Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

One of the problems with performance poetry is that, without the performance, it often seems very thin. Material that might entertain when heard and seen in a club or café with a drink or two to relax the audience, and a suitably benign atmosphere, can lose its impact on the page. It needs the poet, perhaps looking and behaving like a poet (or what people imagine a poet ought to look and behave like) to project the words in a way that emphasises their amusement value. Performance poems can be like jokes told on a night out in a pub. They don’t seem half as funny in retrospect.

     Having said that I have to add that I’m not against performance poetry as such and there are good and bad performance poets. I have never heard Donald Gardner read his work but on the evidence of the poems in his book I would guess that he does it in an engaging way. It is true that a lot of his work is lightweight but he does make neat points in a mocking manner, as in ‘English Tea’:

Oh! Take this cup of tea from me.
Oh! Lord let me not drink it,
unless its part of your greater plan,
this cup of tea with sugar in it.

sugar to mask the bitter taste.
milk to dilute the brew;
and conversation I cannot bear,
it’s been so long a-stew.

It doesn’t add up to a great deal, and I can see how it could be faulted technically, but it’s short and mildly amusing, and those virtues just about keep it from failing. Elsewhere, Gardner writes about mothers who want to talk early on Sunday morning, telephones that ring at the wrong time, friends who call when you don’t want to see them, and other matters likely to raise a response from an audience. He relishes his role as a poet, though blithely admits that it “could have been a strategy for going through life/ without doing anything”, and presents a slightly bemused personality for the reader (or listener) to react to. “I’m not a bad fellow,/ even though I don’t exist, am split and mad”, he says in a disarming way.

     Some of Gardner’s poems do work reasonably well on the page, their long lines and loose rhythms pushing the words along, but as I said earlier, hearing the poet perform them might be the real key to their success.