weight, to stand in public and bring our voices, bodies and histories into the public space. In some ways, having never made much money and being powered by a do-it-yourself ethos, the performance poetry scene requires little to keep it going. It has the power to confer some freedom on its participants, whether that’s starting a publishing house from a creative writing group above a pub, or getting friends together for a poetry event in a squat, on a canal boat, in a pop-up building or an after-hours showcase at a festival. Making something from nothing is what we do. We have done it before, and we can do it again. 

This article is an abridged extract from the Poetry Writers' Handbook, available to pre-order at Bloomsbury.com.

Sophia Blackwell is a performance poet with three published collections of poetry and the author of a novel. Her poetry has been anthologised by Bloodaxe, Nine Arches and the Emma Press among others, and between Autumn 2019 and and 2021, she hosted the LGBT+ radio show Out in South London on Resonance FM, showcasing gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans authors, musicians, comedians and other creatives like her.

Recent notable gigs include four times at Glastonbury on the Poetry & Words Stage, Women of the World (WOW) Festival at the South Bank Centre and headlining a national tour with Hammer and Tongue. She is a Literary Death Match champion, Spread the Word LGBT Hero and Diversity Role Model. She was the Former Chair of Poetry London and is a freelance editor and the current Chair of the Pride Network at Hachette UK.

Photo by Kane Reinholdtsen on Unsplash