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Monday, March 05, 2012

"Performance Poetry Is Dead" Says Who?

This article poetrysociety by Cornelia Grabner says performance poetry is dead.

Agree? I don't for several reasons. Poetry has always been performed, right from our cave-dwelling days when people gathered after the hunt to swap stories and sing and dance to a few rhymes composed by the local poet laureate. (The Ramayana and Mahabharata were written in verse. The Psalms consists of poems written by King David.) It was only in the hoity-toity fifteenth-sixteenth-seventeenth-eighteenth centuries that poetry was published as books and read with a wooden face sitting facing the study wall. 

Now with a lot of poets taking to performing their poems (I have seen and heard excellent performance poets on the internet, go thither and check) I think performance poetry is once again taking centrestage, literally. 

So, Cornelia, on this basic premise I beg to disagree with you.

I am @johnwriter on Twitter and John.Matthew on Facebook. I blog here.

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