Garyswordz

An opportunity to present poetry in a prison arose this week. I took it. This is my account of what happened.

Prisons, and penal practise, have been places of increasing interest for me in recent years. I have never doubted that prisons are required to both protect and punish. I have suspected that some are happy for prisons to exist as little more than festering containment tanks, with little regard for what happens when the contents are released. I have also long doubted the glib belief that prisons are holiday camps.

So what motivated me to take up the offer to run a poetry workshop in a prison? Curiosity to see what life is really like inside, the challenge of coming face to face with convicted prisoners and discovering how I would respond, the chance to share a passion for poetry with an unlikely audience, to introduce something new to others, and to do it well, to maybe make a difference, to try to do something good for its own sake. It was a mixture of all of those things, not necessarily in that order, and certainly with each not carrying equal weight. But as I walked up to the gate, all fine and worthy intentions evaporated as my mind focussed on simply surviving the afternoon!

For reasons of security and confidentiality, I shall not be specific about the establishment and provide aliases for those whom I met. My group were young adults who were serving a minimum of four years, and a maximum of life. Bad boys, who had done bad things.

Before I left home I joked with my wife that if I was taken hostage I expected a tearful, televised plea for my safe return – not an endorsement of a “no negotiations with hostage takers” policy! It was a nervous joke. In practise I had been reassured that assaults on visitors and education staff were virtually unknown, as we provided much appreciated and welcome relief from the daily grind, the more likely risk being of an inter prisoner flare up. Open body language and non-confrontational verbal language was advised. It seemed like good advice too.

I was quite surprised by the number of female officers , fitness instructors and ancillary staff there . Apparently the benefits are a lowering of physical confrontations, the disadvantage, a lack of muscle when violence does break out.

My biggest challenge was what to do in the workshop. Ostensibly , my objective was to solicit poetry inspired by the Lichfield Mysteries cycle, a series of some twenty six plays based on bible stories as re-imagined over the past 600 years. In practise I had doubts about the extent of the likely biblical and theological expertise I was likely to encounter, and anticipated having to start very close to poetry square one.

No-one knew what the abilities of those attending my workshop were going to be. My primary concern was whether they could read and write rather than their grasp of iambic pentameter, alliteration and assonance. This meant that I had to prepare four parallel lesson plans. Plan A, for absolute beginners. Plan B for functional literacy but no expertise. Plan C for a conventional workshop group, and Plan D, designed simply to amuse them if it was all going horribly wrong. That is thirteen hours worth of material. Oh, and there was one more thing. The session was to last three and a quarter hours, locked in, no toilet or refreshment breaks, expulsion from the class not an option, and sanctions somewhat restricted as we already were in prison! I have friends and family who work as junior school teachers, secondary school teachers, university lecturers and adult education teachers. All reacted with pitying sympathy for a session of that length, in those circumstances. I dismissed their wisdom with a less than convincing bravado.

As an enthusiastic viewer of “Americas Hardest Prisons” on television I was well aware of the hold of gang culture in States side prisons. However I was surprised to learn that it is a significant problem here too, although without a uniform racial divide . Here inter- city and intra city rivalries are to the fore such that regular prisoner moves are required to reduce the risk of territory being established and alliances becoming entrenched.

The extended lesson time reflected prison routine of prisoner movements being kept to a minimum as that was the time of maximum risk. I observed the prelude and postscript to one such movement. The anxiety, tension and anticipation of the mustering officers was palpable, their relief afterwards just as evident. My experience of all the staff whom I came across was of decent individuals trying to do a difficult job to the best of their ability.

When entering and moving around a prison a sense of staccato , restricted movement becomes immediately apparent. Entry into a neutral waiting area is via an air lock device ensuring that direct movement to the outside is impossible. Thereafter I was escorted through never ending combinations of locked doors backed by security grills, past patrolling officers and sniffer dog teams conducting a sweep. Security measures were overt, constant and omnipresent.

I had arrived in good time and was introduced to the study room. It was fine. Large and airy, a battery of basic computers offering word processing, but not internet, lined the walls. There was a conference table, office style chairs, a wipe board, flip chart and interactive screen. It was comfortable, appropriate and adequate, neither lavish nor spartan. I was introduced to the staff who would be with me, Pete, a young wiry IT technician and Roy, an Education officer, a little bigger, a little older, and with the all important radio. Security and safety is always in the back of your mind and it did strike me that (in popular parlance), if it came “on top”, the numbers were against us and we were several sets of locked doors from assistance.

Classroom management was clearly going to be paramount here, and my less than imposing average height and middle aged frame were unlikely to have much impact. But I do have an authoritative voice , and I suggested to my colleagues that if I took control from the start, rather than be introduced, it might help. They agreed. It was a good move.

As they entered the room, in dribs and drabs, I offered each a firm handshake, introducing myself, and asked their name. There was to be no “them and me”, and as it transpired they didn’t know each other. I had the initiative from the start. Handshakes tell you a lot. I felt uncertainty, indifference, apprehension and resignation in their palms. One of them had brought with him a folder of work he had already written – it spoke of home, family, sadness and regret. What it lacked in finesse it made up for in poignant veritas. As they settled down I determined that I could handle them, and that they were going to let me do so. The door from the corridor was then closed and locked. This was it. None of us were going anywhere.

I opened up by offering up only a few rules. We were to respect each other, and what was written. No-one had to do, or write or say anything, they could simply pass on any activity in which they did not want to contribute. It was obvious stuff. Respect is the lingua franca of prisons. Control of anything something prisoners rarely enjoy. The “slow ball” open question of “what is poetry?” was a good opener. Fortunately none of them asked it back to me! The realisation that it might include anything, that even a letter home could be poetic, provided an immediate inclusivity that thawed the inevitable initial froideur of scepticism, indifference and unfamiliarity. And I could see it dawn on their faces: “hey, we could all be poets”. I decided to capitalise upon this advantage by declaring the bravery of poetry and poetic performance. No hiding behind make-up, character, props and other people’s writing as actors do. No hiding behind a band, music and set as musicians do. Poetry is hardcore. Just you, your words, your voice and your audience.

Now that I had their interest, if not their undivided attention I went for my party piece, the “Queen of Hearts” trick. If you don’t know it, I shall not spoil it for you. Suffice to say that it is a questioning device which ensures that you can get any member of an audience, however large, to say, and the rest of the audience to think,“ Queen of Hearts,” after which you produce a pre-prepared giant Queen of Hearts card. Considering that deception, sleight of hand and hustling are traits which are not unknown to prisoners, and prison life, I was delighted and emboldened by the fact that I duped them all: “That’s not fucking poetry that’s fucking magic,” came one cry, the ambiguity of which pleased me still further.

We operated on first name terms, I only asked them to offer up the place they would call their home town. I wanted them to have an identity that lay outside the prison, I didn’t want to know who they were, what they had done to be incarcerated, or for how long they were sentenced. Although you couldn’t help but wonder………….

My introductory poetic gambit was to ask one of them to read John Cooper Clarke’s “(I Married) An Alien from Outer Space.” It is off-beat, funny, odd, and rhymes. Kevin, an Afro- Caribbean, volunteered and did a good job. But what surprised me was how literally everything was taken from a poem that is anything but, as we discussed it as a group. The mind-numbing desensitisation of prison revealed itself. This was not going to be a poetry appreciation class. Yet I still had all of them with me apart from Chris, a young man whose physique and taciturn demeanour suggested that words were not his favoured form of expression , and who elected to pass on all discussions.

My next gambit was to actively involve them ,and so I moved on to a rhyming competition. Five minutes to list as many rhymes as possible for five single syllable words. I invited them to pick one word so that they could produce a respectable number , I volunteered to take them on by tackling all five. All did creditably with a sharp competitive edge emerging as the “results” were declared, fortunately I won all categories, apart from one in which I was beaten by Chris! He puffed out his chest in satisfaction at his win, I warmed to the fact that I had won too.

With rhymes in mind I then produced my following exercise, a Dizzy Rascal lyric with some rhyming words, and some random nouns and adjectives removed for them to guess the missing words. This produced frenzied activity, collaboration and discussion, total involvement, and answers which in my opinion were a considerable improvement upon Dizzee’s original efforts. Buoyed by the resounding success of this activity I then challenged them to participate in a round of word association with no rules.

Once again I was struck by how using imagination was such a rusty skill for them. Any word which was triggered by the last was acceptable ( so long as it had not appeared previously in that round), but it took a while to get going even though I had done a demo round with Roy, one of my babysitters. That spark which inspires, which gives us all our identity had been dulled and all but extinguished ,and took some time to re-ignite, then cultivate. Yet it was a pleasure to see that flicker of recognition as we progressed that although physically, we were behind bars –the mind can go anywhere.

Now that I had warmed up their creative faculties I wanted to introduce them to what could be achieved with imagination and rhyme and showed them “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City” by Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen wrote it in his early twenties ( as was true of the John Cooper Clarke and Dizzee Rascal pieces I had given them), the group’s age, as a hymn to street life in New Jersey. The imagery is rich ,operatic and over-blown, opening with the killer line:”He had skin like leather and the diamond hard look of a cobra”. As I looked around I could see minds racing – “hey , no-one can stop what you want to write about, or what you say -, we are free, if only with a pen and paper.”

The time had come to convert both the energy we had created, and some of the rudimentary skills we had practised, into writing some poetry. My earlier assumption that an exercise based exclusively upon my ,and their, exegesis of the Mysteries themes would be doomed, was now a certainty. So I attempted a gear shift, and asked them to write down their favourite things linked to their five senses, and then to mix them up a bit. All eagerly complied apart from Chris who was clearly regressing. “So you don’t have any favourite experiences at all? “ I queried.

“No”

“Name me the last thing that happened which made you feel good”

“When my kids came running up to me”

“What did they look like, what did that sound like, what did they smell of, what were they like to touch?…………………………..”

And then Chris understood. .And then, maybe they all understood just a little bit better.

Now I hate being told what to write about at workshops. The more prescriptive the subject, the more I will resist until something has flickered to catch my attention which may have nothing whatsoever to do with the lead subject. I offered them the same courtesy – and choice. They could either write from my four suggested Mysteries themes:
1. If you could create the world again, like a God, what would you change? How would it be different? Would you have a heaven and a hell
2. What do you think that heaven and hell look like/ are like?
3. What would the end of the world be like? What would you do if there was one day left? Who would you spend it with? Where would you want to spend it?
4. If there was a flood and you were given an ark and you could save whatever animals, people and things you could, who and what would you save?

– or they could write about whatever they fancied using some of the principles we had learned.

Brenda Read-Brown, a poet who works in other prisons gave me some very good pre-workshop advice. Some prisoners may wish to write about life inside, but many will want to write about anything but life inside. It was a prescient observation.

The results were a joy, and only one inmate chose to write about their incarceration. I told them that they could just leave them as their own personal pieces, or read them out. Amazingly, every person read their own contribution, a testament to the self-worth which the exercise had given them. Half chose to write about how they would deal with the end of the world. They told of their children, parents, beaches and pastoral serenity. The absence of any form of materialism struck me. Bill, who had ducked in and out of the conversations surprised us all, twice. His first piece was a very funny rhyming poem about losing his hair, which he was not, particularly. More specifically it was about worrying about hair loss, which encompasses all men. Unwittingly he had written an everyman piece which unified us all. The smiles and laughter all around filled his sails. He had a second one, but would not read it, because it was “ a bit gay”. Yet the approbation from all for the first poem meant that they would not let him get away with that. Everyone wanted to hear what he had written, so he gave in, his second poem was about how he would spend his last day before the world ended, playing on the beach with his sister and family. Again they were universal sentiments which even the hard men of the prison could not help but approve of, not deride.

Other contributions stood out for me too. One was about the end of the world from a first time prisoner asking his parents to forgive him for “being bad”, another from a veteran offender a visceral “Crie de Coeur” about how much he hated prison, with each one having its own distinctive smell, which was a poetic goldmine obviously. It also brought the mood of the group down with a bump. Why? Because the frustration and sense of injustice that this man in a prison grey t shirt felt articulated what all the men in grey t shirts felt, and empirically, they were learning about symbolism.

Finally there was Chris, self –styled hellion, reluctant poet, who refused to write anything, because there was no point in reimagining Genesis, because it was always going to be the same, as there was no point in Parliament as it would always be the same with the rich making laws for the benefit of themselves ,and to the detriment of others ( I paraphrase the last point). I told him to write down what he had said as sentences. As a piece of prose it was a stream of consciousness word dump. But there was something to it. And as we sat down and looked at it I realised that with some judicious line breaks we had a powerful piece. So in “Queen of Hearts” style I asked the right questions and we ended up with four powerful couplets as verses with a rather clever internal rhyme in it! Chris was delighted, his peers were impressed, I was delighted until Chris asked, “Couldn’t you have just done that for me in the first place and saved all of this messing about?” And I reflected that there is only so much that you can achieve in three and a quarter hours.

The crackle of Roy’s radio alerted us to the end of the session. It was time for prisoners to be moved. The glimpse of mental freedom crushed by the exigencies of the mechanics of prison. Copies of printed sheets of A4 all that was to remain. As they left, those glimpses of things beyond faded as fast as Cinderella’s carriage after midnight , the greyness of the system waiting to consume them. We remained locked in for our own safety as the prison rotated its charges, and then as the last muffled voices of mumbling prisoners faded ,together with rasped orders from their guards, and the synchronised clanging of gates and doors, I was escorted back to the gatehouse. It was an eerie feeling, like walking through a wood at night, where you know all manner of life is out there, but you can neither hear, nor see it. And it felt surreal, simply walking out. Something that several hundred men could only dream of.

So was it like a holiday camp? Of course not. Did it appear civilised and humane? Yes. Was it a place of punishment? Yes. I reflect on how those outside prison take freedom for granted, and the acuteness with which those inside suffer its loss. As I shook hands with Roy as I left he said ,“Hey, Gary you made a difference today ”and I did a double take, for it was exactly what my friends had said I should not expect.

Prison has a rich tradition of writing, from Mallory, Bunyan, Genet, Wilde to more recently Solzhenitsyn, Mandela and Jeffrey Archer. None are likely to have their literary pre-eminence challenged by my charges, yet the vast majority of poets write, even the good ones, not with an eye on poetic immortality, but in an attempt to express themselves in a way that connects with others. My group achieved that.

I came across this article, and found it so succinct and apposite in dealing with a popular question that I feel compelled to promote it,and share it. It is in that spirit that I reproduce the following piece, written by Prof Jonathan Taylor of De Montfort University, contained in an interview he gave for Writing East Midlands as their “Writer of the Month”.

Here, he replies to the question,”What advice would you give someone who wanted to get their work published?” The interview in full may be accessed by following the link:

“Well, it’s difficult to answer that question in just a few words, but there are some fairly basic things to say. Firstly, I’d say that writing is a strange art in that it is an unstable compound of individualistic and communitarian activities: clearly, you spend a lot of time on your own writing; but you also have to be willing to be part of a community of writers. Often, this is a local community, and means attending workshops, readings and open-mic events. For poets particularly, establishing yourself within a community of writers is absolutely essential: you need to attend live events and readings, and read your own work aloud to an audience. There are other forms of community as well, one of which is small press publication. Reading small press magazines, and eventually getting poems or stories published in them is, again, fundamental to a writing life. Starting on this scale – writing flash fiction or short poems for small press magazines, and for performance at open-mic events – is a way of developing your craft. And every single performance and publication matters to a writer, however supposedly ‘small scale.’

Clearly, to be part of a community in these senses of publication and performance does mean reading or listening to other people’s work. You can’t expect anyone to be interested in your own work if you don’t engage with theirs. In this sense, writers at all different stages of their careers can and do help one another – or, at least, I hope they do. If writers can’t help one another, no one else is going to.”

http://www.writingeastmidlands.co.uk/writers/writer_of_the_month/january_-_jonathan_taylor/

These are useful tips I have picked up from watching his series:

1. A dead camel can be useful for sleeping inside in the Saraha desert.
2. When leaping off a small ice sheet onto the rigging of a passing ship be aware that the ship may sink the sheet upon which you are standing
3. Raw sheep’s testicles are full of nutrition
4. Rafts, however ingeniously assembled, invariably sink quite quickly
5. When confronted with a forest fire in Alabama you should run through it.Roll around in mud to protect your body, and drench a urine soaked t shirt around your head for protection first
6. Seal skins can be cut and tailored to make excellent singlets in the style of Andy Bell from Erasure.
7. Freshly excreted faeces wrapped in cling film is a good hand warmer in the cold.
8. When entering long mountain single track railway tunnels with no passing places in Oregon, care should be taken that a train is not coming.
9. After bathing in glacial lakes rolling around in snow actually helps you to dry off.
10. Raiding bees nests in Africa for honey without fully covering your face is unwise, their stings hurt.

In early 2011, poets began setting their words to the sound of dubstep and electronica. Almost twelve months on, the signs are that poetronica is here to stay

It’s hardly surprising the year is ending with news that dubstep heavyweight Skream is set for a musical collaboration with poet Jodi Ann Bickley. After all, 2011 was the year when spoken word and electronica joined forces, and will surely be remembered for poets putting down their notebooks and turning to the MPC.

The trend began back in February, with the late, great Gil Scott Heron and Jamie xx’s We’re New Here. The two forms have since made sweet, electro-infused music together, with poets embracing the jerky and sometimes downright jarring beats of dubstep and electronica.
Drums Between the Bells, Rick Holland’s collaboration with Brian Eno, released on Warp Records back in July, was dubbed “poetronica” by critics and bloggers.

One of the most successful collaborations of the year came courtesy of Josh Idehen and electronica outfit LV, whose album Routes received rave reviews, an album of the month in Mixmag, and bookings at both poetry events and club nights. Idehen’s lyrics were cut and chopped by LV, a fresh and somewhat backwards approach to production. The result is a fun and fast-paced album that Idehen describes as a “true collaboration”: “Spoken word works with electronica. It can be a lot more accessible; there are less of the conventions found in hip-hop.”

Poet Raymond Antrobus, part of post-dubstep outfit Speed Camera Shy – who this year cemented UK dubstep’s crossover to the US by signing to the independent Californian label Gradient Audio – also thinks a poetic narrative works better with electronica. He argues that dubstep beats are preferred as they don’t drown out the poet’s voice: “Dubstep beats are something you can own, something that makes your words flow organically as they’re not trapped within a 4/4 pattern.”

Jodi Ann Bickley describes her Skream collaboration as incorporating a “classic minimal dubstep beat” to aid her narrative. “A beat has to do whatever suits the poet. I aim towards proper storytelling with a beginning, middle and end, so it has to be minimal. Dubstep beats give me a blank canvas; they aren’t too overpowering and can be calm if I need them to be. Dubstep can create a sense of place just like poetry can.”

So is poetronica here to stay? Musa Okwonga, of the spoken word and electronic project The King’s Will, is an ardent supporter of the term and is keen to look forward. “It’s been an amazing year in terms of productivity and quality,” he says. “There’s definitely been a tipping point, and I’m really excited for the year ahead.”

Kieran Yates • guardian.co.uk 30/12/12
https://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/music/musicblog/2011/dec/30/rise-of-poetronica

The above article appeared in today’s Guardian. It was of particular interest for me as I know Jodi Ann, have watched her grow and flourish on the Brum scene, and have seen Ray Antrobus perform twice this year too. So, how accurate is this article? Is poetronica really on the rise?

Both Jodi Ann and Ray are undoubtedly very talented performers, and warm to multimedia platforms. Jodi Ann has flirted with music right from the start of her public career, her girlish fresh charm is so “on trend” with the raft of talented young British female singers currently enjoying success that the temptation to cross over must seem irresistible. Her writing is fey, kitchen sink, heartfelt and vulnerable, capturing the angst of young adulthood with a veritas that transcends her immediate peers, and reaches out to those who were young once also.

Ray is a different talent, with photography being another passion of his . That need to capture a moment is so evident in his poetry too. He combines the edginess of a man who was out photographing the Tottenham Riots with a male metrosexual openness.

Poetry’s relationship with music goes back to the origins of the form, through Chaucer and to Homer. As soon as stories came to be told, two tools were immediately available, rhyme to help remember words ,and musical accompaniment, in the form of a drumbeat, and then other instruments as technology evolved, to add rhythm and mood. In England, and English, the Minstrel combined the skills of poet and musician and in Europe, as classical music flourished, you could not stop poets of the day having a crack at a hymn.

So, relationship established, when does a poem stop being a poem and become a song lyric? A poem without music is a poem, a poem with music at some point crosses that boundary. As the 20th century popularised amplified music, the great song writing lyricists and musical theatre lyricists chose to ply their trade with music by choice. Folk music and Country and Western similarly chose music as an essential ingredient to tell their stories.

Two things served to take poetry and the craft of lyric writing apart from popular music. The first was the creation of the Billboard Sheet Music Chart in 1940, and then the first record sales chart compiled by NME in 1952. At those points, as mass media broadened artists from the confines of theatres and clubs, a focus for celebrity was offered to television and radio from which the industry has never looked back. The artist and the sound became as important as the song and the lyric, which previously would not have been possible.

The fight-back, arguably came with Bob Dylan whose lyrics were so rich, dense and enigmatic, that whilst falling short of conventional poetic standards boasted a lyrical content which none could deny. The Doors set Jim Morrison’s poetry to music although the result was emphatically music and Jefferson Airplane successfully flirted with a poetic/literary form in “White Rabbit”. Gill Scott Heron though was undoubtedly the person who first tried to reverse the trend and put poetry first in his debut album “Small Talk”, with spoken word vocal delivery and African-style congas, containing his defining, seminal “The Revolution Will Not Be televised”.

It is ironic that Brian Eno should be seen as being in the vanguard of the poetronica movement due to his work with Rick Holland. Anyone who has heard his early Roxy Music involvement with “Sea Breezes” and “Chance Meeting” on Roxy’s eponymous first album, or “In Every Dreamhome A Heartache” from “For Your Pleasure” will have heard the birth of poetronica. His latter Ambient Quintet of albums, starting with “Music for Airports” and ending with “More Music for Films” were also so minimalistic and sparse musically that they almost begged to have vocal accompaniment- but didn’t. Fellow computer based musicians Kraftwerk flirted with poetronica first with “Autobhan” then with “Computer Love” and “The Model” before becoming consumed by conventional mainstream mores. Yet might David Bowie (who included “Right Line Poem” in his “Hunky Dory” Album and “Future legend” in “Diamond Dogs”) claim a credit for his stylophone composed “Space Oddity” at the start of the decade? Indeed the diversity of experimentation was more than you might imagine in the 70’s with Ian Hunter, a far better songwriter and lyricist than singer recording the spoken word “It Aint easy When You Fall” in his eponymous solo album just before punk broke.

Punk provided unexpected opportunities for poetry that in retrospect were not fully capitalised upon. Patti Smith was the standard bearer with “Piss factory” and her debut album “Horses”, but for whatever reason, she failed to break out of cult idolatry. When Siouxsie Sue was struggling for early lyrical inspiration she simply provided a musical backing to “The Lords Prayer”, and slightly later, I offer you the first genuine slice of modern poetronica, Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”, in 1981.

But one figure cuts a swathe from the sixties to the present day as a lyricist, and on one album outright poet, and that is Lou Reed. Bathing himself in contemporary literature to the present day, he pioneered a spoken style to rock backing from “Waiting for the Man”, “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Street Hassle” through, “Songs for Drella” his album with John Cale dedicated to Andy Warhol.

He too released his own ambient album, without lyrics in “Hudson River Wind Meditations” in 2007. Previously in May 2000, Reed performed before Pop John Paul 11 at the Great Jubilee Concert in Rome. Also in 2000, a new collaboration with Robert Wilson called “Poe-Try” was staged in Germany. As with the previous collaboration Time Rocker, Poe-Try was also inspired by the works of a 19th-century writer: Edgar Alan Poe. Reed became interested in Poe after producer and long-time friend Hal Wilner had suggested him to read some of Poe’s text at a Halloween benefit he was curating at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in Brooklyn.] For this new collaboration, Reed reworked and even rewrote some of Poe’s text as well as included some new songs based on the theme explored in the texts. I suspect that Reed, now 70 will be concentrating on the spoken word in his silent years.

So will poetronica gain traction in the second decade of the 21st century? In a multi-media world there is certainly space for it, whatever that “it” is. There are some great new mainstream lyricists out there, Matt Berninger (The National),James Mercer (The Shins), Devendra Banhart to name but three. There is nothing stopping the likes of Jodi Ann and Ray adding their lyrical prowess to the Dubstep scene which has worked through post-Dubstep to American Brostep ,and creating a poetronica hybrid drawing on the likes of Eno, Kraftwerk and even early Human league and Dépêche Mode to create something new. For me one of the faults of the contemporary popular music scene is that so few artists have anything to say, maybe poetronica can alter that?

Historically, as soon as you put poetry and music together the music wins, and the evolution is conventional music and lyrics. Avoiding that requires discipline, skill and a preparedness to eschew mainstream commercial success. For me, one of the attractions of spoken word poetry is the sparseness of it, the words, the voice and the imagery. It can be tough, and it can be demanding. Furthermore some of the best poets are not the best presenters of their own poetry either visually or in their delivery. Perhaps poets might work a little harder on their own image and delivery too, whatever their chosen platform?

As a poet I want to set my own pace and create my own landscape. Music is an incredibly powerful form and so presents a catch 22. If it is good it has the power to distract, if it is not ,it has the power to detract. At the point at which it becomes complimentary does it not become a song and lyric? In principle I have no problem with that as an outcome, Heron’s “Small talk” and Reed’s “Songs For Drella” show what can be achieved by using music to support words. But the pitfalls are well established.

So there you have it, the history and the context, and the future of Poetronica is unwritten. I would love to see Ray and Jodi Ann picking up the poetronica baton this year and shall be following their progress as they attempt to do so.

Jodi Ann Bickley blogs under: http://jodiannbickleystinyblog.tumblr.com/
Ray Antrobus blogs under: http://raymondantrobus.blogspot.com/