Saturday March 8 was The Day Words Festival, held at the State Library of NSW. Held in association with The Night Words Festival at the Sydney Opera House, the two culminated to create a celebration of the spoken word. Spoken Word: A performing art allowed three successful performance poets, Marc Testart, Edwina Blush and Tug Dumbly to share their opinions and insights into the genre during an hour long panel. This was followed by Words with Linda Jaivin, an international bestselling author, who shared her insights into writing and performance during a second session.

Performance poetry is, in essence, what it says it is; the performance of poetry for an audience. But performance poetry is about much more than that. A hybrid of acting, writing, experimenting and entertaining, the genre allows the word itself to become the focus of performance. It seems to be a logical progression from the written word as society becomes hungrier for faster and shorter tidbits of information. But there is irony there too - performance poetry is in many ways a return to the past and the days before the written word. Mark Testart, Australian Poetry Slam 07 winner, said, "The page has now turned into the performance". The question: is something lost or gained in the translation?

I would have to argue that almost everything is gained. Performance poetry sits right up there as an example of postmodernism. It makes poetry accessible to wider audiences, it dances across definitions of genre and it comes from a mish-mash history of hip-hop, poetry, popular music and theatre. As performance poet Edwina Blush explained, "It's not about homogenising content and style so that everyone understands… our words are meant to alienate you". Sydney poet Tug Dumbly agreed: "In performance poetry, the audience should rise to you".

The rise of performance poetry closely mirrors patterns in popular culture. Performer Edwina Blush lamented that when she began, rap was barely even a part of popular culture, "but now there is this emphasis on words. People are more interested [in words] that they were 20 years ago". It was this fascination with words that appealed to Mark Testart when he first became interested in performance poetry only two years ago: "When you say something out aloud, you are re-writing the text". For Edwina, the meaning becomes clearer when a poem is reduced to nothing more than words, "Once someone reads their work with the intention it was originally written with, its full meaning comes across… When something is committed to print on a page you can lose it".

Linda, Mark, Edwina and Tug come from an eclectic background of music, acting, academia, comedy and radio hosting. With influences ranging from Angela Carter, C.J. Dennis, Shakespeare and a range of unknown stand-up comedians, these artists may as well come from different planets. But it is right there that the very beauty of performance poetry seems to lie: its diversity and malleability.

Like any poetry, performance poetry can be funny, political, rhyming, theatrical or pointlessly avant-garde. However, because it's spoken, it adds new levels of meaning to already existing text. Linda Jaivin, who wrote and performed in the play Rock 'n' Roll Babes from Outer Space and collaborated on a film version of her book Eat Me, noted in her presentation that the nature of the process of moving from text to word seems to function best in an "organic, collaborative way" where the rawness of life helps to creates new characters and new words. These multiple layers of interaction change at every level of collaboration, including with the role of the audience. As Tug Dumbly explained, "you get everyone from old ladies to right wing Christian nutters [at performance poetry events]… there's this whole spectrum of weirdness and together you all get the chance to appreciate these occasional moments of pin-drop, transcendent beauty".

In one of those moments of fleeting beauty, each of the artists, Edwina, Mark, Tug and Linda, performed their words for us, and enraptured audience. It's true: when something is reduced to words it reinvents itself as raw, viciously insightful and beautiful.
And I'm on my way for my next hit right now.

Photo Courtesy of Romanlilly  Creative Commons