When poet John Hegley hosted an Apples & Snakes poetry event at the Battersea Arts Centre in April this year, inviting five of his favourite performers to demonstrate their talent, the result was part Christmas pantomime, part cabaret, part magic show, part comedy act, part a cappella singing, and very small part poetry reading.

Nathan Penlington delivered a satirical fast-paced rap sequence which he concluded by smashing a toy guitar; Christopher Twigg recited a poem about melons, his mouth stuffed with a whole lemon; Lorraine Bowen lampooned the show tune genre in lavish outfits including a feathery Grim Reaper costume; Crisis paced across the stage charismatically, belting soulful, chant-like refrains that contained traces of slave songs, Celtic folk music, Byzantine dirges, and blues. Only Michael Horowitz gave anything remotely like a conventional poetry reading.

Two weeks later, at the same venue, the show of the night was called ‘Double Acts’. Undercutting the notion that poetry is a solo endeavour, eight poets performed in pairs. DJ Innit and Cherry L, in matching his-and-her tracksuits, did a rap duet called ‘Essex Geezer’ and enacted a telephone dialogue in rhyme between a doddering old lady and a sexually deviant telephone prankster. Later, Aoife Mannix and Heather Taylor departed from the comic tone of the evening by mixing dramatic dialogue, verse about Belfast, and Irish music.

For those who frequent ‘establishment’ venues for poetry readings such as the Troubadour and the South Bank Centre, productions at BAC (Battersea Arts Centre) can seem alien or even anathema. Performance poetry, for many in the UK poetry world, is considered a lesser version of ‘page poetry’, which is loosely defined as ‘poetry that can stand alone on the page’.

Hidden in the definition is the twofold assumption that performance poetry (a) aspires to ‘stand alone on the page’ but (b) is prevented from doing so because it lacks something essential. One young but canonized poet who preferred not to be named said, ‘The expression “performance poetry” always seems close to a contradiction in terms. Either it’s poetry or it’s not – but my experience with performancy things is that it’s usually not’.

Why this resistance? Paul Keegan, editor at Faber and Faber, says in Free Verse, a report commissioned by the Arts Council and produced by the Spread the Word Literature Development Agency, that ‘poetry is an inherently conservative genre. It tends to open up relatively slowly and has not diversified as freely as fiction’.

Aoife Mannix, a poet from Dublin who performs for Apples & Snakes and is also involved in their education efforts, explains that the snobbery is one-way. She says, ‘I would never be dismissive of someone who writes poetry for the page, so I’ve never been able to understand the snobbery around poetry that’s meant to be performed.’ Mannix herself writes for the page – she recently published a collection – but she views poetry as designed for performance, too. With a background in theatre (she worked in the Royal Court’s Young Writers Programme) and television (she was Script Editor for Holby City), Mannix conjectures that her early work experiences contributed to her interest in performance.

She clarifies another point: that making a distinction between ‘performance poetry’ and ‘page poetry’ is problematic. She says, ‘For all poetry, not just “page” poetry, it’s important that sound, rhythm and meaning find a way to work together. I don’t understand why people feel the need to label and compartmentalize poetry in the ways that they do.’

Mannix is not defensive when she says this. If anything she seems surprised by my questions, as though debating the value of performance poetry – or even using the term ‘performance poetry’ – is beside the point. Poet Malika Booker, a long-standing artist for Apples & Snakes, has a similar viewpoint: ‘I have never said I’m a performance poet. I tend to say I’m a writer. I craft my pieces so they can stand up on the page and on the stage. I think very hard about how to engage my readers. So if I were to write about the death of my aunt, I would think carefully about the ways I can express the experience so that my reader understands what I am feeling.’

There is an intrinsic resistance to labelling at Apples & Snakes. When I met with Press Officer Charlotte Dove, I expressed surprise that Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, whom I associate with poetry and storytelling, is also a singer. Dove explained, ‘She does lots of things, as do many of our artists. Though the majority of her work tends to be “spoken word”, I’m not sure she’d define herself as one kind of artist over another.’

True enough: some artists are natural chameleons, moving easily through different genres. For others, though, it’s more of a struggle. Booker, whose one-woman show Unplanned is to be part of this year’s Poetry International, admitted to some anxiety about learning an hour’s worth of complicated material. Unplanned, which examines fertility and infertility, hinges on anecdotes: a girl in New Zealand who flushes her unwanted baby down a toilet; a woman who cuts a baby out of another woman’s womb. Booker says, ‘It’s about wanting but not being able to have, or having what you never wanted.’ Unplanned incorporates theatrical devices that Booker, a self- described poet and story-writer, is working with for the first time: audience participation, informal pedagogy and even acting. Though Booker is a seasoned performer, having been on stage at the Barbican, the Purcell Room and other major national and international venues, Unplanned is the closest thing she’s done to theatre, and she is even working with a director.

Apples & Snakes is funding Unplanned, which will go on tour in 2007, following on the heels of Exposed (the 2006 tour) and Temptation (2005). In addition to these travelling projects, Apples & Snakes funds six events per season – autumn, winter and summer – most of them based at BAC, and occurring every fortnight. Each season supports one open-mic event, and the remaining events tend to feature ‘core’ Apples & Snakes artists like Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Zena Edwards, Malika Booker, Roger Robinson, Lemn Sissay, Francesca Beard and Charlie Dark.

Though Apples & Snakes has come to be associated with its performances, when it was first founded in the early 1980’s (at a pub called Apples & Snakes) its predominant mission was education. It still is. In addition to producing youth-centred shows and organizing the so-called ‘World Cup’ (a national ‘slam’ competition for 12-to 17-year-olds) Apples & Snakes runs performance workshops for children and young adults, and sends poets into schools for short and long-term projects. Mannix, one such educator, talked about her spell as poet-in-residence at the Central Foundation Girls’ School at Mile End. She described the student body as 90% Bengali Muslim for whom English is often a second language.

Working with BTEC Fashion & Design students, Mannix commissioned an installation – a ‘writers’ space’. The students designed a hut themselves, and, once built, the hut was relocated to a stage, where students performed the poems they’d written during Mannix’s residency. Mannix got to know the girls over a period of four months, through her once-weekly visits and a supplemental camping trip. She explained that ‘For teenagers, poetry can seem obscure or irrelevant. But once you get them writing, they become more open to reading.’

How did she encourage the students to open up and write? ‘I talked to them about identity, about what defines them. We talked about what they like to wear and why; what music they listen to and why. I explained that what we wear and what music we listen to are part of who we are. And that writing is yet another way to express who we are.’

Mannix, along with the rapper Breis, did a similar project with the Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution. She explained that the boys they taught tended to struggle with anger and insecurity, often convinced that no one listens to them. But once they were expressing themselves through poetry and rap, they began to see that these are ways they could be heard.

Apples & Snakes projects are heftily funded by the Arts Council, which pays the salary for all 13 full- and part-time staff members and subsidizes various projects and expenses. Other funding comes from local council grants, the lottery, individual trusts and foundations, and the Association of London Government.

In August this year Bernadine Evaristo published an article in The Independent lamenting the ‘closed circuit’ nature of contemporary poetry publishing. She wrote that ‘less than one per cent of all poets published by the mainstream poetry presses in Britain is black or Asian’, and rallied for ‘an injection of alternative histories, cultures and stories’ into contemporary poetry. She asked, ‘Haven’t we had enough the same old same old: my childhood memories; my mildly dysfunctional parents; my repressed grandparents; Greek myths; my last lover; my new lover; my love of nature; more Greek myths; my holiday in foreign lands?’

She concluded that ‘Elitism is not a dirty word in the poetry world, it’s a badge of pride’. But Geraldine Collinge, director of Apples & Snakes, views things more optimistically. She points to some performance artists who are accepted by the establishment, including Patience Agbabi, who ‘brings an incredible energy and physicality to intellectually provocative poetry’. She finds Agbabi’s inclusion in the Next Generation poets significant and well deserved.

And it could be argued that performance poetry has hit the mainstream when an institution like the Wordsworth Trust in the Lake District invites John Cooper Clarke, Lemn Sissay and Chanje Kunda to read in its venerable series, as it did this year. Or when Roger Robinson is billed alongside establishment poets like Sarah Maguire, Maurice Riordan and Jamie McKendrick, as he has been at least twice in 2006.

Collinge concedes ‘some performance poetry is created for the stage and isn’t intended to be read’. An example of that might be comedian Simon Munnery’s ‘Giraffe, Giraffe, you’re having a laugh. / Your neck’s so long it looks like a graph!’ Or ‘Deadlines’:

I do nothing without a deadline.
Without a deadline I do nothing
Until the deadline is almost upon me, and then I panic
Which is doing nothing quickly!
Only when the deadline is past, do I begin work
On my excuses.

This is a poem which brought down the house when it was read (Munnery had to pause several times to wait for laughter to fade) but perhaps it succeeds less well on the page. On the other hand, this poem by Roger Robinson seems to expand both on the stage (I’ve heard it read twice) and on the page: ‘Knowledge and Prayers’ reprinted from Free Verse:

There was the time when my mother beat us
with a curtain cord slicing wails in our skin
and my father ran out the house crying.
I heard that when he was young his father

made him boil his belt before being beaten
with the belt buckle-side. Once his father
beat him on his back till his spine was bruised
and he couldn’t walk for thirteen days.

Another time he was put in a corner
to kneel with his hands outstretched in the air.

His father left him there for an hour
and then he placed an encyclopaedia

in his outstretched hands, and left him there
for another hour. Then he added

a bible, and left him there, whilst his brothers
were sent to bed. They left him there

overnight.

For all the detractors of performance poetry, there are many who credit it with ‘saving’ traditional poetry readings from mumbling academics. One Faber poet opines that performance poets have taught ‘page’ poets how to respect the audience and the work – how not to misplace one’s poems mid-reading or drop manuscripts on the floor.

And whatever else it is, performance poetry ‘is a truly democratic art form’ according to Collinge. It’s not often that poetry and ‘democratic’ appear in the same sentence. Maybe the rise of performance poetry will ensure that it does more often.

Kathryn Maris’s first collection, The Book of Jobs, will be published in October by the American publisher Four Way Books. She was previously Listings Editor of Poetry London, teaches creative writing at Morley College, and divides her time between London and New York City.

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