Bruno Cooke ranks the five poems on the shortlist for the Jerwood Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed 2024
This is the second year the Forward Prizes for Poetry have honoured performed poems alongside page ones. The Forward Arts Foundation introduced the Best Single Poem – Performed category at the same time the Grammy Awards launched its Best Spoken Word Poetry Album category, in a move hailed by … me … as evidence the literary establishment is starting to take an interest in the form.
As The Friday Poem’s Spoken Word Editor and general encourager of the form, I admit to assessing the works of this year’s shortlisted poets – Nasim Rebecca Asl, Toby Campion, Eve Esfandiari-Denney, Leyla Josephine and Michael Pederson – through tinted glasses. I want to reassure you they’re not totally rose-hued by exploring and explaining my process.
There are things I have to keep in mind when watching and, to the extent that it’s useful, evaluating performed poems. The first is that keeping anything in mind while watching and evaluating is a distraction and not the point: enjoy, or at least experience, what is there, as it is. But just as film critics and literary reviewers operate (or try to operate) on a higher (or deeper) level, it’s worth watching the Josephines and Campions with a critical eye-ear combo.
First: bear in mind legitimate criticisms of bad examples of the form
So first: bear in mind legitimate criticisms of bad examples of the form. There are traps. Falling into them produces meaningless art, and reinforces the belief among conservative poets and readers that spoken word poetry is a pointless, footling genre, when in fact it is the pre-literate genre from which page poetry was born. It’s just different now. Technology has made it different. Writer and editor Brooke Clark has lamented the “narcissism of contemporary poetry”, arguing that lyric poetry is “the selfie of the poetry world” because “it provides a perfectly contrived snapshot of the poet at a moment in time”. One might say the same about bad spoken word poetry, or bad page poetry performed badly, or something.
Canadian poet Paul Vermeersch wrote memorably about why he hates the genre / sub-genre / sub-sub-genre: “Someone is spouting a string of tired clichés and bargain basement poeticisms into a microphone. But that’s okay; he’s “performing.” His speech isn’t just exaggerated, it’s over-exaggerated; the metre is a contrived hodgepodge of forced iambics and something that is trying desperately to resemble hip-hop, but isn’t. The idea, I suppose, is that the flailing, stylized vocals will be interesting enough on their own that no one will notice how bad the actual writing is. (The blogpost this is from appears to have been deleted, but you can find a detailed and lively discussion of it in the academic journal Liminalities.)
Thank you, Paul. It should, by now, be clear enough what to avoid. One can conceal the absence of craft behind pained inflection, over-stylisation, and a misplaced faith in one’s originality, but it will not be good. Just because I am unique doesn’t mean my writing is, and so on.
Second: bear in mind illegitimate criticisms of good or bad examples of the form, so as not to be discouraged by them
And second: bear in mind illegitimate criticisms of good or bad examples of the form, so as not to be discouraged by them. Vermeersch argues that poetry is basically a written art form: “The word ‘poetry’ means something, and [these examples of performed poems that he hates] ain’t it”. Well, yes, it comes from the Greek word poiesis, which means “making”. Poets are the makers of language. And poetry’s long roots draw from folksong, hymn, and the oral literature of tribespeople around the world, such as African war songs and hunting poems.
In other words, haters gonna hate; you do you. Write your performable poems, and perform them. But try hard to do this well. Edit. Rehearse. Think of your audience once in a while. A good poem should linger in the mind, and a good poet, I think, writes for other people as well as themselves. How likely is it that a reader will send it to a friend? That’s one measure of success. (Performed poems can be worth sending to our friends, too.) If we broaden our search for imagination, innovation and craft, we might stumble upon good poetry in the unlikeliest of places. Taylor Swift’s album The Tortured Poets Department, for example. Or, dare I say it, social media, where poets like Darby Hudson have been carving a sizeable niche for themselves through the development of unique and relatable online personas.
Enough of that. Here are my thoughts on this year’s shortlist for the Forward/Jerwood Prize for Best Single poem – Performed, ranked in order of best, to … least best, because anyone who reaches the final five deserves a hearty pat on the back and some recognition. So here we go, in reverse order:
5. Michael Pederson, ‘What Grief Feels Like To Me’
Before any notion of talking in the past tense is fathomable
At its best, Michael Pederson’s ‘What Grief Feels Like To Me’ paints a moving picture of what it’s like to lose a friend. He speaks in a clear crisp voice and holds the stage comfortably. The main issue for me is that he leans on the universality of grief rather than exploring it imaginatively, and relies on it for relatability rather than telling a story from an original perspective. Describing a feeling is no stand-in for telling a story that evokes that feeling. Nor is there a narrative arc, really.
Leaning on grief for relatability produces platitudes rather than original reflections: “grief dissects us into our most helpless matter”; “I am desperate for touch then offended by the suggestion”; “I find myself looking into my own eyes in every mirror I pass”. And in the context of conversations about contemporary poetry’s ‘narcissism’, Pederson’s numerous iterations of “I feel” feel … a bit dull.
The poem ends on a bittersweet note. Well, mostly bitter. He says his grief makes him feel self-conscious. His friend has died and people directing their sympathy at him makes him feel guilty. He’s having trouble reconciling these two things, and bemoans the dissonance of being the centre of attention when someone else should be. Meanwhile, he’s standing on stage before an audience, reading a two-and-a-half-minute long poem about what grief feels like to him …
4. Nasim Rebecca Asl, ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’
The hour / world / kebab was yours
Nasim Rebecca Asl delivers her poem straight to camera. The domestic setting feels intimate and negates the need for a microphone, which in turn allows her to emote and enunciate in a way that fits the mood of the poem. The darkness of the poem as a whole is achieved partly through the juxtaposition of a playful structure and the threat of sexual violence, and accentuated with moments of light-heartedness.
Obviously, a linearly performed, recorded poem cannot actually follow through on the choose-your-own-adventure structure. But a few of the poem’s x/y/z ‘choices’ contain micro-revelations and moments of tension and release. Form and content work together, and tone and expression follow. It’s a considered performance.
The issue is that, structurally, it’s a fairly simple set piece. About a third of the way through, one clocks the (appreciable) irony binding content and structure together. Then we’re following the story through the motions, waiting for the poet to describe an unwanted sexual encounter and its aftermath. We have little to do since the poem’s eggs are all in one basket. It lacks the daring of a second twist, telling a simple narrative that, while ever relevant, is predictable and often told.
3. Toby Campion, ‘ghazal, screaming’
So many years they took it for madness, my screaming
Like Rebbeca Asl, Toby Campion has submitted to the Forward Prize judges a specially recorded and produced performance of his poem, ‘ghazal, screaming’. His goes a step further, having shot the video in a non-domestic location and having recruited, one presumes, two friends to play the role of chorus. His performance, direct to camera, is confident and well timed.
Campion gets points for writing (loosely) to a form: the ghazal. A ghazal is genre of Arabic poetry that deals with love, both worldly and spiritual, comprising five to fifteen (usually) couplets with a rhyming pattern AA BA CA DA, and so on. Campion’s ghazal doesn’t use the same word to end both lines of the first couplet, and it’s not (obviously) about love, but, like a ghazal, it’s in couplets, uses incessant repetition of a heavily emotive word, and is impressionistic rather than narrative.
The Forward Arts Foundation interviewed each of the poets about their work, and in his conversation, Campion says that ‘ghazal, screaming’ uses Polari, a “secret language variety used by gay men and queer people in Britain before the 1960s”. The Liverpool Museums website explains that Polari is a “bit of a magpie“, incorporating words from Italian, Cockney Rhyming Slang and Yiddish, and rooted in the vernacular of 19th century travelling entertainers. Campion plays on the dual meanings of the word ‘screaming’ – as gerund and, for the world in which he grounds the poem, ‘camp, flamboyant’; he doesn’t give in to figurative language; and his poem knows its length.
2. Eve Esfandiari-Denney, ‘Nearly White Girl Girling on Behalf of Proximity to Mammal’
Girling forth in a white effortless moment
One of two stand-out poems, for me, is Eve Esfandiari-Denney’s ‘Nearly White Girl Girling on Behalf of Proximity to Mammal’. Esfandiari-Denney’s voice – as in, the voice of the writing – is stylised and artificial, and her delivery deadpan. She reads her poem as it is on the page, without unnecessary fluff or affectation, and the result is refreshingly strange.
The scene is: she’s lying on the sofa watching videos of Haley Bieber and Emma Chamberlain at the Met Gala, comparing the fact and language of celebrity with her own ‘sense of girling’. She adopts the argot of YouTube and vox pops, and explores what it means ‘to girl’. It’s an ‘unsettled feeling’, she says, at odds with the lives of Chamberlain and Bieber. What she needs to ‘start girling proper’ is to ‘prepare a glass of lukewarm Solpadeine for the contractions of a new headache’. She spent 12 years of her life in and out of hospital; her pamphlet My Bodies This Morning This Evening is about ‘how we are always dying’, says reviewer Jack Underwood.
In her interview she talks about language coming ‘alive through its spoken utility’ and finding poeticism in ‘fragments of conversation’. In ‘Nearly White Girl Girling’ – nearly white because she’s of Persian/Roma descent – she adopts the tone of the world she explores while maintaining a careful distance from it, and dissects the bits of language that emerge from and orbit celebrities. In doing so, she achieves something that is, in my view, uncanny and original.
1. Leyla Josephine, ‘Dear John Berger’
The hairier I am, the sexier I feel
My pick for the prize would be Leyla Josephine’s ‘Dear John Berger’, for its unapologetic candour, energy and humour. It fits the bill of performed poem by marrying structure, form and content with rehearsed, confident delivery. Josephine has stage presence: mic control, eye contact, facial expression, gesture; she knows when and for how long to pause; and she dresses for the part.
‘Dear John Berger’ runs for nearly four and a half minutes but Josephine keeps it moving with changes of pace and voice, including impressions of Berger himself. She is by turns playful and sincere, exploring feelings of loneliness and invisibility through the lens of a letter delivered to an art critic known for his own journey through ways of seeing. By explicitly mentioning Berger’s book and documentary series, Josephine undercuts any whiff of literary elitism and equips her audience with ways of witnessing her performed poem.
Josephine says in her interview that she likes poets who “use their identity as a lens but don’t lean on it”. She does well not to lean on hers. Meanwhile, her likeability as a performer – worked for, not assumed – enables, or at least encourages, us to go with her on her journey. One gets the sense that ‘Dear John Berger’ can withstand change, that the threads binding its structure and tone are strong enough to allow her to play with the content. Josephine confirms this, saying the version she performs in her submission is different to what went to print. “That’s the beauty of a performed poem,” she says, “it’s alive; it can never be the same twice.” And, like the poets she likes best, she manages to “say it how it is without losing a sense of mystery.” And it’s funny. Well done, Leyla.
