This blog has been rather neglected in the past few months, but that's not to say I haven't been writing. The following is a piece I've written for the revamped Roundhouse website, which is going live with a snazzy new look, as well as lots of new content, at the end of January. Watch this space, as there's more where this case from.
Spoken word
is cool. London has a vibrant performance scene and kids are now actually
watching artists spout verse on YouTube … but what about actual written poetry?
Last November the Roundhouse’s Last Word Festival celebrated the variety of spoken
word but what about the stanzas that we pored over during our GCSE English
classes? Could these ever be cool? Poetry was a chore when I was at school,
though as I grew older it seemed like something that I was missing out on. So
that’s why I became interested when I came across the Roundhouse’s ‘Poetry for
Beginners’ class.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. At first I thought that it would be a class teaching us to write poetry. However, it was far simpler than that. Poet Inua Ellams led the class and he sought to demystify poetry for the uninitiated and for me at least… he succeeded.
It didn’t
feel like a class, instead it was more of a book club, so we all introduced
ourselves and chatted about our thoughts on poetry.
Inua started with his thoughts on the relevance of poetry and it’s distinction from spoken word, saying that “Spoken word is like a fight in a bar, it’s visceral and raw. At the end of it, you can easily see who has won. But poetry…. it’s more like a fight with a Kung Fu Grand Master. At times you’re not sure if it’s even a fight, at the end you don’t know who’s won and it can be months of pondering before you understand what really happened”. With that in mind Inua read William Carlos William’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ out loud:
 |
| Inua Ellams |
So much depends,
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
besides the white
chickens.
Leaping into
the class with this poem, Inua showed us that poems did not have to be an epic
array of words, which required the analysis of multiple footnotes alluding to
classical literature. Rather, it could be 8 lines or 16 words.
What I found
interesting is that after hearing it a lot of us felt that we had opinions about
the verse and had the urge to share them, even if we hadn’t read much poetry
before. We all brought forward an interesting range of ideas, delving into what
we loved and loathed about the words.
Inua stressed that it is okay not to “get” certain poems or think that we had somehow failed if we didn’t get what the poet had to say. After going through a range of great poems (Litany by Billy Collins and Rosh Hashanah by Aharon Shabtai to name a couple), poetry doesn’t seem so distant anymore and I’m confident that I see it for what it is. It is not a lofty set of words to be deciphered; instead it can be absorbed, hated or loved like any other cultural work.
