A third question posed by the new anthology Short Fuse has to do with the volume's underlying agenda. Its ambition can be gauged by the fact that Swift & Norton's intervention works in two directions simultaneously. First, the book attempts to situate oral and performance poetries, aligned in this particular case most closely to the slam & spoken word scene rather than to, say, sound poetry, well within the legitimated borders of text-based work, placed alongside neoformalism, langpo & McPoetry as an equal, not just something quaint done by wannabes at your local slam tavern. Secondly & most ambitiously, Short Fuse argues at least implicitly that oral poetries offer the "missing link" between contending traditions of verse. Thus Short Fuse offers to transcend the poetry wars by placing itself front & center.

Although Short Fuse is hardly the first anthology to suggest the breadth & diversity of oral & performance poetries, it succeeds at its first task. The book clearly demonstrates a phenomenon that is more global than any other tendency within English-language poetry & with a lot more pizzazz than some. 

But to succeed at the second, the performative poetries of Short Fuse would have to overcome some serious limitations. This version of oral poetry would have to become, for example, a genuine poetic tradition whose sense of long term historical memory consists of more than the occasional Robert Service / Vachel Lindsay imitation.*

Close to half of the work presented in this particular vision of oral poetries could be described as stand-up comedy routines transcribed for the page, some better, some not. Polysemy in such works is not only close to non-existent, it's often counterproductive, in that this is a poetry aimed toward an audience that doesn't identify as readers & which places at least as much value on agreement & titillation as it does on meaning. Still, multiple levels of signification are possible, as Guillermo Castro's wry, wonderful homage to Allen Ginsberg, "A Deli on First Avenue," demonstrates. But as a rule it's not evident that, in the context of performativity, richness in content advantages the text.

I think it’s important to note that Short Fuse as a project represents one possible step toward just such an increase in depth & this may be its major achievement. Oral poetries by their very nature tend to be local. If you don't see what, say, Edwin Torres  is doing, you have relatively little access &, by itself, a transcription on paper is seldom enough to suggest all the many layers that are potentially active when the poem itself is understood first of all as a score. At a party I attended for the anthology in the offices of CLMP, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, one Toronto poet told me how much she appreciated hearing the work from Montreal at a reading the previous evening at the New School. The two scenes, according to this poet, seldom communicate, even though both are involved in parallel activities within the same country. In bringing together so many like-minded writers from different regions and parts of the world, Swift & Norton may ultimately be taking the first steps toward the creation of a performance metalanguage, a shared vocabulary that would enable such writers to begin to build on what one another are doing elsewhere.

The absence of this vocabulary is a major weakness in many of the oral poetries gathered in Short Fuse. It explains, in part, why so much of this work falls back on the stand-up comedy routine as a formal framework from which to operate – it’s something to which all these poets and their audiences have been exposed. The lack of a metalanguage is precisely the problem that has kept conceptual art in a position of always having to start over from scratch with each new work, regardless the worker, regardless the scene. And the absence of a true sense of tradition, of historical memory, is itself as much a consequence of this lack of shared vocabulary as it is a cause. It is precisely this absence that an oral poetics must overcome if it is to become more than an adjunct to the text-based poetries of the day, interesting more as sociology than literature.

All of which is to say that I don't think that Short Fuse, the anthology, is going to change the world of letters, not now, not yet, but that by envisioning what such a project might look like, Todd Swift & Philip Norton have upped the ante for performance poets everywhere. That is a huge achievement. And one from which we all benefit, whatever our taste in poetry.

*If either editor has read, for example, Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffery and the late bp Nichol (Underwhich Editions, 1978) or The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language & Performance, edited by Stephen Vincent & Ellen Zweig (Momo’s Press, 1981), it’s not evident. The relative lack of sound poetry and Fluxus-inspired work in the anthology – Penn Kemp is the notable exception – keeps Short Fuse from being truly definitive as a gathering of oral poetics.