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The Role of Performance in Contemporary Irish Poetry: Helping
Irish Poetry Break out of the Victorian Drawing Room
Kevin Higgins
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When I was in London recently, Todd
Swift, a Canadian poet who lives there, told me he thought it was a mistake to include in my bio the fact
that I had taken part in poetry slams. When he’d first moved to London a couple of years previously he’d
let it be known that not only had he taken part in poetry slams himself; he had also been involved in
organising one in his native Montreal back in the early nineteen nineties. What he hadn’t known was
that in Britain there is a metaphorical Berlin Wall, complete with barbed wire and quite vicious guard-dogs,
between the performance poetry scene – which is large and very active, especially in the major cities--and the
mainstream poetry world. And poetry slams are definitely on the performance side of that divide. In parts of
the British poetry world, the phrase ‘slam-poet’ is more likely to lead to the door being closed on your hand,
than it is to an invitation to read at the Hay-On-Wye Festival or take tea with Andrew Motion.
For those of you who haven’t experienced one, a slam is a performance poetry
competition in which poets perform for not more than three minutes, sometimes, but not always, without the
aid of the page in front of them. The winner is usually chosen by a panel of five judges selected at random
from the audience. 1 Each judge scores the poet out of ten, and then both the highest and lowest score are
disregarded; and the middle three scores totted up. So, if your best friend gives you a ten, or your worst
enemy gives you a zero, it probably won’t count. At the annual Cúirt Festival Grand Slam, 2 the winner is
chosen by an appointed three person panel, usually consisting of two poets, here to read at the festival,
and a member of the public who has been part bribed, part press-ganged into the role. The prize a poetry
slam winner receives will vary wildly from an all-expenses-paid trip to read at the Green Mill in Chicago 3
for the winner of the annual Cúirt Festival Grand Slam, to a simple bottle of house red for the winner of
the monthly North Beach Nights Poetry Slam 4 at BK’s wine bar.
What defines a poetry slam is the competitive element, and the foregrounding of
performance rather than text. Although, in Ireland at least, literary quality is taken into account. At the
Cúirt Slam the judges are asked to consider the literary merit of the poem as well as the performance of
the poet and the audience reaction. One or two of our more mildewed critics have argued that this element
of overt competition is a bad thing, and have tried to dismiss slams as a poetry version of You’re A Star
or Pop Idol. But as anyone who has had to navigate its sometimes rather shark-infested waters will tell you:
the Irish poetry scene was already a profoundly competitive place, long before Slam tentatively set foot on
Éireann’s green isle. In her essay ‘Slams, Open Readings, and Dissident Traditions’ 5 Maria Damon argues that
in America:
“slams have inaugurated some folks into a recent
understanding of poetry as a competitive sport
(a concept which makes traditionalists uneasy,
in spite of the arguably more cutthroat competition
for publication opportunities, admission to M.F.A
programmes, and university teaching positions that
poisons the mainstream “creative writing” community)”
Now, I’m sure what Damon
| "critics...have tried to dismiss slams as a poetry version of
You’re A Star or Pop Idol. But as anyone who has had to navigate its sometimes rather
shark-infested waters will tell you: the Irish poetry scene was already a profoundly competitive place,
long before Slam tentatively set foot on Éireann’s green isle." |
says about competition between poets for university teaching positions in the US is not at all true of the
hallowed institution in which this conference is taking place. 6 But I think her point is valid all the same.
If poets were animals, they would be cats, because, like cats, while they are awake poets are always on the make.
And this is typically just as true of the quietest sonneteer, as it is of the loudest slammer. Sometimes more true.
We should remember, that the tendency to draw a severe black line between poetry
as a spoken art and poetry as a written art is a comparatively recent thing. Until the invention of printing
in the fifteenth century, poetry in this part of the world was an exclusively oral art. Poems were passed on
orally from generation to generation, with the inevitable variations in the text. Until Guttenburg conceived
of the idea of moveably type in 1452, it was impossible for a poet to be anything other than a performance poet.
In Ireland the tradition of poetry, the spoken art is particularly strong. What was Anthony Reaftearaí
(1779-1835) if not a performance poet? According to the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature:
“When Lady Gregory and Yeats were gathering folk
material in Co. Galway in 1897 and thereafter,
they encountered many stories about
Reaftearaí and found that his poems were
still sung and recited.”
Reaftearaí was illiterate, and his poems were never written down during his lifetime.
In ‘Na Buachaillí Bána’--a poem celebrating the subversive activities of the Whiteboys--Reaftearaí says of Denis
‘The Rope’ Brown, High Sheriff of Mayo,
“I would like to stick my spear into his huge stomach.”
Exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to hear at a Cúirt or North Beach Nights
poetry slam!
The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature goes on to say that Raiftearaí was
“Often destitute, his life free of normal constraint: according to an enemy and poetic rival, Peatsaí Ó Callanáin,
he ‘went with’ a woman, Siobhán, and they had two illegitimate children...” Sounds like a performance poet to me.
No doubt if he were alive today, he’d be taking part in the Cúirt Poetry Grand Slam and e-mailing me to see if
there was any chance I could arrange a spot for him as a featured reader at Over The Edge. 7
As the nineteen century goes on, Irish poetry for the most part retreats into the
Victorian drawing room. The image of Reaftearaí reciting his verses to peasant ne’er-do-wells gives way to the
image of Mister Yeats reciting his poems to small gatherings of old dears, and not-so-old dears, pausing between
stanzas to sip tea from a bone china cup. In many ways Yeats – great poet, but catastrophically bad reader of his
own work – is the spiritual father of what I call the tweed-jacket poets: the ones with the PhD from Trinity and
first collection on its way any minute now from Gallery Press
And the worst contemporary poetry readings, at which the gentleman or lady poet
recites his or her serious words to five or six people and an elderly Labrador in a hotel with terrible carpet, have
their roots in that Victorian drawing room. Although it has to be said, the decline which has taken the Irish
poetry reading from Coole Park and Lissadell to the small provincial hotel has been a steep one. Listening to
Yeats making a ridiculous job of reading great poems in a grand setting is one thing; but sitting in deadly
embarrassed silence, while A.N.Other declaims his or her verses to a deaf Labrador in the Imperial Hotel, is
a beast of an altogether different variety.
For the organisers of this sort of poetry reading, heroic failure is what it’s
all about. The worst thing in the world would be if people had the temerity to turn up in significant numbers
and actually appeared to be enjoying the experience. This would be poetry become entertainment, and must be
stamped out at all costs. Because, as we all learned at school, poetry isn’t about entertainment, it’s about
suffering. To these people, poetry readings are the literary equivalent of half-eleven mass on a wet Sunday
in Mullingar, without the jokes.
Poetry slams and
| "As the nineteen century goes on, Irish poetry for the most
part retreats into the Victorian drawing room. The image of Reaftearaí reciting his verses to peasant
ne’er-do-wells gives way to the image of Mister Yeats reciting his poems to small gatherings of old
dears, and not-so-old dears, pausing between stanzas to sip tea from a bone china cup." |
open readings may be American imports, but they have the
potential to re-energise Irish poetry, by reconnecting it with its own oral tradition. Indeed, they are
already doing it. At the Over The Edge: Open Readings in Galway City Library, there are always three featured
readers, with an open-mic afterwards. It is not a poetry slam, or competition of any type. And some of those
who’ve been featured readers are well known: these have included the likes of Geraldine Mills, Jean O’Brien,
Nigel McLoughlin, Jo Slade, Ben Howard, Deirdre Cartmill, Nessa O’Mahony, Ann Le Marquand Hartigan, Michael
D. Higgins, Paul Perry, Gerry Hanberry, Terry McDonagh and Collette NicAodha. But the inclusive, democratic
element which an open-mic introduces has been crucial to the success of these readings. Several poets who began
their reading careers very tentatively at the open-mic have gone on to be featured readers. A similar democratic
openness is also crucial to poetry slams.
Writing in the "Art Attack" column in last week’s Galway Advertiser, 8 poet Trish Casey
had this to say:
“Slam is coming to prominence now and it’s happening here in
Galway. Why Galway and why now? Primarily because there is a
group of writers on the literary scene here who don’t believe
in literary borders, elite territories or ghettos and embrace
the word in all its forms, both written and spoken. This spirit
of openness is manifest in workshops, mentoring and coaching
services, which support the artistic development of fellow
writers. North Beach Nights, the Cúirt Grand Slam and the
Over the Edge readings are a demonstration of this enlightened
synergy. We live in artistically interesting times.”
Lately a number of poets, by no means all of them Galway-based, with a wide variety
of reading and writing styles, have begun to emerge from this broad literary scene, of which slam is only a part.
Poets such as Neil McCarthy, 9 Celeste Augé, Dave Lordan, 10 Marion Moynihan, 11 Anthony
Daly, Mary Madec, Billy Ramsell 12 and Lorna Shaughnessy. Some of these have only just begun to publish,
others have already won major awards for their poetry and have first collections forthcoming.
In the context of the “enlightened synergy” Casey talks about, labels such as
‘performance poet’ and ‘page poet’ are unhelpful in that they tend to reinforce what is an entirely artificial
divide. In Britain, as I’ve described, the concrete seems to have set on that divide for now. But it need not
be so here, where things are still in flux. In the same article, Casey also makes the point that:
“Having seen the pitfalls of slam/spoken word in other
countries, we can avoid making the same mistakes here.
Slam needs to be rooted in a broad literary/artistic
context in order to prevent it veering into a cultural
cul-de-sac.”
The cliché of the performance poet - the might-have-been rock-star in the questionable
leather-jacket, who instead of availing of the appropriate psychotherapy, likes to leap around a stage, shrieking
and making what sound like animal noises – certainly does have some truth in it. I’ve met him. And I think I’ve
met his brother. But in Ireland, he is not the norm.
It is perhaps best to view performance poetry – although as I’ve said, I think the
term is perhaps unhelpful - not as some exotic American import, but something which has always been part of
Irish poetry to a greater or lesser degree. There are several well established Irish poets for whom
performance--whether or not they would choose to call it that – is important. Paul Durcan, Cathal O’Searcaigh,
Rita Ann Higgins and Louis DePaor, to name just four. No doubt if they were rising up through the ranks just
now, they would each at some stage have competed in the Cúirt Poetry Grand Slam. Poetry slams are, in their
way, as valid a form of competition as the Hennessy Literary Awards or the Fish Short Story Competition. They
are not the be all and end all; the best poem rarely wins any competition. But we are, I think, in the process
of inventing our own gentler, more literary version of slam here.
In Galway there has been a quiet revolution in the poetry world over the past
three years. Of late it has been a little less quiet. 13 It has the potential to help Irish poetry finally shake
off the legacy of that Victorian drawing room. And as Dave Lordan, the Dublin-based winner of the 2005 Patrick
Kavanagh Award, puts it: in the process to liberate Irish poetry from what he calls “the dictatorship of the
one page lyric.” There is a fork in the road up ahead, and the sign going one way reads ‘Death in a provincial
hotel’, the sign going the other: ‘New life’. I know which way I’m going.
1 The judges are sometimes chosen using a raffle system; tickets are distributed to all audience members not
taking part in the slam.
2 Has taken place annually at The Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway since 2003.
3 The venue in Chicago where the first poetry slams where organised by Marc Kelly Smith in 1986.
4Monthly poetry slam event in Galway. It was founded by Sara Byrne in May, 2004, and is now organised by John Walsh.
It was the first Irish poetry slam to use the American raffle-ticket system to choose the judges. It takes its
name from North Beach in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read his poem ‘Howl’. Credit for the name goes
to Susan Millar DuMars.
5 Close Listening – Poetry and the Performed Word. Edited by Charles Bernstein. Published by Oxford University Press, 1998.
6 First Galway Conference of Irish Studies – Orality and Modern Irish Culture, hosted by The Centre for Irish Studies,
NUI Galway, 7-10 June 2006.
7Reading series in Galway City Library, organised by the author and Susan Millar DuMars. It began in January
2003 as On The Edge, changing its name to Over The Edge in December of that year. At the April 2006 Cúirt International
Festival of Literature, the Cúirt Debut spot was given over to a reading by five Over The Edge alumni: poets Ed
Boyne, Celeste Augé, Sheila Phelan and Lorna Shaughnessy, and fiction writer, Jim Mullarkey.
8 The Galway Advertiser, Thursday June 1st, 2006.
9Cork-born poet who during the summer of 2005 organised ‘The Voice and The Verse’ in Galway: a series of events
each featuring an emerging singer-song-writer and a poet. Poets such as Moya Cannon and Louis DePaor took part,
as did Steve Murray – winner of the 2005 Cúirt Poetry Grand Slam.
10 Dave Lordan won the 2005 Patrick Kavanagh Award. His first collection, The Boy in the Ring, will be
published by Salmon Poetry.
11 Marion Moynihan’s first collection will be published soon by Doghouse Press.
12 Billy Ramsell’s first collection is forthcoming from Bradshaw Books.
13 See The Galway Advertiser, May 11th 2006, May 18th 2006, & June 1st 2006.
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2004-2007 the Dublin Quarterly--to see familiar things with unfamiliar eyes!
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