Poem Analysis: Outspoken Live

A poet relates to the world by constructing their identity through their performance in public spaces. At Outspoken Live, poet Lisa Luxx performed ‘He Sounds Just Like Me’, a moving poem about her being adopted by a British family and her longing for the “absent root” in which she came from Syria. The audiences’ mood changes when Luxx says “[Syria]…is followed by silence”. This eerily captures the atmosphere in the venue. The silent audience shows their awareness of the conflict in Syria, brought to them on a stage in Oxford Circus through Luxx’s performance. Elsewhere, at the poetry café, a disabled poet, Sarah Jackson used a text-to-speech programme to read her untitled poem. There was beauty in which the device added another layer to the poet’s performance. From this, my understanding is that the writer relates to the world through performance not the performance of their words.
Interestingly, an interview with AJ/Tim Atkins /08.02.18 follows how “the performance allows the work to go into the world, rather than the performance being an important part of the words”.
The interviewee means this in the context of teaching. Although, in performing poetry, for the “work to go into the world”, I believe the poet has to construct an identity through the said performance. At Homegrown poetry, Kareem Parkins-Brown references his hometown (North-West London) in his poem ‘Responding to the Artist Impression’. In this, he responds to the government’s failure to gentrify the area. Therefore, Parkins-Brown shows he relates to the world through performance, which influenced my understanding of how important performance this is in the spoken word
scene. Jennifer Stewart assesses that spoken word performance “enacts [an] affirmative engagement with critical approaches to issues of representation and discourse within society” (36). However, across all three venues, the subject matter was not solely stringent protest but a variety of topics. For example, at the Poetry Café, I read my elegiac poem ‘the day the zombie died’ about the filmmaker George A. Romero. I constructed my identity around this performance as a Zed-head (a lover of all things zombie related). Therein, Stewart’s critical approach showcases How I relate to the world by constructing my identity in this performance.
Charles Bernstein indicates that “many poetry performances tend to submit to, rather than prosodically contest, the anaesthetized speech rhythms of official verse culture” (16). By “prosodically” Bernstein means the set of speech variables that distinguish vocal patterns like rhythm, speed and pitch. Notably, Jamaican performance poet Louise Bennett would “never read [but] always performed” her work in Creole (Asher & Martin Hoyles, 29). This set the path for contesting speech rhythms of official verse culture to occur especially in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s work as she was one of his influences. At Homegrown poetry, Salma does to an extent “prosaically contest…official verse culture” as her poem in Arabic and English relates to the world through performance. Here, poets do not need to contest official verse culture to construct identity through their performance.
Lastly, an interview with AJ/Jeff Hilson/09.02.18 highlights that performing one’s poetry “[gives] it an actual voice… [which is] another way of disseminating [ones] work”. This “disseminating” is crucial in allowing the work and its ideas to go into the world constructing an identity with it. In summary, from my understanding of these events, poets relate to the world constructing their identity in different ways through their performance. Spoken word’s criticism in academia conflicts how I define myself as a poet.