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The poet as performer

How often do the highest compliments we can think to give poets and authors liken their writing to speech? Phrases like, ‘This writer has found his voice,’ or, ‘That writer speaks to me,’ have been so blunted by overuse that it is very easy not to notice the assumption they are predicated on: that the spoken word is more compelling than the written one. I think this is because we associate speech with performance, with joke telling, story telling, drama and mimicry. All of these activities demand our attention in a more immediate way than words on a page ever could, even though they may not necessarily entertain us more when they have it.

In A Short Introduction to English Poetry, James Fenton wrote, “Some decades
ago, it was considered bad form, in the world of poetry readings, 
to do anything that smacked of performance. That poets had once performed their works, chanting them in a manner which approached the bardic, was held against them. It was showing off. It was inauthentic.” Yet James Fenton is the poet as performer par excellence; in his work he reconciles poetry to song, the cousin from which it had grown so estranged by the middle of the twentieth century. In the manner of Byron via Auden, he writes for the ear more than for the eye, yoking together the most improbable rhymes for the sake of rhythm.

His poem ‘In Paris with You’, which has received the dubious honour of enshrinement within the AQA GCSE anthology, rhymes ‘Champs Elysees’ with ‘sleazy’, ‘wounded’ with ‘maroonded’, ‘embarrassing you’ with ‘In Paris with You’. The anarchic playfulness with sound on display in this poem does away with sense altogether in others. Take a look at ‘Here Come the Drum Majorettes’. “It’s the same chalk on the blackboard!/ It’s the same cheese on the sideboard! It’s the same cat on the boardwalk! It’s the same broad on the catwalk!”

This is the kind of poem which should be in GCSE anthologies, because it cajoles us into doing away with all those sanctimonious assumptions about poetry which school burdens us with: that is has to mean something, that it has to have themes! On the contrary, when did anyone demand the same of music? Breaking Fenton’s poems down into tricks and devices only does so much. It only explains how they are so enjoyable, not why. They demand we acknowledge that, like good music, there is something inexplicably, senselessly pleasurable about the way they sound.

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