Performance poetry

(an improvisation)

(I) – [skip, if you like]

If the vast majority of poetry was oral, was experienced in oral recitation, where does that leave our own culture? We have stratified realms of “spoken word” and “published poetry”, practically refusing to embrace. Yet our own body of “published poetry” must be built on off the cuff transcripts and collations of the improvvisatore, the harpist, the psalmist. Our own neat numbers of psalms negates the vast volume of psalms that must’ve been strung towards the atmosphere in direct castigation of some spontaneous suffering.

When poetry does extend to memorisation, it always seems to be the canonised authors that are elevated in the columns of memory, rather than some immaculate, gilded sonnet carved on a cigarette packet. We forget that this process of canonisation is precisely this – the collation of orality. The biggest figures of British Literature – Shakespeare, Burns, – were also mediators of ballads, popular songs, ossifying them into “verse”. This has been called “oral-formulaic”.

Rather than think mathematically, it is much easier to think of verse like Tridentine Mass, as a kind of dance-fusion integrating word and stone-hewn dance into its proceedings. One sees this acutely in the verse of Richard Crawshaw, where a prepositional chaos underpins the pouring-forth of the verse. A circling, as if the poem itself is performance with the stage, with the compass-points we ascribe to spiritual forces – shewn in “A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa” –

Love, thou are absolute sole lord
Of life and death. To prove the word,
We’ll now appeal to none of all
Those thy old soldiers, great and tall,
Ripe men of martyrdom, that could reach down
With strong arms their triumphant crown;

The ordered, lithic flowing of the tetrameter is built upon a kind of dance – a sub-sense – as if we circle around it, gesturing upwards to a downwards-flowing force. There is an implied verse-upon-verse, lost in the neat transcription. This is why poetry, especially, comes to us when we move, as the ordered sense of the word is completed by the errant motion of hand, leg, ear.

(II)

I have laboured to restore what I have constructed, in utopian terms, as the idol: a union of the Word with the spiralling neumes of digit, palm. Verse meeting verse.

I have struggled, therefore, with neat recitations of poetry from ordered books, Faber and Faber editions cushioned on lecterns, where poetry is configured as a sacred text. I do not object to poetry being reckoned as sacred, only the sacred without the full choreography of the epic it necessitates.

I believe I have created a new kind of performance poetry that seals the world in text.

I am still working on it. My Fringe show will be the start of the process: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/brother-smudge-s-strange-meditation#:~:text=Description,and%20what%20we%27ve%20lost.

Sam