e-poets Plain Text: Poetry across frontiers (11)

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Poetry across frontiers (11)

response from London, England

Paul,

Firstly, I am glad that you did not duck out of taking on the issues I tried to put out there when I responded to Kojo. Secondly like Kurt, I, too, feel there is much to relish from this thread. I would especially like to hear from non-Americans, particularly the Canadian contingent of the e-poets.

Before composing something more cogent I have to say that I like slam as a poetry format and I have extreme love and respect for my many friends who have treated me with immense kindness during my travails around the United States. My objection is to the clique of people who are seeking to corporatise a grass roots movement and encouraging a totally restrictive style of performance to emerge, and discouraging further growth and originality.

I feel that what is being done to the US slam movement mirrors and apes the worse excesses of the dreadful academic poetry scene that gave rise to its creation. As for attracting the needy, as a former little magazine editor and small press person I defy you not to apply that rather cynical tag to a majority of people involved in poetry activity!

I feel the need to express ones self is a rather magnificent need and the strength of slam/performance poetry is that it provides an interface between different views, ways of speaking and validates and gives the opportunity for voices normally excluded by mainstream culture to be heard.

I have seen much US non -lam poetry and admire a whole raft of American writers from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Raymond Carver, and poets Dana Bryant to Sharon Olds. But that was not the point I was trying to raise. It's not a crude reductionist argument I am making for Europe against America, and I hope that there is enough sophistication in the way I engage with the world to appreciate good art where ever it is.

Now pop culture and how art is formed is for another time! I have to say though that the idea that the Beats represent counter culture seems pretty daft to me. Then, I come from a society much more influenced by notions of social democracy and socialism than seems to be the case in America, I therefore have a much different idea of what is radical to you, I imagine.

Finally if British poetry were represented by the likes of slam poets such as Dana Bryant, Marc Smith, Allan Woolf, Patricia Smith, Taalam Acey, Taylor Mali, Sou McMillan, Patricia Johnson, Traci Morris, DJ Renegade and many, many others too numerous to mention, I would be IMMENSELY proud, `pop' or not.

Best wishes
- John Paul O'Neill

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