beginning of the poem, and on the word ‘escape’ right at the end. Volume,
speed and dynamic come together to create long phrases and consider-
able build-ups of verbal tension. These contrasts within the performance
emphasise the tension between reality and dream, the urban and rural,
freedom and imprisonment implicit in the words. But there is also
an African-American voice and presence in the performance. This
evokes the jazz tradition, and has many other cultural resonances.
Despite its humorous aspect, the poem echoes Martin Luther King’s
‘I have a dream’ speech, not only in its subject matter but also in its
rhetorical and heightened delivery.
Some spoken-word poems particularly emphasise the patterns of
speech rather than written language. Such poems may focus on colloqui-
alisms, local or class-based dialects, or ethnic speech patterns.
An example of such a piece is the poem and sound recording The Six
O’Clock News by Scottish poet Tom Leonard (1984), which satirises the
notion of the once omniscient (white, upper-class) BBC accent, and
the idea that words spoken in a dialect are regarded with suspicion. It is
spelt in dialect and spoken in his inimitable Scottish accent. It can be
accessed from his website (see p. 235).
Speech-based work may explore the intersections between different lan-
guages, or the impact of bilingualism or polylingualism on uses of
language. Such exploration is central to the work of performance artist
and poet Caroline Bergvall who lives in England and writes in English, but
is of French and Norwegian extraction (French is her first language). For
Bergvall ‘mis-translations’ and ‘mis-spellings’ are part of the process of
writing (1999).
Technology can also give us quite a different take on the idea of ‘spoken
word’. In the interactive work by American David Knoebel, How I Heard It
(republished), on The Writing Experiment website, clicking on the circles
in the visual display creates multiple overlaid voices talking about the same
incident, though in fragmented ways, and with additional environmental
sounds. The interactive element means that the reader can constantly shift
the voices and the way they relate to each other. We will explore more
about how to use technology in the following section.
Some possible strategies for Exercise 1a, creating a speech-based per-
formance poem, are:
- Write a poem with a view to giving shape to the words through
dynamic, speed and rhythm. Bear this performance aspect in mind
while you write the poem, and let it, in some respects, dictate its
direction. Choose a theme, or set of themes, which will be responsive
to such a performance dimension.
Tongues, talk and technologies 217