Sympathetic Sybil is Write Out Loud's own Agony Aunt, send your problem to sybil@writeoutloud.net

 

hi yer sybness - i'm a great performance poet – but them proper poets say me brillyant work is no good on the page - it's rote to be performed so why do i need to bovver with finks like grammar and spelling and punkchewnation

street-man

Ah yes dear,

... that perennial old question. Why, why, er why?

I have to say first of all, that those ‘proper poets’, to whom you refer, who write solely for the page, are often not quite as good as they think they are. One can get away with murder on the printed page with large blocks of dense, tedious verse that the writer knows will interest no one but the elite in outer Hampstead, or an even more rarefied strata of society which has much in common with Mrs Bucket’s pretensions and delusions.

These are the passages that are essential for the great review, but which the normal reader will nimbly skip over to try to find the new insight, bon mot or well turned, poetic phrase; alas only too often to be left thirsty and in need of some of the hard stuff from the likes of, TS, Yeats, Allen or one of the true greats.

Not then, for these page pushers, the howls of derision, slow hand clapping and hurled metaphorical (and sometimes real) rotten eggs that can meet the honest, gladiator that is the performance poet. The ones who risks all in front of an audience, often lager fuelled and totally disinterested in what you have to say, as they eagerly await their turn to perform. 

And for those of you who conquer such audiences, I salute you!

But one mustn’t confuse the roar and approbation of the masses in the pits with an ability to string two words together successfully on the written page. What can seem witty, clever and spontaneous in performance can look dull, heavy handed and hackneyed on the page; this isn’t because you aren’t any good but because there is a different dynamic in the two forms.

The manner in which one speaks on the stage, the performance you give as it were, is not the only way you communicate with your audience, for as well as the verbal there are other cues you are sending out. There’s your body language, your appearance, your delivery which coupled with the audiences expectations, can communicate many other things. So, for instance, beat boxing is great in performance but I’m afraid it doesn’t work on the page. As I keep on telling Beardy Man, one of the great beat-boxers of our age, ‘Darling, I love the way you scratch, and your reverse technique is simply mind-blowing! But the impact is lost when you write it down’

As you perform you are naturally punctuating your performance, it’s something one doesn’t even have to think about but it has a definite impact, and this punctuation is even more important on the written page as there are no other cues for the reader.

So Dylan says “Do not go gentle into that good night” and we know what he’s saying.

But punctuate it differently and the meaning becomes obscure

Do not go, gentle, into that good night

Do not go gentle into that, goodnight

Nonsense, of course, but it makes my point.

Similarly, with spelling: When one writes for performance it is immaterial how you spell things, as long as you enunciate properly both you and the audience will understand what you mean, innit! Practice your enunciation now “Koo, Kah, Kee!”

But on the page it is different. One can be saying complex things and if you want your reader to understand it is important that you follow the convention of correct spelling. It’s a contract one is making with the reader, I’m using words that you comprehend and if you don’t (you moron!) look them up in a dictionary.

Well unless you are making words up, in which case your spelling is always correct!

Where were we?

Some insist that one should follow grammatical constructs but I say pish! Poets often undermine such things and mint new ones for a point. Shakespeare was notorious for it, I said to him ‘Wills darling, you can’t just make up words willy-nilly, forsooth!’

Of course all of this goes out of the window if one is deliberately using onomatopoeic constructs or forms such as concrete poetry where the words and their meaning can be of less importance than the form and style.

As I’ve now argued myself out of the position I was adopting, it’s time to say heed my words! Or you could just ignore them and do what the hell you like… it’s all poetry anyway.

Nurse!