Am I thinking of you, dear readers, as I write this blog? Am I imagining what you might be wearing, where you might be sitting, what you might have eaten for breakfast this morning? Or am I thinking of my editor, Sarah, and what she might like to put on the site, my fingers trembling in fear that she might not like my first effort for the scrumptious new books blog? Should I not be thinking of any reader/audience at all, but solely about the words on the page?
In the dark of the Royal Festival Hall this weekend I listened to Lemn Sissay read a poem called "Listener", penned for a radio commission. Something which tapped into an issue I've been musing on much of late, the question of who a writer writes for. Is it possible ever to be free of a real or imagined audience? Does the saying "dance as if no-one is watching, sing as if no-one is listening" also make good advice for a writer - to write as if no-one were reading?
"A poet doesn't write for an audience", insists Sissay, who is sick of people telling him he's a performance poet. "The more that the audience is not there, the more that the poet gives to the poem. The poet writes from some inspirational point in childhood where something clicked ... to give that away to the vagaries of the audience is an offence to the art of the poet ... Once it is given away to the audience, the poet becomes part of the market".
There's nothing more beautiful than seeing a poem working on an audience, he continues. But when doing a reading you're not doing it for the audience, you're doing it for the poem.
In the opposite side of the verbal boxing ring is Luke Wright, who thrives on his awareness of audience, and for whom performance poetry is alive and kicking. Although he hates slam, what performance poetry does is bring poetry to the people. What's more, he says, all poetry is sonorous, you can't read it like prose, but always aloud in the head or in reality.
He reads a poem about his greatest insecurity - his inability to dance. The realisation dawned on him at the age of nine that he didn't "have rhythm", he just couldn't dance. I am not convinced at first, but the incremental tension of his performance is compelling, the energy of the words melting into the frenzied energy of his body jerking about on stage, uncoordinated. As the rhythmless dancing becomes more intense, his words cluster together into rhymes that build towards the poem's crescendo, as if seeking in sound a harmony that his body has failed to find. The tension between the body and the voice, the voice becoming part of the body, is delightfully brought out by Wright as is the humour at falling short, at failure. What's more, if there were no performance poetry, "I'd be out of a job and my family will die".
The debate is followed by a stunning performance from Israeli-Arab rap duo, Arapiat, and readings from poets hailing from America, India and Sweden. With poet and translator Robin Robertson introducing, actor Krister Hendriksson reads in Swedish from the poems of Tomas Tranströmer as the words of Robertson's English translation skid across a huge screen - the most haunting words of the whole day, testament to the power of written words to perform themselves, and keep performing, even when the person who made them is not there.
