“working the poems” Quadrant (Oct, 2026)

Ode to Kosmos 482

 

 

Ode to Kosmos 482

Kosmos 482 was an attempted Soviet Venus probe

launched on March 31, 1972 at 04 hundred hours. 

The main descent craft crashed while on a trajectory 

over Australia and the Indian Ocean on May 10, 2025.

Old soviet space junk 

half-ton of good intentions 

Venus probe that failed to reach escape velocity;

You are the workers of the world that failed to unite

You are Trotsky’s ice pick, Lenin’s hair tonic,

Gorbachev’s wine stain;

You are the cake that never rose —the cookie       

that never crumbled.

Forever trapped in earth’s lower orbit

your booster rockets misfiring

like Putin’s T72’s bogged and bombed out 

on the Ukrainian Steppes.

You are mission aborted

mired forever in a giant looping earth orbit 

that could only end one way —

in an anonymous watery grave.

Still, the educated among us stand out in open fields, 

earthbound and looking up —

as if to salute the descent

Thrilled by the silver mark it leaves scratched into the sky

like some twentieth-century vandal

hellbent on making immortal their homage to bad ideas.

 

  

from "Thirty poems: 2020-2025"

Learning English through Poems and Songs/ by Roseanne Greenfield Thong (OUP, 2009)

A good question prompt to get students thinking about definitions/ possibilities 

(while acknowledging the ambivalence much poetry is met with in 

contemporary affairs)

 

The ghost of Leonard Cohen

 “Ah but don't go home with your hard-on 

  it will only drive you insane” 

                               L.C. 

I saw the ghost of Leonard Cohen 

On stage the other night; 

the latter, hatted version 

gave me one hell of a fright 

His form was recognisable 

but his cheeks were hollowed out 

like he’d done a round or two 

wif the grim reaper, in a one-sided bout. 

His voice was reduced to a whisper 

as he leaned into the microphone 

and the audience leant in too 

until they caught a whiff of his stinky bones. 

His skin was thin as rice paper 

his range, totally shot — 

like an AI programmed hologram 

or a poorly assembled bot. 

The ghost of Leonard Cohen 

had seen better days, 

but for the punters who’d paid to see him 

it was pretty much all the same 

towards the end of his performance 

he took a seat on a raised platform

centre stage; 

crossed his legs, closed his eyes 

and appeared to disengage 

(had he truly died—

or simply transmogrified?)

Just like that, he was wheeled out

ready for the next late-night show 

on an anonymous stage somewhere 

god only knows — 

I swear I saw the ghost of Leonard Cohen 

bumming cigarettes at the bar 

whatever he went home with that night 

I can testify, was most definitely — 

hard. 

 ©️ alan w jefferies

Stance

 

When did I become him

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

    

When did I become him

when did I become that gormless twat
who walks up to complete strangers at the mall
and starts telling them their life story like they were a guest
on an episode of “This Is Your Life!”

who keeps talking long after the other party has stopped listening
or quite often, when they’ve totally walked away —
(left the state)
who has been left conversing with trees, butterflies, windscreen
wipers…

who yeah, nah, yeah, nah

can’t get to the point without taking a side road round the houses
and when he reaches the main fork forgets where he started
and why;

who falls in love with sales people
whose discount deals are like personal invitations to candle-lit dinners
who comes back again and again spending their hard-earned
just so someone, someone he deeply cares for, will speak to him
like his life meant something—
when in reality she couldn’t give two roots whether he lived or died.

who ran up on Gough Whitlam at the airport long after he left politics
assailing him with decades-old stories that made no sense to anyone
who wasn’t there;
poor old Gough just kept walking straight ahead —
purposely not averting his eyes like the Giant that he was;
being yapped at by an over-excited Chihuahua.

when did I become that plonker

somewhere between Steve Irwin in terms of enthusiasm
and a billy goat in terms of being able to appropriately read
the reactions of others.

who earned the nickname “the marijuana kid” by going down to the nearest
Queensland RSL and telling anyone who’d listen (including the local drug-squad
detectives) about his wild days smoking weed in the merchant navy
when in all likelihood it was a blunt or two at most.

who turns up to someone’s crib he met only once 12 years ago
with an overly-friendly “Remember me?!”
only to be told to fuck off or they’ll let loose their hounds!

whose solution to other people expressing opinions different from his own
is to up the volume and continue talking 

like an out-of-control steamroller.

so, yeah, nah, yeah nah

when did I become that guy?

who’s been left outside on a freezing night
after his girlfriend whose bed he was sharing
decided his best mate who was crashed on the couch
was a better prospect, or a better root,
or both;

who wears shorts, t-shirt and thongs all year round in all weather
even when it’s ten below and blowing a gale
just so someone more appropriately dressed might ask,
“Aren’t you cold?”

and he can rattle off the long convoluted story
about the time he climbed Mount Wellington outside Hobart
in a blizzard at night dressed only in garbage bags
(a story that anyone who has known him 

more than a week
has heard multiple times)

so yeah, nah, yeah
when did I become him —that absolute fucking 

gormless plonker;
my dad.

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal — from Six Poems

 

Cha : An Asian Literary Journal

Thanks to Poetry Editor: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho 

“Social Alternatives” (Vol. 43 : 1)

Poetry memes ...

"Ignorant new puritans out to purge our poetry" (Spectator article) (11 April 2021)

Response to Guardian article  "The whole canon is being reappraised: how the #MeToo movement upended Australian poetry"

 It was the by-line that caught my eye 'The whole canon is being erased' or at least that's 

how i first read it. It actually read 'The whole canon is being reappraised: how the #MeToo movement upended Australian poetry"

It's not often poetry gets into the press and when it does it's normally for something terrible, like slander, or someone's run off with someone's work or worse. So it was with some trepidation that I pushed off from the shore of the first paragraph, compass firmly adjusted to Guardian reality.

The article is based around input from two poetry politicians, Jacinta Le Plastrier (poet, editor, publisher and CEO of Australian Poetry, the peak body meant to represent poets and poetry nationally) and  first nation poet Evelyn Araluen.

The opening is fairly standard fare, Le Plastier says: 

            “There’s a huge rise in First Nations writers and women, 

            queer and non-binary poets who are writing about the body but also colonial assault, 

            rapaciousness and trauma.”

O-Kay…
However it's not long before my reading journey comes to a shuttering holt:

              Both Le Plastrier and Araluen directly link this shift in Australian poetics to the

               spaces created by the #MeToo movement, and specifically to the 2018 

             publication of Kate Lilley’s autobiographical collection, Tilt (Vagabond). Just as 

             significant were the allegations of abuse and sexual exploitation, made by Lilley 

            and her sister Rozanna, about their mother, poet Dorothy Hewett, and numerous 

             figures – among them Bob Ellis, Martin Sharp and  David Hamilton – in Australia’s 

             feted bohemian artistic circle of the 60s and 70s, or the “generation of 68”.

Huh! What has Dorothy Hewitt and “her artistic circle” got to do with the generation of 68?

A quick google search brings up: 

                     “The generation of 68, a contested label applied to a loose group of 

                    Australian poets who began writing and publishing in the late 1960s.”

The truth is Dorothy Hewitt was never considered central  to that generation because she started writing much earlier. The other names mentioned; Martin Sharpe, Bob Ellis and David Hamilton weren't poets and weren’t in any way associated with that grouping.

Unfortunately these facts alone may not be enough to prevent these ideological simpletons from dragging  the whole generation to the bonfire.

The movement (towards reappraisal) hasn’t just affected what and how we read. “It’s also going to change what’s being archived, what’s kept on library shelves, what’s digitised. It’s really profound,” says Le Plastrier.

I'm not sure if i should take that as a threat or a promise. Either way this is truly frightening coming from the editor, publisher, and CEO of Australia's peak poetry body. You might expect a more rounded, full 360-degree view of the OZ poetrysphere - as would be worthy of a truly representative national body - instead the message is laced with resentment, exclusion and frankly revenge. 
“That whole canon is being reappraised,” says Le Plastrier “I know a young non-binary poet who just removed all of that generation’s (generation 68’s) work from their shelves!”

So there! All that self righteous censorious rage triggered and fuelled by what? a complete untruth?  And as for the unnamed, aforementioned, 
non-binary poet I’d say you’re an dead-set hero/ heroine (the non-binary equivalent?) - to all book-burning fascists everywhere!

Le Plastrier goes on :

             "Similarly, can you possibly read someone like Ted Hughes without a completely

            changed  lens given the information that’s come out recently about his relationship 

            with Sylvia Plath?”

Recently? I mean Plath died in 1963 and since her death and the posthumous publication of "Ariel" she has become an absolute icon of Feminist literature. You could fill an entire library with the publications which dissect her and Ted Hughes' relationship, and after consuming that you could watch at least one Hollywood movie and numerous documentaries that cover the same territory. My point here is, there's nothing particularly new or startling in any of this.

Before moving on to the rest of the article though,  I want to return briefly to that supposed water-shed moment that both Araluen and Le Plastrier, identify as pivotal in unleashing this urgent book burning, sorry, “cultural reappraisal”.

At the outset I want to say that my comments here are in no way meant to excuse or to diminish in any way the harm and trauma that may have resulted from the alleged behavior revealed in Kate Lilley and Rozanna Lilly's books. However i think it’s important to acknowledge here that this really wasn’t a “speaking truth to power" moment in the classic  #metoo sense of that term.  

More accurately it was a “speaking truth to dead persons” moment. The individuals named at the time, and renamed in this article, have all passed away and the one alleged rapist poet that was alluded to  is apparently still living,  and apparently still unnamed and still too powerful to touch. 

I get it.  The costs of legal indemnity are far cheaper via the dead persons route.  Then again, the dead aren’t here to defend themselves or to seek  redemption (another word long deleted from the woke dictionary).

Evelyn Araluen's contribution to the article runs along similar lines; hatred and resentment steeped in toxic generalisations:

 

         "For Araluen, Australian poetry has long been full of writers that “glorified [white] men

           who drank themselves to death and treated women like shit”.

 

There you go, i knew race would have to come into it eventually. White men treat women like shit and only white men drink themselves to death. Got it. And according to Araluen the rest of us dumbfux just idolise them…

            "I’ve been really struck by how many otherwise progressive people don’t see an

              issue with glorifying those figures"

Which figures exactly? It's not clear.

Isn't there just an outside possibility that some readers were able to separate the person from the work, and still found something enlivening in their poetry. Is it just possible that you've generalised a whole generation from the alleged behaviour of one or a few individuals? Endless possibilities unless your mind is a steel rod bolted to the deck of a failed political system.

But despite all that negative drift Stephanie Convery who wrote the piece finishes with hope and dare i say it… future redemption.  Like the ending of some age-old morality play, the heroic, noble and oppressed prevail over the wicked drunken white demons. 

         "It’s in the ruins of those Australian literary mythologies – the tarnished history of

           a previously lauded cultural coterie – that a new chorus of voices, not all of them 

          young,   has found the space to draw breath."

What a lark! What a load of old cobblers! How can i say this any clearer, Dorothy Hewitt's so-called "bohemian artistic circle" WAS NOT and never will be the generation of 68 and the only thing that's being tarnished in this article is your reputation.

So this is what the Australia Council funds these days- book burnings and witch hunts.  This is what the fully-funded CEO of Australia’s National Peak poetry body is applauding: the effective censorship of Australian poets and Australian poetry in 2021. Of course we must remember that for the woke crowd, censorship is holy; especially when it’s necessary to protect readers from unsafe poets and the harm their work causes. 

This is what censorship does, it infantilises the audience and makes them subservient  to the judgement of the supposed more knowledgeable, more educated arbiters of moral purity. I for one do not need Le Plasterer, Araluen, or anyone else to tell me what constitutes good work or what i can read, or what should be archived or for that matter what should go onto the shelves of my local library. 
The meat of the matter here is, who decides? What's in and what's out, what's for the bonfire and what's for the delete all button.

One thing i definitely do not need is to be spoon-fed my cultural sustenance by self-righteous brain-dead cultural Marxists like this poet and this esteemed CEO. 

Instead of presenting a full 360-view of what’s out there in the  OZ poetrysphere, Australian Poetry thru its CEO has made it crystal clear what they are offering; a confected safe space away from a supposedly hostile, racist, white g-pop. A perfect echo chamber dedicated to the glory of their own moral superiority, accessible only to those other truly woke individuals who want to offer abeyance at the throne of their self righteousness and importance. 

In other words, the roughly 10% who vote progressive. A hundred per cent of taxpayers hard-earned going to fund what is essentially an exclusive  club; or as the article puts it "the community".  

Le Plastier couldn't be clearer, if you don't fit their woke, exclusivist, self-righteous agenda then you may-as-well pick up your marbles and stay away. Just count yourself lucky we don't come round to your crib, remove your books from your shelves, delete you from our archives and disappear you in an acid bath of our righteous anger.

When I started to air my views on this article a friend pointed out that canons and artistic/literary generations are always being reappraised, which she thought wonderful. Each new generation bringing a new lens and important conversations continue. Yes it's a good point, but when the new generation is coming at you waving little red books and screaming profanities. It's difficult having a conversation with someone who"s shouting in your face. Harder still while locked out of the guarded citadels of OZ Poetry Inc.

So yes, read this article and weep! Not for the “wistful nostalgia” of a time past or the 

generation that the article speaks of, but for the fact that these self-righteous woke Puritan

 cultural vandals are now @ the helm of our peak cultural bodies and they’re coming for your

bookshelves!

We are all poets... poetry in the Age of Narcissism

We're all poets” - poetry in the Age of Narcissism 

by Alan Jefferies

“And of course this fashion for poetry readings has led to a kind of poetry that you can understand first go: easy rhythms, easy emotions, easy syntax. I don’t think it stands up on the page…”

Philip Larkin (Paris Review Interview… Summer 1982)

“Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music”

Ezra Pound (“A few Don’ts by an Imagiste”)

I first encountered the “we are all poets” line back in the late seventies.
I was at a party in inner-city Sydney and I was introduced by a friend thus: "This is my friend Alan, he's a poet." The reaction of her friend was to fix me with a slightly quizzical gaze... “A poet?” said with rising intonation, giving it a distinctly questioning edge. Yeah, my friend replied, “he's actually published. Oh yeah sure, but you know... we're all poets." That was his response.

I honestly can't think of another art form where such a notion would be entertained, let alone commonly accepted. Can you imagine someone saying “Yeah well, you know, we're all musicians / painters /sculptors, novelists/ filmmakers or playwrights. It sounds strange.  But yes, we are all poets and presumedly, we just don't know it, yet.

At least in those days you had the distinction between poet and “published” poet; the later signifying a degree of seriousness of purpose and intent. Since the advent of the Internet however, even that distinction has been erased. Anyone can "publish" on the Internet and hence we are all now "published poets". Whether anyone reads the work is seemingly immaterial; and an audience for poetry it appears, is now more irrelevant than ever. The fact that you're “out there”, apparently, is enough.

So what has been the result of this mass democratisation of the art of poetry? In short, the production of a lot of really bad poetry. On the supply side there's been an extraordinary explosion in the amount of poetry being written and “published”, and on the demand side there's been a  corresponding decrease in the audience for poetry. In other words; more “poets”, more spoken-word artists; slam, rap, hip-hop performers, and less audience for poetry.

Shouldn't it be the opposite? Surely as more people write it, shouldn't that automatically mean that more people are reading it? Well, the answer to that question is sadly, no. The main reason being that many of the people who've taken it up just aren’t that interested in other poets, not interested in reading poetry, and, in general, not interested in poetic voices other than their own.

One apocryphal story I heard recently relates to a poet who got up at a spoken-word event in Melbourne and read some Sylvia Plath poems. After the reading they were approached by another spoken-word poet who complimented the work and asked where they could see Plath performing around Melbourne. Sylvia Plath? Arguably the twentieth-century’s most famous woman poet? 
Okay, even if the story isn’t true, there’s enough truth in it to resonate. Obviously, not all spoken-word poets fit this description but in general, there appears to be a wilful ignorance of art of poetry, and a genuine disregard for the seminal voices that have shaped the art.

In the age of Facebook, Twitter, slams, open mikes, and spoken word the emphasis is on making noise and being seen. Poetry is no longer the quiet, meditative, transformative, almost priestly vocation that it once was. It's loud, brash and in your face. Alright! Welcome to poetry in the Age of Narcissism.

Spoken word/ open mikes/ slams etc are the shop fronts of this new narcissism.

Everyone typically gets the same amount of reading time. The poet who’s been working away assiduously at their craft for decades is given the same amount of airspace as the muppet who gets up and reads a gem they coughed up that morning over a coffee and a fag; or someone who rises to share a friend’s status update for that morning - (this actually happened at one reading). In fact they often get a lot more time because the narcissist poet (narci-poet) never wants to leave the stage. Drunk on the sound of their own voice, they read their intolerable poems, typically with intolerably long intros, for intolerable periods of time.
Who cares? The audience doesn't know the difference, and besides - when can I read next?

Can you imagine how that would work in other art forms. The master painter gets equal exhibition space as someone whose only art practice consists of doodling on the back of beer coasters. The virtuoso musician shares equal billing with the three-chord-wonder. Nah... in other art forms it just wouldn't happen; in poetry/spoken word it happens every night of the week.

The fact that many of these poets-for-a-day read from mobile devices like cell phones and tablets is indicative of how they regard the craft of poetry. The mobile device is an expression of the immediacy of their self expression. Feeling brought up raw from the pit of their tortured stomachs is what interests them most.

First name introductions only. Readers at open mikes are typically introduced first name only. Novices are actively encouraged. After all, the world can’t have enough “poets”, right? A complete absence of all critical filters is actively encouraged, indeed demanded. The main goal is to give everyone a platform to express their feelings.

Poetry equals feelings. The best poems are the ones that express the most heartfelt emotion. What could be better than a first-timer standing up and inflicting their sensitive poems on the assembled, and how uncouth would you be to unfairly criticise emotions so sincerely expressed.
Cue… vomit.

These poetry conversions often take on the semblance of an almost religious occasion - a baptism of sorts. The poet-for-a-day is assisted onto stage by the willing celebrants who spur her/him on to share their inner-most feelings. Rhyming, half-baked, sentimental, cliched, completely devoid of all artistry - who gives a rats - it’s feelings we want. Hallelujah, another poet is born - all in the service of the Spoken-Word god!

Recently at a panel discussion a headliner in the spoken-word universe defined a poem as “a heart you throw at the audience to see if any of it sticks” Actually, I prefer the W.C.W quote “poetry is a machine made of words”.

Poetry is a slow, exacting, deliberate craft that requires years of patient learning; it requires the attention span of a moon, not of a Facebook post. “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits” so wrote Carl Sandburg. Poetry is a million-and-one things but one thing it most definitely is not, is easy, and that’s the lie that spoken-word propagates.

And that brings me back to the Larkin quote: “easy rhythms, easy emotions, easy syntax.” If Larkin had been around today and had the misfortune of wandering into an open-mike/poetry night he might very well have added “easy politics” The politics of spoken word starts at the lunatic left and keeps going till it reaches entropic darkness. Rants about the greedy, racist, misogynistic , environmentally plundering, Western capitalist society are standard fare; the same society, by the way that provides through the various arts bodies the funding for the larger spoken-word events.

And here’s the scary part; if you happen not to like a particular rant that somehow equates to disagreeing with the politics that that rant happens to be espousing. Idiotic, feeble, reductive, nonsense doesn’t even come close.

As a result of all of the above, open mikes, spoken word events, slams and poetry readings in general, have mostly become marathons of self indulgence and abuse.

If you have a genuine love of the art of poetry; if you truly stand humbled before the power of the written word; if you nurture a profound respect for the thousands of genuine wordsmiths who over hundreds of years have put everything on the line for their craft; real poets who have forged a voice in solitude, drunk on nightingale’s muse. If you are that person, then the only natural response to these occasions is sheer horror and revulsion.

                                                               +

A simple anecdote will serve as an illustration of what I'm talking about. I recently met a woman via the dating site RSVP. She was educated, well-read, cultured, widely travelled, and had a genuine interest in poetry. Over a coffee she related the following story. She'd seen a poetry event advertised on the net and thought it sounded interesting; something a bit different on a Saturday afternoon so she rang a friend and decided to attend. Half-an-hour later, after being subjected to what she called “a barrage of self-indulgent rants” she and her friend left the venue never to return. Her conclusion- the “poets” should make an urgent appointment to see their nearest mental health professional.

Poetry in the Age of Narcissism is drowning in its own vomit. The general public has long abandoned the art to its practitioners, and the louder poets yell, the faster the punters run - in the opposite direction.

                                                                 +

In the late 1970’s - when i started publishing and attending readings - we called it performance poetry. The rationale at the time was that performance poetry was a reaction against the stuffiness of the normal academic delivery. It’s aim was noble; to tap into the centuries old aural tradition and find a newer, larger, younger audience for poetry. An audience outside the academic setting to which the muse had been confined for so long.

Poets performed their work. Some read straight from the page, others memorised their poems while others used a musical instrument as accompaniment; think Ginsberg’s harmonium, Robert Bly’s dulcimer or Richard Tipping’s jews harp. Whether you were consciously “performing” your poems or just reading them from the page the commonly agreed belief was that the poem had to work on the page before it worked on the stage. In other words; the primacy of the page - page first.

And that’s where the spoken-word practitioners of today differ so much from the performance poets of yesteryear. For most spoken word poets it is most definitely page last or in many cases page-not-at-all. It just doesn’t get that far, and if it did, it simply wouldn't work as poetry.
Or as Larkin so aptly put it all those years ago, it simply wouldn’t “stand up on the page”.

My argument then is that once you disassociate spoken word from the written word then the work ceases to be poetry. Yes, you certainly have another form of performance art but it’s not, and should never be confused with poetry. In the same way that you wouldn’t mistake stand-up comedy for poetry. Yes, stand-up can be clever, it can employ word play, satire; it can even use some of the same rhetorical devices as poetry; but it’s clearly not poetry and would never claim to be.

In the same way most song lyrics are not poetry. I would say that many song-writers throughout history have aspired towards poetry, but only a very small number get anywhere near. Dylan might be one of the few exceptions. Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen would be contenders but even then only a handful of their lyrics reach the threshold of true poetry. (And no, I don’t think Dylan deserved to win the Nobel Prize).

That’s why I took such great offence in 2016 when ex-QPF Director David Stavanger - in some way trying to justify another musical extravaganza at a poetry festival - boldly declared that David Bowie and Prince were “probably two of the greatest poetic voices of the 20th century” which I’m sure would have come as a surprise to them, considering neither of them wrote poetry. He then proceeded to spend public monies celebrating the lives of two internationally famous rock stars instead of cerebrating the poetry of Australian poets, and more specifically Queensland poets. It’s a fucking poetry festivalafter all!

The problem here - common to spoken word - is a willingness to bestow the laurel of poetry on work that simply isn’t. Bowie and Prince may have been brilliant songwriters - personally I liked their music - and yes, they may well have been consummate performers but to me they are not poets because their lyrics don’t work on the page as poetry. No surprise there, rhymed song lyrics don’t often work as poetry on the page because a regular rhyme scheme is associated more with the poetry of a hundred years ago, rather than with the modern day. But that’s okay, because they wrote lyrics to pop songs and they work as song lyrics, and that’s what’s important. I challenge anyone to present either a David Bowie or Prince lyric that works on the page as poetry.

But here’s the rub, in the spoken-word universe, the terms poetry and spoken-word are used interchangeably - they mean the same thing.

The most obvious distinction between written and spoken word is that words read aloud are ephemeral. They are here now as sounds and they pass now as sounds. There’s no re-wind or re-read facility. There’s no, “I didn’t catch that, would you mind saying it again”. As the result of the immediacy of spoken word the emphasis is on delivering simple emotions, simple words, simple messages, things that can be taken in and absorbed at first hearing. The necessity to dumb-down content is simply inevitable.

The shouted polemic - the rant - is one the most favoured forms in spoken word/ slam. It’s no coincidence that much rap and hip-hop music employ the same form of direct address - the shouted polemic, the rant.
Clearly the emphasis is on style of delivery and much less on what is actually being delivered. Hence, the fancy dress and theatrical hysterics which so often accompany these events.

Without doubt there is a sort of a nuance bleaching in spoken-word poetry. Spoken word/ open mikes have become mass-nuance-bleaching events. There seems to be almost a deliberate purging of obscurity, the exact thing which, for me, makes the reading and re-reading of poetry on the page worthwhile and pleasurable.

In terms of form, the listener, as opposed to the reader, misses a lot of the features of a poem such as the shape the text makes on the page, the enjambments and line breaks, the style of the text - italics or bold - and of course the reading of a poem, as you would hear it, as opposed to the way the poet would like you to hear it. This ability to work with how you would read and phrase the poet’s words on the page opens up, I believe, a space for the reader and adds enjoyment to the reading of poetry on the page.

Edwin Hirsh has written that poets “seek language that lasts.” and by “lasts” I’m sure he means more than the two minutes allotted at a poetry slam or a ten-minute spot at an open mike. He means language that lasts potentially for thousands of years, across dozens of cultures - timeless in the true sense of the word.

                                                           +

Poets will continue to read their poems out loud. Public readings have become an essential part of the poet’s trade and are an effective way to reach new readers. Moreover they provide an opportunity to sell books in an era where many bookshops have stopped stocking poetry books.

However if poetry is ever going to pull out of the narcissistic death roll it’s currently in the grip of, it needs to work harder at defining terms. No piece of spoken word is a poem until it works on the page, and no spoken word performer is a poet unless they’ve written something that works on the page.

Poetry is a craft that requires immense skill and patient application. It requires persistent and inquisitive reading over time and most of all it demands a hopeless love and dedication to the art in all its forms and manifestations. To pretend otherwise only serves to diminish the achievement of genuine poets and totally undervalues the immense contribution made by poets to the history of the imagination.

And that’s the thing I probably despise most about spoken-word, the way it portrays poetry as something easy, something you can take up at a moments notice. Something like a participation sport, an activity that the whole population should be encouraged to engage in - like aerobics or zumba - because it’s somehow good for you and somehow good for society. It’s not; and rather than expand the audience for poetry it’s achieved the exact opposite because the audience can tell the difference- they know a rant when they hear one.

And in the process spoken-word has helped reduce what was once a solemn, almost sacred vocation - that of a poet - to that of a second-rate vaudeville actor sprouting lines with all the incisiveness of a political slogan, and all the gravitas of an advertising blimp.