What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.
Chris Chandler is the best performance poet I have ever seen.
The first spoken word poem I ever wrote was when I was 14 and I wrote it because I was accidentally signed up for a teen poetry slam. Because I loved poetry I said that I'd try it out.
But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.
I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.
Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do.
The United States' poetry emerged when there was a high literacy rate in the United States, even in the 19th century. People read the poetry when it was written. In Ireland, there was a poor literacy rate and people remember that poetry. That was handed on as a memorial tradition.
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.
When I was in south Sudan, people used to rap in my village. But the rapping was more in the mother tongue, Nuer.
The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.
I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.
The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.
Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.
There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.
Because we are all of an oral tradition in our beginning histories, the voice of the poet in this particular society will be heard.
I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.
My ideal reader is somebody who reads my poems out loud.
