Poetry is a minority occupation in 21st-century Britain. A glance at the meagre, or non-existent, poetry shelf of most major bookshops confirms it. Serious verse is largely the province of academics, students and recipients of grants and residencies—those people, as Philip Larkin wryly noted, who are either paid to write or paying to read. Fewer than a million poetry books sell each year, compared to almost 50m novels; and fewer than half of these are written by living poets, among whom only a few regularly sell over 500 copies.
Yet shelves and sales are far from the whole story. In the live arena and online, a very different kind of poetry is starting to reach audiences for whom even ten years ago poetry barely existed outside of school: the under-30s. There are many reasons for this: the popularity of hip hop has bred a new interest in lyrical substance; the growth of the internet has given less marketable arts free access to a wider community; and there is always a demand for something new, or at least for something old being reinvented. But is this a trend we should be excited by? I recently spent an evening with one of London's newest spoken word groups trying to find out.
Spoken word artists don't share the PR instincts of their colleagues in the music industry. It's only after several beers with the four members of "A Poem in Between People"—PiP to its friends—that I can persuade them to list some of places they've played in the last year: "Er, Tate Modern, Royal Festival Hall, Oxford Playhouse, Glastonbury, the Big Chill, the Forum…" Who's played their recordings? "BBC 6 Music, Radio One, XFM, Channel 4." And who are their influences? "Give us a bit of time on this one, please. Shakespeare. Ben Okri. John Keats. Mos Def. WB Yeats. The Streets. Hemingway's short stories." They see no conflict between admiring the old and wanting the new to happen as soon as possible.
PiP began life in late 2005 as "Two Black Guys and a Poem Between Us." The guys in question were the poet Joshua Idehen—born in Britain in 1980 but raised in Nigeria from 1984 until his return here in 1999—and saxophonist and clarinettist Shabaka Hutchings, best known for his work with jazz luminaries Soweto Kinch and Courtney Pine. The name came, Joshua half-jokingly notes, from wanting to "say it before anyone else did": here is a young black guy performing poems, with saxophone accompaniment, about life in London. The two black guys soon became three with the arrival of Musa Okwonga, an old Etonian and Oxonian solicitor turned performance poet and author (his homage to football, A Cultured Left Foot, was published last year). By the end of 2006, things had become semantically unwieldy with the arrival of miscellaneous others—some of whom were neither black nor guys—bringing the membership up to, at one point, eight. It was a maelstrom from which PiP emerged. By 2007, it had turned a little more disciplined, with a hard core of four: Joshua, Musa and newer arrivals Inua Ellams—a 23-year-old Nigerian-born poet and author (and artist: he drew the image of the group, below right)—and Catherine Martindale, aka PoetiCat, a student and poet who arrived via open mic nights at the Poetry Café in central London.
Narrative is the key: grabbing hold of your audience with what you're saying, compelling them to listen. The word "ego" comes up a lot, too, as both a bad and a good thing: you need to think you've got something worth saying, but must steer away from thinking it's all about you. It's not an identity issue, Musa explains: "I'm a black guy, I stand up with a mic, people think I'm about to rap," he says, "but why should I rap? And what does it mean to be a black gay rapper?"
Spoken word performance still has an uneasy relationship with "proper" literature. Barriers to entry are low; rhetorical trickery can dominate sets, while open mic nights can degenerate into shouting competitions or second-rate stand-up. Yet such events are taking on importance almost by default—because so many people of PiP's generation feel let down by modern written verse, and by the absence of something beautiful and transforming in the lyrics of most big musical acts. Can performed poetry really scale the heights, either of quality or of public recognition? PiP are less evangelical than you might expect. Inua has his suspicions of the spoken word—"just how good can it be? There are definitely problems with quality"—while Joshua is starting to use more rhythm, music and rap elements in his work, "to make it easier to listen to. You've got to get people coming back." But the live experience is, they agree, the heart of something many artists have lost touch with—that place where, at the level of an audience's pleasure, "there's no way you can think you're doing well when you're not."
The best spoken word nights are as much like variety shows as anything else, with banter, songs, readings, performances and an easy chemistry between players. After years of sporadically attending (and intermittently contributing to) such events, I still have my doubts, perhaps because this is an inherently more ephemeral art than the written word: a method for our times, but one that has a far more tenuous relationship with posterity—whatever a digital age's posterity will look like. You also have to be prepared to take the rough with the smooth: to stomach the mawkish, the misguided or the plain bizarre. But when it works, there's something electric about a work unfolding in the air in front of you. Inua's "Midnight Music Marauders," for instance, weaves its spell with a synaesthetic melding of sounds and words: "We played like a dead French kiss reincarnated/as a saxophone with tendencies to hiss/galaxophonic secrets through the tombs of trombone/reborn as the lower bones of Bojangles, dancing/on bass drums prancing like songs of the railroad/set free." On the page, at first glance, it could almost be parody—a trainwreck of ideas and images. But at the speed of the ear, it becomes melodic, fresh and free. The audience pause, applaud then stomp their feet as the next performer takes the stage: Musa, with an excerpt from his rhyming retelling of Othello. The future, stumblingly, gets under way.
