PAUL BEASLEY

Vive la difference! Performance poet ry

’Performance poetry’ doesn’t work on the page. ’Performance poetry’ is an excuse for bad writing. ‘Performance poetry’ - don’t I mean ’black poetry’? And so goes the critical chorus orchestrated from within the literary main- stream - unless there’s a promotion on. I’ve even heard one of our leading ’performance poets’ ask if we can’t do without the ’performance’ bit, all of us being just poets. I‘ll come back to this.

Personally, I find the label apposite and useful, but it has suffered from so much abuse recently we might have to invent a new one.

Just a thought, how about ’contextual poetry’? It puts it in language ’intellectuals’ could relate to andlbut I suspect - just as with ’performance’ - this would catch all those extra-literary dimensions that make serious writers and critics quake with fury at the mere mention.

Firstly, I mean dimensions like the poet’s personality or persona, then the cultural, social, political, historical backgrounds and traditions through which the poet works - the general contexts - to which could be added the particulars of the context of the body - the sheer and unique physical being of the poet and how this contributes to the poem’s fullest effect - also the particulars of place - including venue and with that audience - because ’contextual poems’ are often addressed to the poet’s immediate community and heard in the setting of public spaces.

One thing is for sure - this paper will not get us any closer to an appreci- ation of ’contextual poetry’ unless we’re prepared to experience this poetry on its own terms. I must admit though, I don’t find the new label as nice to lick or as sticky as the old one - vive ‘performance poetry‘.

I think one of the reasons I’ve been asked to write this is to try and clarify and substantiate the term, if not defend or apologise for it. I sense the critical frustration with its vagueness (who islis not a ‘performance poet’?). In my book, however, vagueness can be a virtue. The term is not specific or definitive, but general and suggestive. It makes no claims for a special genus or class of activity or materials. It is only usefully understood as a heterogeneric term - a hybrid of diverse artistic and cultural forms. It actively generates different possible interpretations and applications. Some go so far as to say the term suggests an alternative aesthetic and ideology.

Vive la difference! Performance poetry 29

One thing is sure - the notion admits a huge variety of culturally specific and sub-genres - from jazz to choreo-poetry, from cabaret to sound- poetry. And it has to be said that its usefulness is entirely contingent - not least on being perceived within a multicultural context.

Now - at the risk of sounding somewhat obvious - I’ll pick out a few of what I consider to be common features of performance poetry. For one, it is often cast in the vernacular, the everyday idiom and speech patterns of the poet - the language of the class andlor cultural group to which the poet belongs.

And it is often the case that that accent or dialect is offered up not only as a ’natural’ fact but as a political issue - in explicit defiance of pressure to conform to standard expectations or obviate it in more abstract or formal- istic concerns. Instead it is all the more foregrounded - celebrated as a key component in the poet’s individual and group identity, a defining element of difference, of what we are and where we are coming from. In this central sense it is properly situated in the front-line of self and community defence against immense and subtle pressure to assimilate, integrate and eradicate difference and diversity.

This is exemplified in the work of so many of our most popular, con- temporary poets - both directly and indirectly. To mention just a few - Benjamin Zephaniah, Merle Collins, John Agard and Valerie Bloom - indeed it is evidenced in the work of almost all black British poets - very much concerned with the preservation and promotion of their cultural identities - forging their works in patois or (as Linton Kwesi Johnson would have it) Nation Language. It is evidenced in the work of the Scots poets - again to name but two - Liz Lochhead and Tom Leonard - whose work can be seen as friction-sparks flying off the clash between working- class and institutionalised cultures. Again, it can be clearly heard in the work of such Yorkshire poets as Ian MacMillan . . . then there’s John Cooper Clarke, Joolz, Lemn Sissay, Henry Normal, Rita Ann Higgins, Billy Childish . . .

I hope, just by giving so many examples, to avoid a stereotypical styling of the point. I’ll also add that none of these poets would deny the necessity, usefulness and beauty of a ’purer’ English diction - indeed, it is also their medium. Like so many of us, they are bi-dialectal - working in both linguistic modes as and when. It is just that they feel the real urgency to assert their local linguistic identity.

The multiple features of orality are amplified in the varied stylistics or aesthetics of performance poetry - and they have everything to do with the politics of identity. A few more common characteristics would include that performance poetry is often heavily rhythmical - especially dub, rap, rock

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and jazz poetry - all of course built on their respective musical structures. Popular and culturally specific musical genres are informing performance poetry - just as they always have done. To start listing - ballads, sonnets, etc. - would be tiresome on any other than academic ears, but bhangra, jazz-rap and jungle poems are on the move.

To move on. Other stylistic features foregrounded by performance poetry would include what are rightly recognised as the ‘traditional’ elements of poetry - rhyme, alliteration, assonance, dissonance - also epithetic and other formulary expressions, like the use of chorus and refrains. And of course all of these elements appeal to the ear, imply a hearer, an audience - something that mainstream and modernist move- ments in poetry have done without. A point to be picked up later.

Back to the drift. All of these elements and more are fundamental to the oral arts - including performance poetry - and do influence if not deter- mine the syntax; and all serve to in tense and dramatise the action and/or the psychological experiences being addressed in the poem. Much the same can be said of most poetry.

Another thing. It is noticeable in poetry coming out of age-old oral tra- ditions and the modern spoken word movement how the techniques of storytelling are fully employed; for example, in well-defined frameworks of action and strong characterisation. For instance, Jackie Kay’s and Carol Ann Duffy‘s work are remarkable for their use of narrative and monologue forms.

For me, this leads on to another defining element of performance poetry - in the sense that it is situational rather than abstract, invoking an existen- tial setting as compared to purely subjective states.

At this point it makes sense to comment on how performance poetry is most readily associated with ‘protest poetry’. As said, much of perform- ance poetry is concerned directly or indirectly with self and community defence and it does need to be seen within the wider context of resistance or oppositional cultures. As Walter Ong, in his seminal analysis ‘Orality and Literacy - the technologising of the word’, says of primary oral arts, they are commonly situated within the arena of struggle. So with per- formance poetry - whether that is against class, racial, sexual or other oppression.

Take rap poetry for example, which strives to engage in verbal and intellectual combat. Rap grew out of the street culture of African-American youth and a game called the ‘dozens’ in which highly stylised insults are traded. And this is hardly an alien feature in mainstream cultures - it is just that it has become institutionalised through rhetoric, public speaking and dialectics.

Vive la difference! Performance poetry 31

Within the context of struggle, a concomitant characteristic of perform- ance poetry is its topicality, its explicit addressing of current affairs, the news if you want. Now, of course this gives performance poetry an in- creasingly and admittedly perishable value. It also puts the emphasis strongly on the new. I would argue, and I think this will get me into trouble with certain performance poets, that it is not concerned with the dictum ‘poetry is news that stays news’ but has in-built obsolescence, is con- fessedly disposable. I’m going to argue that with performance poetry there is no pretence to ’immortality’ and ’universality’ - as elitist Western cultural values would have it - but a commitment to the here and now.

Look at those worms squirm! I’ve spoken to a few well-informed and ideologically different people about this and have enjoyed their reactions. I’ve heard a well-respected publisher with a serious distaste for perform- ance poetry actually defend the ‘best’ of it as worthy of endurance. Of course, I wouldn’t disagree with him on that point. But can the page, the book format, contain, never mind preserve the performance poem? It is a classic case of yes and no. The book, which is of course a perishable product in itself (although it won’t be openly admitted), can provide one form of documentation and a retrieval system for the poem, but it changes the poem and the experience of the poem utterly. It begs the questions, what is gained? and what is lost? Also, it raises some pretty pertinent questions about the relative merits of each form - of authorial production, distribution and (er . . .) consumption - and how they relate.

Other reactions to the proposition by performance poets have been both defensive and assertive - arguing that collective or community memory (the word of mouth) sustains the work, and, in thoroughly Marxist- Gramscian terms, that it is the dominant, hegemonic ideological pro- duction systems that determine what ’lasts’ and what perishes and that these systems need to be challenged.

I understand the performance poem as perishable in more than one sense - for instance, in terms of its necessarily being a live event - i.e. you can’t take it home with you, or only what you remember; it is time-based (as contrasted to the space of the page or the book shelf); it is committed to the moment, the here and now; and, as said, it is intimately engaged with the current agenda, which is subject to rapid change. What’s more, not being driven by the arrogant, elitist aesthetics of say some page poets - the demotic democracy admits all people as (real or potential) poets - it’s about participation; it doesn’t aim to sustain the notion of just the ’best’ ’lasting’.

I’m beginning to think that the differences between the page and per- formance should be better defined and understood in order to preserve them rather than blur or close them down.

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I think we’re getting somewhere here, but please allow me to stand back a little and make a few more general comments.

As I’ve said, more or less, performance poetry exists primarily in a social context. Indeed, it has reclaimed a social space for poetry. The poem may well be written in private, in isolation, quietly. However, it is very much conceived with its audience in mind (both immediate, particular and general). It may be constructed in silence on paper but it only comes into being, achieves its original purpose when it is fully articulated.

Performance poetry is designed for oral transmission and so necessarily implies the presence of an author-speaker and an audience. It does not properly exist in any other sense. The audience is a necessary element of the art - it is possible to say that the audience is needed to contribute, participate, and to finish the poem. This can be evidenced in the explicit stylistics of the poem, for example the inclusion of call-and-answer devices and structures. Or it may be more implicit - put simply in terms of response. It is even possible to argue that the raw materials of the poems are not words or sounds but the sensory apparatus of the audience. This may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Performance poetry requires the ac- tive involvement of others - it solicits, conjoins, provokes and incorporates people. It does not tolerate a passive or consumerist role for the receiver. It moves towards reception theory. It relies on and demands feedback. It is an interactive, two-way, give and take thing.

For my appreciation of the value of performance and how it works I’m deeply indebted to Walter Ong, as mentioned. Again, although he is con- cerned with primary oral cultures, many of the features or what he calls ’the psycho-dynamics’ of orality carry over into contemporary perform- ance poetry. The whole oralitylliterary debate sheds so much light on modern cultural, especially literary, developments - it is almost blinding. It also suggests why so much prejudice is heaped upon oral and popular cultural forms. The inverse of this, I suppose, is the anti-literary argument, which would include the perfectly valid point that, while writing has enabled so much, it has also occasioned the internal exile of the poet - divorcing himlher from almost any social context and role - making only for purer personal or scientific orientations.

We can thank Eliot for pointing out a historical moment in Western culture when the sensory processes in poetry became secondary to the cerebral ones - that is in citing the Metaphysical poets as ’teaching the lyric to think’. Eliot also, of course, prescribed a creative process in which the poet had to achieve a certain distance from the work at hand. While this is so obvious on one level, it has allowed for a general interpretation and

Vive la diffQence! Performance poetry 33

application of distance as a rule. So much so that the poet seems so far removed from the diurnal he is sensed stronger as an absence - as in the case of hermetic, closed-circuit, abstract work.

With performance poetry, presence is more the rule. In the first instance, the sheer physical presence of the poet - on the site and as the agent of interaction. Secondly, in the sense that the performance poet goes out to close down or bridge distance. And, just as performance reclaims a social space for poetry, it reinvents and promotes a poet’s public function, perhaps especially as guardian of or challenger to cultural values, and redefines the poet’s role to include, for example, community historian, teacher, broadcaster, agitator and entertainer. The specialist conception and myth of the poet as separate from and above people is mercifully exploded.

The repercussions of this reorientation are significant. The notion of the poet and the nature of the poem are transformed. We are no longer dealing with the poet as a member of a cultural elite or with the poem as merely ’words on a page’. Likewise the limited conception of language as writing (nodding again in the direction of Ong) - i.e. a spatially controlled system of symbols - sound fixed in a visual field to be retrieved internally. Language becomes to a considerable extent freer of just its chirographic and typographic representations and biases. Performance poetry resituates language in an audio-visual field. It no longer operates in the context, and on the consciousness, as determined by writing alone - for example, two- dimensional, lineal, silently internalised - but three-dimensional, expan- sive, audibly committed.

Ong accounts for how the technology of writing initiated a process of interiorisation, marking a profound departure from oral modes of cultural life. To my mind, performance poetry initiates a corresponding process of exteriorisation.

Performance poetry has to be described and evaluated according to different but related criteria from the poem on the page. Performance is the poem or the word as occurrence, as event - it is timally and not spatially committed. It is by its very nature perishable and contingent.

To me, these distinctions also suggest why there is a preoccupation with image in Western literary appreciation over and above music or the sound of a poem. This reminds me further of the book’s strong relationship with the visual arts, and the dominance of artefact over experience, product over process.

Because of performance poetry‘s temporally expressed form, it relies all the more on its memorability to achieve an enduring presence. And to do

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this it has to work by different rules and conventions from literary poems (I’ve mentioned some already) as an aid to recall, retention and recom- mittance. These mnemonic devices are understated in mainstream and modernist poetry. This is because they work within radically ‘different linguistic economies’ (Ong) and, I must add, according to divergent aesthetic and ideological principles.

Writing facilitates analysis, complexity, compression and abstraction. Its lineal propensities propel the writer on a seemingly endless quest for originality, or the new. Its internal economy does not tolerate the primary stylistic features of orality - like repetition, excessive or accumulative word-play. Literary poems tend towards incisiveness and exclusiveness, whereas performance poems tend towards expansiveness and inclusive- ness - imparting a sense of abundancy that the literary finds cumbersome or redundant.

Now I know that in this sense it can be argued that performance poems operate within a much more traditional and conservative ethos than say literary ones. But this is easily overstated. The poetics employed by many performance poets are highly sophisticated and complex - and they take what they want from postmodern literary technique. It is also true to state that a more naturalistic or realistic discourse dominates in performance poetry. But again, it has to be understood that performance is concerned as much with communication as it is with expressiveness or experimentation, and it is propelled by a genuinely felt democratic impulse. I’m sorry if some people find that crude - for them that is. Performance poetry is in this sense less concerned with the ’new‘ and such postmodern stylistics which aim at dissociating the senses or other alienating techniques - but more with the social, ceremonial and ritualistic functions of poetry. Sadly, again, this is a vital dimension and mode to which many literary sensibilities are no longer alive.

All the while here I’ve been stressing the physical nature of poetic language, its sensory dynamics alongside its psychodynamics. Perform- ance celebrates the corporeality of language - language as a muscular pro- duction (as well as cerebral), i.e. that of the larynx, the lung and the limb. Language is not just a product of writing. Of course performance poems can be and are written down and read with the mind’s ear, but they can only achieve their fullest effect and meaning in the sensory dimension.

To consider a poem in this context is not to lose sight of language, but to enrich its appreciation and significance, to enlarge the focus to include, just for example, body-language. Significance is also detailed in gesture and movement and facial expressions - of course, this is where poetry crosses

Vive la diffdrence! Performance poetry 35

over into dance and theatre. Significance also resides in the phonetic qualities of the work; for example, in the pitch, the tone, in duration, intonation and inflexion - and this is where poetry crosses over into music.

I’d also propose that performance poetry foregrounds the physical prop- erties of language as a political act and fact. By drawing attention to the power of language, performance thereby makes an issue of it. It doesn’t ’gloss’ over its import as if it were a transparent or neutral medium, but demonstrates language as a concrete and powerful production.

Just as I’m talking about different modes of authorial production, it follows that the work’s different forms of dissemination and distribution must be addressed. Indeed, this is one of the form’s most radical aspects, especially in so far as it strategically bypasses the established hegemonic means and modes (i.e. publishers and literary editors and their markets of readers). Instead it creates its own - in the form of networks and circuits of platforms - from the local community centres, to pubs, to the regional and more broadly representative venues.

More on venues. Another virtue of performance poetry is that it can happen anywhere; it doesn’t need big production or technical (financial/ capital) facilitation. Also, individual platforms - many just as transient as the poems themselves - crop up in the unlikeliest places as the need and the convergence of energies occasions or demands. They can be likened to a guerrilla art form - and this is their strength and beauty. It worries me a little when I hear arts administrators, in recognising the energy and popu- larity of this fluid network, start configuring national networks of literary platforms into which I can imagine them diverting existing and more widely distributed public resources. It would be a sad day when the arts budgets of the country were investing in or rather subsidising the con- struction industry at the same time as perpetuating dodgy cultural values.

As I‘ve mentioned, the book as a format does not easily lend itself to the aims and methods of performance poetry. The page, in fact, cannot bear it. Performance poetry, concerned as it is with audio-transmission, has en- deavoured to make itself more available through other formats; primarily the event and secondarily through sound-recording technology - the album, cassette and CD. Also, and perhaps more importantly, through media transmission, especially radio and increasingly through TV and video.

I don’t want to get into evaluating the various merits and demerits of individual productions here, although that would be an interesting exer- cise on its own. I’d just like to observe that although the media have been slow to pick up on the potentials of performance, especially for a mass

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audience (and we shouldn't really be surprised), it is happening and the signs are seriously exciting. Increasingly, performance poets are experi- menting in this field - just as they are with other performance and visual media - and the cross-cultural, multimedia possibilities are being sensed and seized.

I have cited a range of different aspects of performance, perhaps high- lighting points of divergence rather than convergence with mainstream and modernist traditions. However, while recognising the repellent polari- ties of, say, popular cultural and avant-garde forms of poetry, it is still possible to see areas of genuine commonality and how performance poetry as a frame of reference can and does accommodate both.

Take these two apparent extremes of popular and experimental poetics: the first concerned with its immediate 'lumpen' audience - originating or incorporating popular artistic forms like rap and cabaret; the second con- cerned more with itself or with a rarefied audience of specialists - oper- ating on the cutting edge, engaged in experiment for its own sake or in the name of linguistic science. I can still detect sites of correspondence and can suggest how they relate or even reconcile within the parenthesis of performance.

For starters I can cite the work of Futurists and Dadaists and other pion- eering modernists - including Marinetti, Mayakovsky, Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara - for the overtly rhetorical and gestural nature of their work, as well as their agitational motives. But it is especially for their programmes of performances that they first became known - if not, at first, remembered. Many of their performance productions consciously exploited popular cultural forms - in particular variety theatre - for its multimedia possi- bilities, its emphasis on novelty, its engagement with audience and its vulgarity, which they endeavoured to bring into the service of their aim of disrupting a complacent bourgeois audience and revitalisinglrevolution- ising stale cultural forms.

Of course, this is not only a valid, exciting and effective artistic strategy - it gives great press! And let's not deny these artists power and importance as publicists.

The powerful play of opposites here - between popular (attractive) and modernist (alienating) techniques - is the key that unlocked energies that still feed through Western literary, performance and visual arts today. For my purposes, however, they are importantly recalled as the initiators of a movement in performance art which, although it had its best moments in the sixties (before my time) with its environments and happenings, still signposts an important and undervalued dimension of poetry.

For me, one of the key current performance poets who works directly out

Vive la difference! Performance poetry 37

of this avant-gardist tradition is Bob Cobbing - the internationally re- spected / locally neglected soundlconcrete poet. His life’s work has been a serious and sustained challenge to restrictive notions of the constitution of poetry. In particular, his work breaks down the borders between the liter- ary and performance and visual arts - exploring through his concrete works poetry as it approaches the mediums of paint and sculpture, and through his sound works poetry as it approaches the condition of music, and demonstrating how these extremes relate.

What I personally thank Cobbing for the most is how he invests and extracts significance and demonstrates how poetry resides in the smallest sound units - phrases, words, syllables, phonemes. To pick just one other instance of this kind of thing from an apparently separate cultural plane, it would have to be Mikey Smith’s anguished and reverberative prayer in his poem ‘Mi Cyaan Believe It’ - in a word (type can’t do it justice), ‘Lawwwwwwwwd . . .‘

Likewise, for me, Cobbing’s work suggests how avant-garde and popu- lar forms canldo coexist and fuse. To quote from a paper he put down in 1970 called ’Sophisticated l Primitive’:

Two lines of development in concrete sound poetry seem to be complemen- tary. One, the attempt to come to terms with scientific and technological development in order to enable man to continue to be at home in his world, the humanisation of the machine, the marrying of human warmth to the cold- ness of much electronically generated sound. The other, the return to the primitive, to incantation and ritual, to the coming together again of music and poetry, the amalgamation, with movement and dance, the growth of the voice to its full physical powers again as part of the body, the body as language.

Only the gendering of the issue dates this, as I believe Cobbing invites us to interrogate the crude dichotomy of the title and arrive at a further- reaching appreciation of the possibilities. Already, just for example, ’jungle poems’ are pushing the point.

I find the implications for performance poetry here highly charged and challenging - proposing a further extension of the poetic licence. But what Cobbing does with his emphasis on the phonetic and physical powers of language is to touch on the point where apparently divergent traditions and poetics connect.

I can relate this statement to the works of such radical and popular poets as Linton Kwesi Johnson - whose poetry is intrinsically musical, informed by the rhythms of reggae, structured on the fundamental beats moving us to dance, communicating with the diaphragm and feet just as much as the heart and head, moving us to thought and action - and to the work of such

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jazz poets as Jayne Cortez, with her vividly realised, almost surrealistic imagery reinforced by the tonally latonally counterpointed and polyrhyth- mic structures, expressing both the violence with which her work is concerned and its redeeming energy.

Like Bob Cobbing’s work (and the exciting new wave of experimental performance poets like cris cheek and Aaron Williamson), Jayne Cortez’s work has a serious ritualistic function. All use mantric, chant and incanta- tory forms - summoning collective involvement and invoking liberational spirits.

The points of correlation between popular and avant-garde forms do exist within the parameters of performance poetry. Although, if we take modernity to mean a culture of fragmentary images and styles, a superficial pluralism or pure relativism, intensification of alienating techniques, dis- location and disintegration rationalised only by clinical formalism, well then, performance poetry is on the flip-side or part of the counter-culture of the late twentieth century.

Just so, it represents a challenge to the traditional Western canon, with its cultural superiority complex, chauvinistic and neo-imperialist pro- grammes - especially with its vacuous notions of excellence, stupefying classification systems and concepts of standards - and with its systematic marginalisation of ’other’ cultures.

Performance poetry does work in opposition to many of the accepted tenets of literary culture and the linguistic hierarchies it promotes, includ- ing, in fact especially, its blueprints for linguistic purity, or dare I say programmes of linguistic cleansing.

Vive la diffkrence!

All rights reserved. This paper is an updated version of a talk first presented to the Queen Mary and Westfield College Post-Graduate

Literary Seminar in 1994, organised by Apples & Snakes.