Laura Winton (aka Fluffy Singler) is writing her dissertation on the absence of formally progressive poetics in spoken word poetry. In a recent message in Facebook, she noted my own comment on how, with performance and sound poetry so visible (audible) at the Text Festival in Bury, there was no sign of slam there, and wondered why.
That’s a good question. I don’t pretend to fully – or even remotely – grasp all of the local politics of poetry in the UK, but the contrast between the almost entirely white participants of the Text Festival and an afternoon just two days later in the giant plaza at Trafalgar Square in London, one of the most multicultural, multiracial, multilingual, multinational places on the planet, proved startling. Indeed, the difference between the Text Festival and the crowd at Katsouris’ deli in the famed (and very multi-multi) Bury Market just two blocks away was noticeable enough for Krishna & I to talk about it over lunch.
One aspect of this is simply sociological – what counts as literature to one community couldn’t be further from it to another. Looking at the White House poetry reading this past week, I feel much more sympathetic to the work, say, of Jill Scott than I do to the thinly veiled appeals to sentimentality that Billy Collins slips in just below the surface of his humor – she & I both have Philadelphia as a point of reference, plus we’ve both had to deal with Sudden Deafness Syndrome in our lives. Her poetry asks harder questions than Collins’ ever will. Yet it is inescapable listening to that reading that Scott’s work also looks to sentiment, just with more earnestness than Collins. Collins’ irony is much closer in practice to the work of Kenny Goldsmith, something that might appall them both. Where Kenny & Billy differ is that Goldsmith’s shtick has much more historical consciousness & contextualization, and to some degree depends on it.
